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Mina the Hollower
00:45:50
Yacht Club Games 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,
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- [00:00]
Narrator
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. Joe Nash is a developer, educator and award winning community builder who has worked at companies including GitHub, Twilio, Unity and PayPal. Joe got his start in software development by creating mods and running servers for Garry's mod, and game development remains his favorite way to experience and explore new technologies and concepts.
- [01:15]
Joe Nash
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.
- [01:30]
David d' Angelo
Hi, thanks for having me.
- [01:31]
Joe Nash
So I'm going to 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?
- [01:39]
David d' Angelo
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. 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 jump. 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 served Jello Knight.
- [02:23]
Joe Nash
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 Voldy 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.
- [02:37]
David d' Angelo
Oh, for sure. I mean, that has nothing to do with me. That's all Jake. 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 billion 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.
- [03:08]
Joe Nash
That's awesome. So I guess a lot of what we're here to talk to 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?
- [03:18]
David d' Angelo
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 are inspired there.
- [03:59]
Joe Nash
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 you've done so far, you've got this like what I think is a really lovely narrative about, you know, the progression from NES to Game Boy. Shovel Knights, your Mario, this is your link, or your Zelda, et cetera. How much of that was planned from the start? Like how much that was the original vision and how much of it kind of came along organically as you developed the game?
- [04:20]
David d' Angelo
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 ide. 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 going to 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. 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. They release 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.
- [05:28]
Joe Nash
Yeah, that age point is 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 a long time. And I imagine that involved building up 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 release now. Does that affect your talent pipeline at all? Is that a factor you have to deal with as you're bringing new people into the studio, whether they've experienced these titles.
- [06:04]
David d' Angelo
Yeah, in a way, yes. I mean when we hire people, we definitely are asking them, what games do you like? What did you play? But that said, I mean, there's always people who. 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, which is like this like 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. 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 weeks I'd be like, you gotta try punch out. You gotta try like Final Fantasy Adventure or whatever. And then she'd come back and be like. When she told us what game she liked at the start per 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.
- [07:15]
Joe Nash
Excellent. Very cool. See, I guess the other question I had about that flip from NES2D side scroller Mario to link is top down RPG. Very different style of game. How was that transition process from like one style to. Because you were in the Shovel Knight 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?
- [07:38]
David d' Angelo
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. 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. 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 Shovel Knight.
- [09:28]
Joe Nash
Yeah. Cool. Yeah. The position for large objects that occupy lots of going back space is really interesting. Some of the bosses I guess hopefully isn't too spoiled, are quite large. And the minute 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. Right, interesting. So I guess actually you mentioned the Game Boy 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 summarise, I guess what the style is you're going for and some of the self imposed constraints that came along with that and how you dealt with those.
- [10:02]
David d' Angelo
Yeah, so the art style is like the Link's Awakening or Oracle of Ages, Oracle Seasons kind of Game Boy 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. Name's escaping me. I always forget it's like Dark Beast Battle Busters 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 Game Boy compared to the NES is 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 in a Game Boy 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 pose 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. We stick to that global palette I was mentioning before. This music is written on like a very advanced Game Boy era chip. 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. The dialogue's 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 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.
- [12:32]
Joe Nash
Nice. Got it. Yeah. So philosophically trying to restrict stuff. So there's no. Because it's your own engine. Right? It's all in house.
- [12:38]
David d' Angelo
Yes, all in house on C. So there was no.
- [12:41]
Joe Nash
There's no points where you're like, actually let's build this like constraint into the engine. It's all.
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Narrator
No.
- [12:47]
David d' Angelo
Yeah. No point. Like, oh, no, the sprites are going to flicker when there's seven cross in a line or whatever.
- [12:53]
Joe Nash
Yeah. Nice. See, I'd love to hear about the engine and I guess how the tech is set up for the game.
- [12:57]
Narrator
Yeah.
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David d' Angelo
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 is going to go from like this range of blues to this range of reds and it's going to do it really fast. 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. 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 in 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 90s too. 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 need 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.
- [15:01]
Joe Nash
Awesome. So I guess Ranso correctly mentioned that this is a post Shovel Knight engine. Did any of these tools exist for Shovel Knight or are they all built for Post Shovel Knight and Mina and what else?
