
Bug Off is a 2018 title inspired by Galencia, developed after Marcel Lansing saw Jason’s game and felt inspired to create something with a similar impact.
Having worked on various titles across different Commodore machines, Marcel set out to develop Bug Off as a port of The End by Stern – an arcade game where aliens swoop down to steal bricks and spell out “THE END”.
Development began back in 2018, unusually starting with the loader, intro, title screen and game over sequence – with the gameplay itself left until last. As time went on, Marcel found the project increasingly complex, and eventually motivation waned before completion.
Despite this, the game reached a relatively complete state, featuring functional gameplay with descending enemies and an impressive mothership battle. However, Marcel himself feels the gameplay still needs refinement and isn’t quite up to the standard he envisioned.
Visuals were created by John “Hend” Henderson, and the soundtrack by Richard Bayliss. Although Marcel once considered auctioning a single physical copy of the game for exclusivity, this idea was shelved due to the contributions of other artists.
At present, Marcel isn’t looking to release the game either in a finished or unfinished state – due to lack of motivation, but also partly due to concerns about the cracking scene, and not wanting to see an unprotected version distributed with added intros or modifications. Hend also plans to reuse some of the graphical assets in future productions.
While the situation might change in the future, Bug Off remains unreleased for now. Any glimpse of it comes via the surviving visuals and soundtrack – a promising but shelved creation from a developer who clearly poured a lot into it.
Contributions: Marcel I. Lansing