Mina the Hollower

Yacht Club Games https://www.yachtclubgames.com/ is the studio behind the acclaimed Shovel Knight franchise. Their latest release is Mina the Hollower, which is a top-down action RPG inspired by classic Zelda and Castlevania titles. After many years in development, the game recently launched to widespread critical acclaim. David D’Angelo https://x.com/dandyycg is a lead programmer at Yacht Club Games. In this episode, David joins Joe Nash to discuss the custom C++ engine built for Mina the Hollower, how the team approached Game Boy Color art constraints and audio in a modern rendering pipeline, the game’s Castlevania-inspired combat philosophy, how the open world manages saving and collision without load screens, and more. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected] https://cms.megaphone.fm/organizations/619b680e-d813-11ea-9750-e7ecac406436/podcasts/e60108fe-e328-11ea-b2b6-1348249f900a/episodes/3913370a-bc44-11ed-ace6-8b1f96d82bba/[email protected] The post Mina the Hollower https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/podcasts/mina-the-hollower/ appeared first on Software Engineering Daily https://softwareengineeringdaily.com.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Yacht Club Games is the studio behind the acclaimed Shovel Knight franchise. Their latest release is Mina the Howler, which is a top-down action RPG inspired by classic Zelda and Castlevania titles. After many years in development, the game recently launched to widespread critical acclaim. David D'Angelo is a lead programmer at Yacht Club Games. In this episode, David joins Joe Nash to discuss the custom C++ engine built for Mina the Howler, how the team approached Game Boy color art constraints and audio in a modern rendering pipeline, the game's Castlevania-inspired combat philosophy, how the open world manages saving and collision without load screens, and more.

• 0:43Speaker 00

  Joe Nash is a developer, educator, and award-winning community builder who has worked at companies including GitHub, Twilio, Unity, and PayPal. Joe got a start in software development by creating mods and running servers for Gary's mod, and game development remains his favorite way to experience and explore new technologies and concepts.

• 1:15Speaker 01

  Welcome to Software Engineering Daily. I'm your host for today's episode, Joe Nash, and today I'm joined by David D'Angelo, lead programmer at Yacht Club Games, developers of the beloved Shovel Knight franchise, and now a new action RPG, Mina the Hollower. David, welcome to the show.

• 1:29Speaker 02

  Hi, thanks for having me.

• 1:31Speaker 01

  So I'm gonna start in our traditional question. Obviously, you've been at Yacht Club for a while now through a lot of the Shovel Knight years, but what was your journey into game development?

• 1:38Speaker 02

  Oh, it's sort of a weird one. I went to school for computer science and music, and out of school, I was writing music for commercials. And the guy I was working with said, "Oh, you should go write music for movies. That'd be really cool." And he's like, "Go move to LA." And I did. And when I did, it was the financial crisis, and all the studios were closing, and no one wanted anything. And I was like, "Well, there's a lot of game studios in LA. Maybe I could like get a programming job. What I really want to do is make games." And I applied at Wayforward, which had basically like no requirements of any kind. They're like, "If you've ever used a programming language, we'll hire you." And it worked, and I got hired, and I worked there for a while. And then we left to Yacht Club and started Shovel Knight.

• 2:22Speaker 01

  That's amazing. I did not know. Well, funny enough, we've had the Way Forward folks on this show before as well. We've had Valdi come on. That's awesome to hear. And I guess actually, yeah, your music background, I guess that has also been useful in your game development as well. The soundtracks for your games are fairly well renowned.

• 2:36Speaker 02

  Oh, for sure. I mean, that has nothing to do with me. That's all Jake, uh, who's a genius. But yeah, I put in all the sound effects in the game and make sure that, you know, they sound good and line up and stuff and doing lots of tricks like, oh, we have these three sounds overlapping, so it makes a different kind of sound. So Jake doesn't have to like pump out a brilliant sound effects. Definitely the audio stuff comes in handy. And I mean, just in terms of gameplay, it's like rhythmically, you like want everything to feel like it's got the same kind of tempo to it. So yeah, it's definitely a very handy tool in my tool belt.

• 3:08Speaker 01

  That's awesome. So I guess a lot of what we had talked about today is Mina. So we should probably get into, for folks who aren't aware, can you briefly introduce us to Mina the Hollower and what kind of game it is?

• 3:18Speaker 02

  Mina the Hollower is a top-down, like an old-school Zelda action RPG. You play as Mina who's a mouse. She can whip and she can burrow into the ground and pop out. And it's a big, open world where you can go anywhere and do anything. And it's got leveling up and lots of equipment. And it's very make-it-your-own-game kind of secrets abound. It's really fun, but it's like made to be in that like Game Boy Color era art style. It's very like, like Shovel Knight was like an NES take. This is more like Game Boy Color and that kind of what we were inspired by there.

• 3:58Speaker 01

  Perfect. And yeah, actually, that's one of the things I wanted to ask about because you've got in the press around the game and some of the interviews done so far. You've got this like, what I think is a really lovely narrative about, you know, the regression from NES to Game Boy. Shovel Knight's your Mario, this is your Link or your Zelda, et cetera. How much of that was planned from the start? Like, how much of that was the original vision and how much of it kind of came along organically as you developed the game?