- [15:11]
David d' Angelo
The only thing we're using from Shovel Knight is the level editor and the animation Importer. I mean, we 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.
- [15:32]
Joe Nash
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 in the style of game?
- [15:41]
David d' Angelo
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?
- [15:53]
Joe Nash
Great. Cool. So I guess the combination of the two, one of the art and the engine. One of the things that immediately made my eyebrow 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. Really extreme parallax kicks in. Is this a 3D engine?
- [16:13]
David d' Angelo
Technically it's like. I mean these days it's like hard to Write a not 3D engine.
- [16:17]
Joe Nash
Right.
- [16:18]
David d' Angelo
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 is 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 something like that room with a lot of parallax in it. What would be like. Basically those layers are told this layer is so far back it should never move right. And this layer is 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.
- [17:00]
Joe Nash
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 technical restrictions and hardware restrictions in particular. And there was an interesting line in one of the blog post 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?
- [17:23]
David d' Angelo
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 sort of the same way where it's like a texture thing. You're giving it. The 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 your own magic going into it. And modern engine, like modern rendering API is basically like the main way you draw things as 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, 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, like have textures on them.
- [19:13]
Joe Nash
Nice. Awesome.
- [19:16]
Narrator
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- [20:02]
David d' Angelo
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- [20:04]
Joe Nash
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David d' Angelo
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- [20:09]
Joe Nash
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- [20:12]
David d' Angelo
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- [20:21]
Joe Nash
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David d' Angelo
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Joe Nash
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David d' Angelo
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- [20:46]
Narrator
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- [21:16]
Joe Nash
so onto. 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. You're positioning while you're attacking, while you're avoiding something. The borrow mechanic is like if you're an action RPG player. Like if you 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.
- [21:54]
David d' Angelo
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. 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. 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? And they also have the, like, 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. 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. 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 playstyle, we do have ways. Like for example, there's like trinket called the Dodging Pendulum where it's 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.
- [25:31]
Joe Nash
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. No, no. Yeah.
- [25:41]
David d' Angelo
I mean that was like. Yeah, very similar to like Castlevania. We're sort of thinking of it like a duck. So if something there could be attacks in the ground or there could be effects on the ground or there would 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 bur. To get out of the way of attacks.
- [26:12]
Joe Nash
Cool. So trinkets and sidearms we'll definitely come back to because, yeah, they're really interesting. But you mentioned positioning and weapons there, which I started with the whip, and 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 lovely. I'd love to hear about, I guess, the weapon design, but particularly the choice is the choice to allow to lock certain weapons into axis attacking. Again, an aesthetic sensibility. 1. Where does that come from?
- [26:39]
David d' Angelo
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 at any time, your position essentially doesn't matter because 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. Another character. When we were making Shovel Knight, it's a very similar idea, which is like, when we 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 moveset to take advantage of the situation. So when we're 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? And when you get something like the battery, the buster, which 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.
- [28:29]
Joe Nash
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, 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, 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 Metroidvania setup. So that I imagine was not super challenging. But the sidearms intrigued me because you've got a couple of sidearms realms that really give you better traversal powers, but then they're temporary and you lose them. So I feel 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, the dash, because I knew that this would help me get to an area or the umbrella or whatever. How did you deal with where these should be in relation to, like, what challenges they might help you navigate?
- [29:15]
David d' Angelo
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, and we 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. Right. We'll, 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, but you might find it in the first level you get to. And if you find in the first level, you might not, like, realize its potential right away, but hopefully you will 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 what we call an under lab, 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 save one of your sidearms there. Or if you. You die. Like it's. Yeah, there's a. Called a sidearm saver mistake. 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, 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 specific thing.
- [31:42]
Joe Nash
Yeah, that's awesome. That explains a lot. I was wondering why at one point my sidearm were respawned and I had no idea why that happened. I guess I must have accidentally triggered the sleeping sidearm for the first time after like 20 hours in the game. Great. Cool. Yeah. And then the trinkets. Yeah. As I guess you got into earlier, they do. You know, there are trinkets that completely break open and change the style of the game or change how 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 from other games and stuff. But were there any other, I guess, design challenges or particular things that you wanted to achieve with the trinkets after certain, like, gameplay milestones?
