View GGJ-San with visible limbs (warning: scary!)
The game that started it all! Originally, Renewal was not supposed to exist. Daniel wanted to make a VR game for this jam but could not get the headset to work. While he was struggling with the headset, Ravi designed a same-screen arcade combat game just in case the headset proved to be unworkable. After a few hours, Daniel gave up fighting the headset and the team pivoted to implementing Ravi's backup plan.
The backup plan was quite different to what the final game became. Ravi's initial design was for a same-screen top-down game where cactuses would shoot at each other in an old-western setting. Daniel pitched changing the game's name (which at this point was Rootin Tootin) to Roots: Renewal of Bloom, parodying the WolverineSoft Studio game Bloom: Roots of Renewal. Ravi initially resisted this, thinking that nobody would get the joke but Daniel successfully convinced him. The team updated the design to better parody the studio game: the cactuses were changed to trees, and the setting was changed to an island in the middle of a lake. The same-screen top-down camera was changed to a split-screen third-person perspective.
Incensed and inspired by the terrible theme, Daniel decided the series needed deep lore. Quotes from the group chat:
Roots: Eternal is the first game in the series to feature the five main characters. These characters almost never happened. Ravi pitched the idea of creating four distinct characters instead of re-using the trees from Renewal, but Daniel initially didn't like the idea.Daniel: i really want to inject lore into this
how do you all feel about a japanese narrated cutscene before the fight
It was only after some convincing that four distinct characters would make for better cutscene content that he agreed.Daniel: [Jojo's Bizarre Adventure image] but trees
Ravi: we could do trees tho im thinking carrots and onions bc those are roots
i have no idea why i thought of trees when we were making the first game tbhDaniel: idk i think id prefer trees again to vegetables
something about trees fighting is very amusing to me
Daniel created the character GGJ-San to personify the Global Game Jam, mocking them for the terrible theme. Potato-san's opening line "Your doctrine of roots was successful" references the previous year's GGJ theam of "roots," while the following line "You could declare 'make me laugh' and the people would have no choice to obey" references the then-current jam theme of "make me laugh." Not wanting to model a new character just for a cutscene, he decided to simply use the Unity default capsule and default material. GGJ-San speaks Spanish because Daniel was trying to find Japanese voice actors but not enough people were available at the time. José, one of the team members, speaks Spanish, so GGJ-San's language was changed to match.
Initially, the game was intended to be a first person shooter like Doom, but the team changed the design to be a shared-screen suicide game because it would be easier to program and might fit the theme better. The first person shooter concept was eventually used in Roots: 2. Roots: Eternal set the precedents for each game embodying a different genre and featuring multi-lingual cutscenes.
This was a solo project Ravi created during the Fall 2024 WolverineSoft mini-jam, in which participants created WarioWare-style micro-games to add to a larger WolveyWare collection. This game is also the reason why GGJ-San's design is a pill on a box. In Eternal, Daniel intended the box to be be a pedestal GGJ-San was standing on, as though he was looking down on the people below. When Ravi was drawing the animation for Rootout, he misinterpreted the box GGJ-San was standing on as part of GGJ-San's body.
This was also a game which almost didn't exist. Ravi, Daniel and Nikhil Ghosh planned to make a game named "Roots: 2077" during the summer Michigame Jam, a collaboration between WolverineSoft and SpartaSoft. The planned game was a 2D RPGMaker-style single-player story-driven adventure game. The team decided to deviate from the established norm of four-player multiplayer for this game because the Michigame Jam was fully remote. However, both Daniel and Ravi were busy the exact week of the jam and so Roots: 2077 was cancelled. Or was it?
Ravi and Daniel still wanted to make Roots: 2077 as the Fall 2024 semester begun. For the October Pumpkin Jam, they got Ethan Thompson on their team, who knew a lot about racing game mechanics. It was then decided to scrap the original plans for Roots: 2077 and make a Mario Kart style game. Ethan originally wasn't sure how much overall he would contribute to the game, but he quickly became absorbed and contributed the critical kart physics that made the game function. Ravi provided half-remembered half-invented explanations for how the kart physics should be implemented, and to everyone's surprise, they worked.
Daniel asked people at the jam if they knew any foreign languages when casting for the cutscenes. Roots: 2077 features the highest number of different languages: Japanese, Spanish, French, and Mandarin. Marco Brizzio reprised his role as GGJ-San for Roots: 2077, while the rest of the characters got new voice actors. The team planned for the characters to shout "you absolute fool!" whenever an item attack successfully lands, however, this feature was cut due to a lack of time. These voice lines were re-used in Roots: 2.
The team wrote the lore for Roots: 2 long before design work on the gameplay had even started. Daniel was in the midst of planning his most ambitious cutscenes yet, but was suffering from writers block with regards to how to end the final cutscene. At NYPD after a VGMC meeting, he and Ravi workshopped ideas, eventually settling on the surprise final reveal. Daniel had originally planned for cutscene god to simply be named "Roots" but Ravi proposed Root-Sama-San as an alternate name.
The team decided to make a first-person arena shooter last-minute. Jacob Robinson joined the group after a year-long hiatus participating in game jams. He originally planned to only stay for a single day since he wanted to attend a football game on Saturday. However, he found out shortly after he was planning to leave to go to the game that the game was actually the following week. He chose to stay and contribute to the game, which probably saved the project since Roots: 2 otherwise did not have a dedicated programmer.
Talk of creating a sequel to Roots: 2 began shortly after its release. It was unknown whether the game would end up happening as after Roots: 2, since Daniel stated that he was done making joke games and wanted to go back to making serious games. However, as the game jam grew near, Daniel simply couldn't resist. The cutscenes this time featured full character animation! Unfortunatley, Fruits did not end up featuring voice acting due to time constraints.
"Brainroot" is defined as:
The unprompted and uncontrollable urge to reference Roots-related content in inappropriate and unrequested contexts.It is a play on the term "brainrot." Alexander Wang coined the term.