• 4:20Speaker 02

  I mean, like, when we started Yacht Club, we were like, we're gonna make a big franchise like Mario, and then after that, we'll make a big franchise like Zelda. This was sort of like, it was always the idea. I think the Game Boy was sort of the surprise, but Alec, who pitched the original idea, he was like, working on Mina as a side project, just like, working on his programming skills and his art skills. And he was like, well, I can't really like make art of anything like a Game Boy is like in my wheelhouse of art I could make. So that's like where he landed on that. And then when we were talking about, oh, we're gonna make this into a full blown project. I think that's like when it made a lot of sense for us. Just like, oh, we're keeping it eight bit.

• 4:58Speaker 02

  Like, there's some things that we can pull and use from Shovel Knight, really, obviously, and some things that are exciting and new. And, you know, in some ways, it's like just as old as NES, so they released like close to the same time. But in a lot of ways, Game Boy Color, Game Boy had such a long lifespan that like Alec, who's 10 years younger than me, is like, that's what he's most nostalgic for. It's like just hit another generation, because especially like when Pokemon came out, like just really took off again. Yeah. So, I mean, it was pretty much from the start.

• 5:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, that age point's a really interesting one, because one of the things I was worrying about, the game's been developed for six years, you've been working on it a long time, and I imagine that involved building out a bit of a team about it. Going like the model of your studio, I guess, specifically going off to NES, specifically going off to Game Boy. And then in some of your posts about the development process, for example, you talk about like, people going into their like favorite Game Boy Color games in really narrow detail, like putting out their favorite colors and this kind of process. And I was wondering, like, you know, it's 28 years since Game Boy Color released now. Does that affect your talent pipeline at all? Is that like a factor you have to deal with as you're like bringing new people into the studio, like whether they've experienced these titles?

• 6:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, in a way, yes. I mean, when we hire people, we definitely are asking them, like, what games do you like? What did you play? Like, but that said, I mean, there's always people who, you know, we hired Eli, who's one of the programmers on the project. And, I mean, he's like 20 something. And probably his first console was a GameCube. Maybe, maybe later. But when we were talking to him, he's like, oh, yeah, my favorite game is Gargoyles. Quest was just like this weird game on the NES, right? And it's just like, oh, I guess kids these days, like if you're the right kind of kid, you're like still finding these games and playing them. And it was like, oh, then we know like you'll fit in eventually into this culture. And I mean, some people don't, some like that we've hired, like really don't find that stuff.

• 6:47Speaker 02

  But we like get that ingrained into them as part of like the process. Like Bridget, one of the programmers who worked on the game a long time. I was basically like every couple of weeks, I'd be like, you gotta try Punch-Out. You gotta try like Final Fantasy Adventure or whatever. And then she come back and be like, when she told us what game she liked at the start, her interview process, she was like, you know, my favorite game is X, Y and Z. And we're like, I don't know about that. And then by the end of like working with us, she's like, I don't even like those games anymore.

• 7:15Speaker 01

  Excellent. Very cool. So I guess the other question I had about that flip from NES 2D side-scroller Mario to Link is top-down RPG, very different style of game. How was that transition process from like one style to the other? Because you were in the shovel night world for a long time as a studio. And then this game for quite a long focus time. Was there any, I guess especially technical challenges to reorienting around that new style?

• 7:37Speaker 02

  I think technically the weirdest thing is just the perspective. It's like a not realistic perspective, right? I mean, not that side scrolling is realistic in any way, but at least it's more like it's you're looking at sheets of paper going back or whatever. And they're scrolling and I guess in depth wise, it always like sort of makes sense. Like you're looking at flat drawn images, which is something you like experience in real life. And in a Zelda game, it's like you're looking at it top down. But it's like, if you were actually looking at top down, you'd be looking at the top of someone's head, right? So it's like sort of side on, sort of not side on. And I think that comes with complexities, like which thing draws in front of which thing?

• 8:20Speaker 02

  Like, what's the rendering order to make this make sense and feel like it's not confusing? And it will read well to the player. When two combat boxes collide, does it really feel like they should collide here? Because a player might not understand what depth they're at in the world. And if they do understand what depth they are, is this how big that object seems? It's like. You can't see the size of the object, right? You see a giant monster and you don't know how deep that monster's body goes. You just see their sprite. So like, how much 3D space do they take up? We're sort of making it up and we're assuming the player is like figuring it out. Or if we follow consistent rules, they'll figure it out. But a lot of the complication is that.

• 9:00Speaker 02

  And then another big difference with Mina was it's a big open world and you can go anywhere at any time. And there's no load screens or places where like checkpoints or no time where it could take a break or anything. And it's also saving every single screen. So I can tell you, we ran into lots of bugs this week, which we were rapidly fixing where it's like people got themselves saved in some kind of weird position. That kind of fun thing, but overall generally it's very close to shuttle night.

• 9:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, cool. Yeah. The position for large objects that occupy lots of going back space is really interesting. Some of the bosses, I guess, is hope it isn't too supportive are quite large. And even that you said that, there's two in particular. I'm like, yeah, actually I did kind of run into like wondering how far behind them I was. That is a really good point.

• 9:43Speaker 02

  Right.

• 9:43Speaker 01

  Interesting. So I guess actually you mentioned the gameboy art style. We should probably talk a bit about the art style. You've been talking lots about this in other outlets. I don't want to spend too long on it, but for folks who aren't aware, can you briefly summarize, I guess, like what the styles you're going for? And some of the self-imposed constraints that came along with that and how you dealt with those?