- [32:21]
David d' Angelo
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 word 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 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, like fill the holes in the moveset. Like I was saying before, you might be like, I want a, a quick dodge in some way. How can we give that to you? 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 other 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 and they're being. They'll be powerful. And I was just 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. 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. 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 gotta 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.
- [35:42]
Joe Nash
Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. I think one of the things. 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 borrowing, and immediately I was Just like, okay, this is. I can see some ridiculous stuff that would happen with this. You've got the feet for speedrunning already. So I know you 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 on top of your
- [36:12]
David d' Angelo
head, 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 play tests. I haven't seen the speedrunner since the game has come out that much. But in our play tests, 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 some like, for example, we have something called the combo capacitor, 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, and get them down in like a couple seconds. Seeing that stuff has just been like so much fun. I mean the game for anyone does. Doesn't know. It's like 20 to 30 hours long. And our 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.
- [37:30]
Joe Nash
And the, the feat is at four hours, right? That's.
- [37:33]
David d' Angelo
And the feet's four hours. Yeah.
- [37:34]
Joe Nash
That's already a good chunk down from the feet. That's awesome.
- [37:37]
David d' Angelo
Yeah.
- [37:38]
Joe Nash
So onto 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 have 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 happened. It just seamlessly. It was just seamlessly conveyed to me. Teller telepathically how did you approach, I guess like tutorialization and teaching people the core mechanics in the game.
- [38:07]
David d' Angelo
I mean, yeah, that's the stage that you play through. So everything is very open in the game and you can go anywhere at any time except for the very beginning stage, which essentially leads you to the main town of the game. 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. That example you give over 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, 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.
- [39:21]
Joe Nash
Right.
- [39:21]
David d' Angelo
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. You learn that thing or at least have done it. 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.
- [39:36]
Joe Nash
Nice. Cool. Yeah, it definitely works very well and very subliminally apparently. I didn't recall that. You said it. I do. There's a lot of fencing over pits. That's cool. So to, you know, we've spoken about kind of some of the later 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 fort formula is there's clearly a fair amount of 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 all these amazing post game stuff. But that feels to me like probably slightly less trodden territory in some of your influences and probably places where you're having to, I guess, go a little bit more greenfield. How did you approach designing that style of post game for a Game Boy color rpg?
- [40:18]
David d' Angelo
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? 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 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 when we're starting. But it 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 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 against. So in ours there's actually like seven rounds of New Game plus and each one changes how the game plays. 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 her hope is that you go to different areas and do different, 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 or that actually have it like built into the game properly. 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 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 vials. 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 in different ways. And later new game plus has like, 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. But we swap where the areas are of leveling. So like now level one has like wait, the weight, 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.
- [43:42]
Joe Nash
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?
- [43:49]
David d' Angelo
Oh, I don't even know. That's a good question.
- [43:52]
Joe Nash
And this could be your favorite trinket to play with or your favorite one to have like designed and implemented. Either is fine.
- [43:58]
David d' Angelo
Oh man, I gotta like look them up. I'm not even sure.
- [44:01]
Joe Nash
Get into the spreadsheet.
- [44:02]
David d' Angelo
This is real, this is real serious.
- [44:04]
Joe Nash
The yacht club games internal trinket tier list. I wanna, I wanna see that as content.
- [44:10]
David d' Angelo
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 three or the Mother games they have. When you get hit, it's 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 0 and if you can heal before it gets to 0, you're actually still alive. So we basically the, 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 longer than you think. And then it's like, oh, I get healed. I, I like really love that feeling. And it becomes, when you're in new game plus seven, it becomes vital. I'll tell you that.
- [45:00]
Joe Nash
That's actually, I'm really glad to ask you this now because I've got that trinket and I read it description. I was like, oh, I don't know why I would want that. And now you've explaining where it's come from and like how it works now I'm like, cool, that sounds good.
- [45:10]
David d' Angelo
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. Yeah, 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.
- [45:31]
Joe Nash
Well, that brings us to the end. David, thank you so much for joining us today.
- [45:35]
David d' Angelo
Thanks for having me.