• 10:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the art style is like the links awakening or oracle of ages, oracle seasons, kind of gameboy color era, top down Zelda games, but we did look at a lot of other top down Zelda games from that same era, like Final Fantasy Adventure, Pokemon. Uh, my name's escaping. Man, I always forget it's like Dark Beast Battlebusters or something. It's like a Neo Geo game, but I mean, there's a lot of top down dragon quest monsters, a lot of top down games that we're looking for. And the interesting thing about the gameboy compared to the NES is like the NES has like a fixed palette of, I think, forget it's 54 colors maybe. But the colors are chosen to you by Nintendo, like you cannot change those colors.

• 10:44Speaker 02

  And in a gameboy color, you can change those colors. You can decide it's the same restriction where you have. A certain number of colors, but you're picking your palette. So we basically were going through all these Game Boy Color games and figuring out what kind of colors do they actually use? What would make sense for our game? And then in terms of self imposed restrictions, we're not like actually restricting the game in any way that is like real. Yeah, it is all like we're pretending. So we do things like we try not to put on too many sprites on the screen in normal circumstances, unless it's like a crazy boss. We do stick to the colors, like each sprite in a Game Boy Color game only had like three colors to it. So we stick to that principle.

• 11:29Speaker 02

  We stick to that global palette I was mentioning before. This music is written on like a very advanced Game Boy era chip. It like, it's probably too advanced to be on a real Game Boy, but it's still like written with the same kind of, I guess you would call it synths or whatever, like just the sound wave channel, like the way it operates is the same way that it would on a Game Boy. And we are doing, yeah, just a lot of, I guess, trying to make sure it's not too crazy or like the effects are not so in your face in a way that you might do these days. There's not like a billion particles coming out of something or that kind of stuff. Or like when we write text, like they don't say a lot of stuff.

• 12:11Speaker 02

  The dialogues kept small. Our script is like probably alone would break a Game Boy for how much text is in the game. But you get the same sense of like, oh, like when you talk to a guy in Pokemon, they don't say that many words. And that's the kind of restrictions we're sticking to, like trying to make it feel the same. But yeah, at the end of the day, it's like, it's so much bigger that it wouldn't, you know, fit, but that kind of idea.

• 12:31Speaker 01

  Nice. Got it. Yeah. So philosophically trying to restrict stuff. So there's no, cause it's your own engine, right? It's all in-house.

• 12:38Speaker 02

  Yes, all in-house, all in C++.

• 12:40Speaker 01

  So there was no, there's no points where you're like, actually this build this like constraint into the engine. It's all.

• 12:45Speaker 02

  No, yeah, we know. Yeah. No point like, oh no, the sprites are going to flicker when there's seven dots in a line or whatever. Yeah.

• 12:53Speaker 01

  Nice. See, I'd love to hear about the engine and I guess how the tech is set up for the game.

• 12:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we got, we call it propeller. That's the engine. It's basically like, this is the core thing that runs the rendering, the input, the controller, or the controller handling input, the sound output, all the like, file handling. It's what takes propeller. We also have like a suite of tools that we use to like make the stuff. We have a tool to like make the palettes to generate them, or like specific palette effects. Like if you want to animate, oh, the character's going to go from like this range of blues to this range of reds and it's going to do it really fast. So we have like a tool to animate those. We have tools for like importing the art and setting them up in sequences and animations and putting hitboxes on them and that kind of stuff.

• 13:40Speaker 02

  So the propeller basically like can read all the information from those tools and make it happen in game. And then I guess we have like what you might call a game engine, like the gameplay engine, which is like all the systems and stuff that essentially make Mina work. So like, here's a set of collection of systems like collision and animation and combat tools that can use like, so for any enemy can like use those systems in that engine basically to like run. And it's not like every enemy we're adding. We're adding a new way of processing the collision, that kind of stuff. Yeah. And I mean, it's a pretty like, not like the craziest engine in the world. It's very maybe of the era of the nineties too.

• 14:23Speaker 02

  It's like, I mean, it's C++. It's like very much written in a style that we were using in Shovel Knight, but just better and stronger and hopefully more resilient in the future. And then like one part of the engine, I guess I didn't mention is we also basically like, there's a core part that like runs all those systems. And then like for each console, we're like building a branch of essentially like, this is how you render something that if the gameplay is trying to render something, it calls these functions. And if the engine, we needs to draw to the PS5, it knows that these functions should call like these PS5 functions. So we have these like separate branches that essentially run on each console.

• 15:00Speaker 01

  Awesome. So I guess Ryan's correctly mentioned that this is a post Shovel Knight engine. Did any of these tools exist to Shovel Knight or they all built for post Shovel Knight and Mina? And what else?

• 15:10Speaker 02

  Everything. The only thing we're using from Shovel Knight is the level editor and the animation importer. I mean, we were basically started this engine from the ground up when we started the game and we just, we want to be able to build levels and animation stuff. So we didn't want to have to write those from scratch. So yeah, those are still used from Shovel Knight, but everything else is from the ground up.

• 15:32Speaker 01

  Cool. And yeah, the fact it's got a name is called Propeller. Do you intend to, is this now an engine you'll take on to like subsequent titles or is it very tied to Mina and the style of game?

• 15:40Speaker 02

  No, no. I mean, we definitely hope to forever and ever use this. The Shovel Knight engine was sort of like, oh, this is a one off. We gotta just get this game out the door. Yeah. So now we're like, how do we make something that lasts a long time?

• 15:52Speaker 01

  Great. Cool. So I guess the combination of the two, one of the art and the engine, one of the things that immediately my eyebrows go up is there's some particular moments of parallax in this game, particularly the one that made me really go, what's going on there was in the bayou, you enter a house and you've got like the floor below. A really extreme parallax kicks in. Is this a 3D engine?

• 16:13Speaker 02

  Technically it's like, I mean, these days it's like hard to write a not 3D engine.

• 16:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:18Speaker 02

  The way it actually works is it is set up like 2D planes. So it's not like what you might call like an orthographic perspective. It's essentially like this is flat 2D way of drawing it. It is set up that way. And what we do is we just, we give each layer has a parallax value, which is like, if the camera moves, at what percentage does it move with the camera? So you something like that room with a lot of parallax in it, what would be like, basically those layers are told like this layer is so far back, it should never move. Right? And this layer is like halfway to the player's eye. So it should move half as much as the camera does. So it's just like, yeah, sliding based on where the camera is.

• 17:00Speaker 01

  Awesome. And then another related question I had. So obviously you're building new engine, new technologies, but trying to emulate stuff that was very much rooted in like technical restrictions and hardware restrictions in particular. And there was an interesting line in one of the blog posts, which was that under the hood Mina draws textured triangles and not sprites. Can you tell us a little bit about, I guess, how you implemented the art style and managed to like, make it feel authentic in a modern setting?

• 17:23Speaker 02

  Yeah. So the way the old systems would work is basically you could draw sprites, which usually meant like you have a fixed size thing that you can draw. And that's essentially it. And you're feeding it sort of the same way where it's like a texture thing. You're giving it a sprite is like a very defined thing on that console. It's like a bundle of colors. It's like some format that they come up with. And that's like the only way you can draw on it. And there might be some exceptions to that, which is like, you might be able to manipulate the pixel that you're at on the screen, but you can't draw a triangle to the screen. That's like, not a thing that you could do on those old systems, or at least not without

• 18:06Speaker 02

  your own magic going into it. And modern engine, like modern rendering API is basically like, the main way you draw things is triangles. So, I mean, we're doing that. So we're essentially, we do in a way still sort of set it up like an old game, which is, for example, like in Mega Man, the character is actually two sprites, because they have a different amount of colors for the face and a different amount of colors that they want to use for the body. And they want them to be like two tiles tall, which is like, makes them need to be two sprites. So they draw a sprite for the head and they build a sprite for the bottom. And those pieces like obviously always move together. And we do the same thing. When we import the art, if it's like a big piece of art,

• 18:48Speaker 02

  we'll separate like the head will be like one draw and the bottom will be like another draw. So it's like two boxes that we've essentially set out and those draw like two triangles per box. So it's, you know, like if we had to like work in a sprite system, it'd be like set up to do that in a way. But yeah, we're very much like drawing it in the modern way where it's, we're figuring out how to turn it into triangles that have textures on them.

• 19:13Speaker 01

  Nice. Awesome. So on to, you know, I've been playing a fair amount in this game, really been enjoying it. And I think one of the things that really stood out is there's a lot of moments where like every screen is very densely packed and there's a lot of moments where like you're trying to like nail your positioning while you're attacking, while you're avoiding something. The burrow mechanic is like, if you're an action RPG player, like you've played Souls, like it kind of has like the dodge function, but it's not quite a dodge roll. Like it's a little bit more, requires a little bit more of you. And so there's a lot of stuff that a player has to manage and it has to like feel really good and it does feel really crisp and the controls are beautiful and everything feels lovely. Talk to me about your approach to player input and player controls, because it's a great achievement. It feels awesome.

• 19:53Speaker 02

  Oh, thank you. I mean, for us, it's really about, I guess, we just want to make sure we're making something that is a little bit different and a little bit like interesting and maybe not something you've experienced before. But at the same time, we want to make sure that everything in there is like consistent. And like when you do an action, like what happens is what you expect. And hopefully we're giving you enough time to process things and understand things. So it's like fair and can lead to it being fun. The main inspiration for the combat was actually looking at old NES Castlevania games, the original ones. They're very like deliberate and position oriented on the screen.

• 20:37Speaker 02

  Like when you play most modern combat games these days, like Souls or Zelda or basically pick anything, Hades, they have like basically the same kind of combat loop, which is I attack, attack, attack, attack, then I'm about to get hit and I press the dodge button. So they either have a dodge or a roll or a dash. They're all like some equivalent of I need to get out of the way really fast and then I'll come back and approach again. And we just sort of didn't want to do that. Like, and when we're looking like old Castlevania games, they're more set up. So the positioning is the important part. Like you have this really long whip and it's more about like, am I in the right position to not get screwed in this situation?

• 21:22Speaker 02

  And they also have the You can duck or stand up straight, right? So like if someone's coming at me, do I keep a lower position or a higher position or to not get hit or hit them? So everything really like you are very sluggish in the game and it is hard to move and it is hard to escape. Like if I'm close to an enemy, like I better have like gotten close for a good reason. Otherwise I'm going to be in trouble and they're going to take advantage of the fact that I'm close because I can't get away. I can't dodge out of the way. So we wanted to sort of emulate that same feel, but those games, I think the reason that's sort of like fallen out of fashion is because they're so rigid and so they're hard to control in a way that like it's not responding to your input all the time. Right? When you jump in a Castlevania game, it's a fixed arc.

• 22:06Speaker 02

  It isn't like a Mega Man or a Mario where you can control yourself midair. So we thought people don't really want to play those games nowadays, but maybe we could get that same positional kind of combat in a top down space. We give you like a fast move to get around quickly to new positions and we make it more about, yeah, like where are you positioned on screen compared to the enemy and compared to like your weapons attacks? And so part of that was like making it so in the game you jump and then you burrow and the burrow effectively feels like a dodge. It feels like an invulnerability period where you can quickly get away or do what you need to, but that jump has it's like a 30 frame jump or something like that. So there's a good chunk of time where you basically can't escape.

• 22:50Speaker 02

  So you have to think about like, where am I going to be when I'm attacking? What position am I going to be in? And if someone is going to attack me, I have to think ahead of time. I can't just react on the spot. That said, we do have a lot of like equipment in the game and stuff that if you're really like not able to come around to that play style, we do have ways like, for example, there's like trinket called the dodging pendulum where just some, if someone's hitting you and you jump right when they hit you, you'll be invulnerable for a period of time. So we do have like mechanisms to make it. So maybe you can like baby step your way into this style of playing the game. But yeah, it's more about trying to figure out something that was like a little different than what all the other games out these days.

• 23:29Speaker 01

  That's awesome. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. The burrow is so interesting that like big time to jump, but also I might be wrong on this, but like not, it doesn't dodge all attacks like when you're under.

• 23:38Speaker 02

  No, no. Yeah. So I mean, that was like, yeah, very similar to like Castlevania. We were sort of thinking of it like a duck. So if something, there could be attacks in the ground or there could be attacks on the ground or there we get attacks in the air. And so we were like thinking about those three layers of combat a lot. So for the beginning of the game, often like you can burrow and avoid everything, but as you progress, there's going to be guys that start like slamming the ground and attacks come out of the ground and you have to, it's like, oh, now I have to jump to get out of the way of attacks as opposed to burrow to get out of the way of attacks.

• 24:10Speaker 01

  Cool. So trinkets and sidearms would definitely come back too. Cause they, yeah, they're really interesting, but you mentioned, you know, positioning and weapons there, which I started with the whip and I had, I was having so many feelings about the fact I couldn't attack diagonally. And then I got the battery buster and was like, oh, the game has changed. Everything is, everything is lovely. I'd love to hear about, I guess, the weapon design, but particularly, you know, the choice, is the choice to allow like to lock certain weapons into like axis attacking, again, like an aesthetic sensibility one, like where does that come from?

• 24:38Speaker 02

  I mean, it's the same Castlevania thing. It's the same, like, we want to make it positionally interesting and engaging. The fact that you cannot attack diagonally, at least with some weapons, means like now your position becomes very important. If you could attack in any direction, any time, your position essentially doesn't matter. Cause you can safely hit something no matter where you are or where something is in relation to you. But if we leave those gaps in there, that now it becomes interesting to the point of, I have to think about where I'm getting my character moving into a space of another character.

• 25:13Speaker 02

  When we were making Shovel Knight, it's a very similar idea, which is like when we, we were first testing it in Shovel Knight, all you can do is down thrust. You can attack below you or you can attack to the side and we'd have enemies flying in from above you and people would get so mad. They'd be like, I just want to hit above me. I just want to hit above me. And it's like, well, if you could hit above you, it wouldn't be interesting. You would just kill the thing, right? It's like, you need to walk out of the way. You need to like figure out how to use. Your move set to take advantage of the situation. So when we were designing all the weapons, essentially, we're coming up with like, what are the strengths and weaknesses that allow you to like positionally be interesting?

• 25:50Speaker 02

  And when you get something like the battery, the buster, what you got, it's cool because it allows you to do diagonal, which you like can't do with any other weapon. But it is also like behind this, you have to like hit enemies first and build up the ability to essentially do that to switch the other weapon and get the diagonal out of it. And even that said, it's still like a pretty limiting. It's not like you fire hard on those directions and your bullet's pretty small. So it's like, you still have to like, be pretty good at knowing how to hit those sweet spots with the angles. But yeah, it's like all over that same concept, just trying to make sure it's like important when you're playing, knowing where you are in relation to the enemy.

• 26:27Speaker 01

  Cool. So to come around to the trinkets and sidearms, I guess the first question I want to ask about this. So the trinkets from like, uh, you know, navigating the open world, both the trinkets and sidearms kind of allow you to ease getting access to areas like jumping over big pits is like the one of the ones that there's both trinkets and sidearms that help with that. And so I think the trinkets, positioning them feels like a fairly typical like metroidvania setup. So like that, I imagine is was not like super challenging, but the sidearms intrigued me because you've got like a couple of sidearms that really give you better traversal powers, but then they're temporary and you lose them. So I felt like placing them must have been, and I don't know whether I was doing it wrong, but like I have backtracked a lot to go back and get like a dash because I knew that this would help me get to an area or the umbrella or whatever.

• 27:08Speaker 01

  Uh, how did you deal with where these should be in relation to like what challenges that might help you navigate?

• 27:13Speaker 02

  We sort of started from like an overview perspective, which is we know we're going to make 14 or 15 of these. We know we have six, seven core stages. Basically, we're going to have these areas. How many sidearms should be in each area? When should we introduce new sidearms? We're just like mathing it out. Okay, we want like every area to have like a new one. That means there's going to be three old ones, but we don't like, if you go to this level and then, or this level first, we want to make sure those ones have different sidearms. Right? So we're figuring out basically there's like a set of four sidearms in like each area. Figure out that set and then we're figuring out where does it make sense to place them? Oh, there's like, if you had that thing that throws stuff in the sky here, that will help you with all the flying enemies.

• 27:58Speaker 02

  Right? Well, like, put that nearby. So it's a lot of decisions like that. I mean, I think a fun thing about it being a game just full of secrets is it could just be a good secret to like, walk into a place and find the sidearm that you want, or find the sidearm that like, maybe you don't find till a later stage. You find it here. Yeah, so there's a lot of that. But in terms of like, I guess the Metroidvania-ish aspect of it. I mean, we weren't considering it really too much, other than we just wanted to make like the stuff that lets you get over big pits that breaks it a little bit more wide open. We tried to like, spread out a little farther away, at least from the, just the beginning area. So even if you found it, you might find it like, you won't find it like in the first town you walk into,

• 28:42Speaker 02

  but you might find it in the first level you get to. And if you find it in the first level, you might not like, realize its potential right away. But hopefully you will like, over the course of the game. And then we did put in tricks. I don't know if you've gotten to this far, but we did put in tricks so you could eventually hold two sidearms. Or you have a, what we call an underlab, which is Mina's little base that is part of her checkpoint system. And so in each checkpoint, you can go into your base and you can essentially like, save one of your sidearms there. Or if you die, like, it's, yeah, there's a called, a sidearm saver. Completely missed that. Yeah. So there's like two more ways essentially to like, I want these sidearms and I want to make sure they're around. Yeah, we tried to like, build that stuff. We knew people would like, find later in the game.

• 29:26Speaker 02

  But basically, we wanted to like, introduce you to the system where you might be losing it. And then make the satisfaction of getting upgrades that made it so it's like, less, like, more likely that you have the stuff you want. And aren't searching the whole world for it if you, if you really want that specifically.

• 29:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, that explains a lot. I was wondering why at one point my sidearm would respawn and I had no idea why that happened. I guess I must have accidentally triggered the same thing sidearm for the first time after like 20 hours in the game. Great, cool. Yeah. And then the trinkets. Yeah, so I guess you got into earlier. They do, you know, there are trinkets that like completely break open and change the style of the game or change what you think about. I feel like the proto spark has been like a fairly discussed one already, just like in terms of like changing the difficulty curve. You spoke a little bit about, I guess, about your design of those, you know, like allowing people to play in ways that they might be more familiar with mother games and stuff. But were there any other, I guess, design challenges or particular things that you wanted to achieve with the the trinkets after certain like gameplay milestones?

• 30:20Speaker 02

  I mean, the biggest thing we wanted to achieve, I mean, we just wanted to have a lot of good stuff to find in the game, in a game like a Zelda game or like secrets. Like oftentimes it's like, oh, I get one quarter of a heart. It's like, great, who cares? So we wanted things that felt like, oh, this is really interesting and good. And I'm glad I found this. Or, you know, even if I didn't, I'm going to go sell it at the pawn shop and I'll get my money's worth out of it. So we initially thought we needed like a lot of stuff. So there's 60 trinkets in the game because we wanted like, we wanted when you went down a secret path for that path to be worth it. Or if you went to the shop for like, there to be things to buy from the shop. And then we wanted each of those items essentially to be meaningful in a way

• 31:02Speaker 02

  that oftentimes what we were thinking about is like it helping with some part of the game that you might be having trouble with. So, oh, this one helps with the platforming. Oh, this one helps. If I'm scared of being close to enemies, this helps with the combat of being close to enemies. If I'm not very fast of a player, this helps me be faster. If this, if I'm, you know, all I want is to have more defense because I'm, I just like taking hits all the time. I just like, I'm the kind of person that just likes getting hit and hitting the guy back as fast as I can. Basically, we're trying to like fill the holes in the moveset. Like I was saying before, you might be like, I want a quick dodge in some way. How can we give that to you?

• 31:39Speaker 02

  The healing system is very particular in this game where you can't heal until you attack someone. You attack someone and it fills up a meter. And then after filling up that meter, when you use a potion, that meter like. Turns into your energy, your health. And some people are like, I don't like, I just want to heal when I press the button. So we got a trinket for that. It's like that kind of stuff. The challenge is, is that we have 60 of these. By the end of the game, you can equip six at once. And how we were thinking of it is like, well, you can make millions and millions of different kinds of builds of characters. Which is like, I'm pairing this trinket and this trinket. And the way these like, help influence each others makes me like, really good in this particular way. It's like, oh, I can use like way more sidearms if I put these three trinkets on.

• 32:24Speaker 02

  And they're being, they'll be powerful and I will be spamming them like crazy. Basically like playing into like the way you can make the character yourself in a way that's like cool and fun and maybe no one else is making that character. And that was challenging because the game is open and you can go any direction you want. And you can do anything at any time. And so you can really like break the game in a lot of ways right from the start and figuring out the right like, balance of you can make this game like really easy. Or, you know, on the contrary, you can make it, you're maybe not getting the things that would help you. Oh, I'm a player. I just need something to help me not fall in pits, right? Maybe you didn't find the trinket that helps you not fall in pits.

• 33:07Speaker 02

  Those are the things you need. It's like making sure it's basically balanced for everyone that's playing. It was such a huge challenge. It just meant us playing the game thousands and thousands of times being like, should that trinket be there? It seems more likely that like the person who needs it might find it there. But if we move that one over there, that's like, what do we do with that one? Then we got to move it over here. Then we have like 60 trinkets that are like, oh crap. We don't know where to put them. Yeah. So it was just like the act of balancing those and making sure that it didn't upset the level of the game feeling fun in any direction, whether it's too easy or too hard.

• 33:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, awesome. Yeah, I think one of the things, it's a bit of a tradition of asking devs what they think of the current or how much they designed for speedruns and what they think of the current record. I'm excited to see what happens to this game because of the builds. Like there are definitely, I've just got the, this is a spoiler folks. 30 seconds in, I've just gotten like the wall burrowing. And immediately I was just like, okay, this is, I can see some particular stuff that would happen with this. You've got the feet for speedrunning already. So I know you've thought about this. Like what is the, the most unhinged? Build you've seen that's like sped up the game, if there's one top your head.

• 34:11Speaker 02

  I mean, there's a fishing rod sidearm that really breaks it wide open and I don't know, like we had speedrunners in our playtests. I haven't seen the speedrunner since the game has come out that much, but in our playtests, like with our friends and family, we had a few of our speedrunner friends playing it. And every time they made a speedrun, it's like they had a different build and it would be interesting and different. A lot of them were focused around either being able to traverse over like larger areas quicker or combat getting the most out of it. Like, so we have something like, for example, we have something called the combo capacitor,

• 34:49Speaker 02

  which is every time you hit a guy, it makes your attack power go up and you'll do 2.5 or 3.0 more damage, depending on how many times you hit in a row. But if you get hurt, that combo gets reset to zero. So they'll be figuring out ways to essentially like cheese that so they can get more hits in quickly to build up that combo. So they're doing like enormous amounts of damage to a boss and like can get them down in like a couple of seconds. Seeing that stuff has just been like so much fun. I mean, the game for anyone that doesn't know, it's like 20 to 30 hours long and their speedrun, I think the best speedrun right now is like an hour and 20 minutes. It's like very big gap from going fast to playing it for reals.

• 35:28Speaker 01

  And the feet is at four hours, right?

• 35:31Speaker 02

  And the feet's four hours, yeah.

• 35:33Speaker 01

  That's already a good chunk down from the feet. That's awesome.

• 35:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:36Speaker 01

  So on to, I guess, a related topic. So the game includes a manual, which I only know because it was very helpfully included in the like pre-release information. I've not had to open it because the game does tutorialization amazingly. And there's a moment when I was thinking about what to ask you, there's a moment I was like, I don't know at what point I even learned that jumping out of a burrow makes you go further. It just, it just happened. It just seamlessly, it was just seamlessly conveyed to me telepathically. How did you approach, I guess, like tutorialization and like teaching people the core mechanics in the game?

• 36:06Speaker 02

  I mean, yeah, that's the stage that you play through. So everything is very open in the game and you can go anywhere and anytime, except for the very beginning stage, which essentially leads you to the main town of the game where and from the main town, you branch off to all the different areas. So that main intro stage is basically where we are meticulously designing every single room to teach you a different idea. This room teaches you, you can jump over a pit. This room teaches you, when you hit a wall, it will like, that has like a notch in it, it will break and blow up. This room teaches you like there's a treasure chest and you have to hit a treasure chest to get what's inside. This room teaches you that like some enemies shoot projectiles at you, you know, on and on and on and on.

• 36:47Speaker 02

  That example you give of the burrow jumping farther is, so at one earlier point, we teach you that like a burrow goes under a fence. So we teach you that idea, you go under a fence and then later on, you get into a situation where there's a fence and there's a two tile gap. So you naturally go like, I'll jump going under the fence and you jump a longer gap. So it's basically like, we're forcing you to learn that just by like, you'll make the connection. Here's what I did before, I'll try that thing again. Oh, I guess I can go farther when I do that, right? It's like just a step by step, like we're feeding you the information you need to know in order to progress. And you can't really progress until you learn that thing, or at least have done it.

• 37:29Speaker 02

  You might have not learned it, but you like, you did it enough to get forward and maybe you'll be able to do it again.

• 37:35Speaker 01

  Nice. Cool. Yeah, it definitely works very well and very subliminally, apparently. I didn't recall that. I didn't know you said it. I do, there's a lot of fencing over bits. That's cool. So to, you know, we've spoken about kind of some of the latest stages of the game. I'm not at the post-game yet, but I've seen what it entails because of some of the feats. So one of the, I guess, modern embellishments on the formula is there's clearly a fair amount of like souls like influence. You've got the spark system and I guess the flasks in general, but you've also got new game plus and like all these amazing post-game stuff. But that feels to me like probably slightly less trodden territory and like some of your influences and like probably places where you're having to, I guess, go a little bit more greenfield. How did you approach designing like a, that style of like post-game for a Game Boy Color RPG?

• 38:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, the concept of new game plus, I think, I mean, original Zelda had a sort of similar concept. It wasn't like when you beat the game, it carried over your equipment, but it was like there was the master quest, right? So you could beat the game and then you could play it again and they shuffled all the dungeons. And it was like, interesting to play it again. I mean, you know, it was cool like as a concept at the time. Like, I think when you play a Zelda game, what you're experiencing is the fact that you can go anywhere. Right? But when you're playing it, you sort of don't like register that. You're just like wandering to the next place. When you get further in the game or you've beaten the game, you go, oh, now that I, now that I'm thinking about it, I could have gone to like the third dungeon first, couldn't I have?

• 39:01Speaker 02

  And then you're like, I think it's your instinct to go back and try that, right? Like, I'm gonna go see what it's like if I, if I do that. So, I mean, that was basically like, we got to encourage that kind of mindset. Like you said, new game plus, carry over your equipment kind of thing is, is a, I think the first game maybe to be popular with that was Chrono Trigger, or maybe Invent It, which is like around the era of when we're starting, but definitely hadn't like picked up by any means as like a popular thing. But yeah, so I guess we were just thinking about combining like, what would be the interesting new game plus wise? And what would get you that same feeling of like old Zeldas where it's like going in and playing again? So in ours, there's actually like seven rounds of new game plus and each one changes how the game plays.

• 39:45Speaker 02

  So the first one is like more standard, you keep your equipment, stuff is harder, there's less checkpoints. But like the second one, for example, flips the whole world horizontally and you lose all your items. So it's like, oh, how do I play this game? I don't know where the things are anymore. I don't know how the world is set up. And so our hope is that you like go to different areas and do different things. And in the first new round, you have all your equipment. So our hope is like, it's harder, but you're like figuring out how to slot your equipment in different ways. And the third new game plus is we actually have an item shuffler in the game. So like randomizers became very popular like five or 10 years ago. And we wanted to sort of do a take, I can't think. Of many games that actually have it like built into the game properly.

• 40:31Speaker 02

  So yeah, we took a stab at that. And like when you do the third one, essentially you lose all your equipment again. And now you things that will happen, like, for example, when you start the game, there's a character who gives you your healing vials, which you use throughout the whole game. But if you start the game with the item shuffler, you're not going to get the healing vitals. You might get something really valuable, or you might get something really terrible. That's part of the fun of going through it. So we just really wanted to encourage basically like going and playing through the game and different styles and different ways. And later, New Game Plus is like, you can go anywhere in the world, but like level one, the enemies are scaled to be easier than level six. The enemies on level six are like really hard and you have to level up to be able to fight them easier.

• 41:16Speaker 02

  But we swap where the areas are of leveling. So like now, level one has like, wait, the wait, level six style enemies in it or whatever. We shuffle those around. We basically are playing like with, hopefully, if you go through and play it a bunch and have fun with the game and you want to sink your teeth into it, there's just like a lot of ways that you can basically like keep encountering the world and enjoying it.

• 41:41Speaker 01

  That's awesome. We are coming up on time. So I wanted to end, I guess, on a little bit of a silly question, which is, what is your favorite trinket?

• 41:48Speaker 02

  Oh, I don't even know. That's a good question.

• 41:51Speaker 01

  And this could be your favorite trinket to play with, or your favorite one to have like designed and implemented. Either is fine.

• 41:56Speaker 02

  Oh, man, I gotta like look them up. I'm not even sure.

• 41:59Speaker 01

  Get into the spreadsheet.

• 42:00Speaker 02

  This is real. This is real serious.

• 42:02Speaker 01

  The Yuck Club Games internal trinket tier list. I wanna, I wanna see that as content.

• 42:08Speaker 02

  Maybe the vascular syrup might be my favorite, or at least I think it's like a cool thing, which is basically like, if anyone's played Earthbound or Mother 3 or the mother games they have, when you get hit as a standard like JRPG, but when you get hit, you have like a rolling health bar. So your health, say you take a kill that would kill you and you have 500 health. You watch it go from 500 to zero. And if you can heal before it gets to zero, you're actually still alive. So. We basically, the vascular syrup is a similar kind of concept where if you get hit, your health starts ticking down. And if you can heal it, you can basically recover it from that point. And you can go all the way to one and it can sit at one, one health, you know, a little

• 42:50Speaker 02

  longer than you think. And then it's like, oh, I get healed. It's clutch. I like really love that feeling. And it become, when you're a new game plus seven, it becomes vital. I'll tell you that.

• 42:59Speaker 01

  That's actually, I'm really glad to ask you this now because I've got that drink here and I read it description. I was like, oh, I don't know why I would want that. And now you're explaining where it's come from and like how it works. Now I'm like, cool. That sounds great.

• 43:08Speaker 02

  I think there's a lot of stuff that you might initially like, I like the things I have. I'm not going to switch. Or I don't really get why that's valuable. Because, you know, when you have the item shuffler and that's your first item, it's like, well, I guess now I'm going to see why this is a good drink. So it's like fun that you get to experience it and sort of like, basically over time, like learn why those things are cool or not.

• 43:30Speaker 01

  Well, that brings us to the end. David, thank you so much for joining us today.

• 43:33Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me.