EPISODE 1940


[INTRODUCTION]


[0:00:00] ANNOUNCER: Yacht Club Games is the studio behind the acclaimed Shovel Knight franchise. Their latest release is Mina the Hollower, which is a top-own 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 Yach 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.

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 development remains his favorite way to experience and explore new technologies and concepts.

[INTERVIEW]


[0:01:15] JN: 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.

[0:01:30] DD: Hi, thanks for having me.


[0:01:31] JN: 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?

[0:01:39] DD: 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 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.


[0:02:23] JN: That's amazing. I did not know. Well, funny enough, we've had the WayForward folks on this show before as well. We've had Voldi 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.

[0:02:37] DD: Oh, for sure. I mean, that has nothing to do with me. That's all Jake. He's a genius. But yeah, I put in all the sound effects in the game and make sure 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 sound effects.

Definitely the audio stuff comes in handy. I mean, just in terms of gameplay, it's like, rhythmically, you want everything to feel like it's got the same kind of tempo to it. Yeah, it's definitely a very handy tool in my tool belt.

[0:03:09] JN: 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?

[0:03:19] DD: 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. Shovel Knight was like an NES take. This is more like Game Boy Color. And that kind of what we are inspired by there.

[0:03:59] JN: 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 the regression from NES to Game Boy, Shovel Knight, your Mario, this is your Link, your Zelda, etc. How much of that was planned from the start? How much that was the original vision? And how much of it kind of came along organically as you developed the game?

[0:04:20] DD: I mean, when we started Yacht Club, we were like, "We're going to make a big franchise like Mario. And then after that we'll make a big franchise like Zelda." 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 make art of anything. A Game Boy is like in my wheelhouse of art I could make." That's 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 when it made a lot of sense for us, just like, "Oh, we're keeping it 8bit." There's some things that we can pull and use from Shovel Knight really, obviously, and some things that are exciting and new.

And in some ways it's like just as old as NES. They released close to the same time. But in a lot of ways, Game Boy Color, Game Boy had such a long lifespan that 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, especially when Pokemon came out. Just really took off again. Yeah. I mean, it was pretty much from the start.

[0:04:20] JN: Yeah, that age point is a really interesting one. Because one of the things I was writing 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. The model of your studio, I guess,

specifically going after NES, specifically going after Game Boy. And then in some of your posts about the development process, for example, you talk about people going into their favorite Game Boy Color games in really narrow detail. Putting out their favorite colors and this kind of process. And I was wondering, 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?

[0:06:05] DD: 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?" But that said, I mean, there's always people who - we hired Eli, who's one of the programmers on the project. I mean, he's like 20-some.
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 weird game on the NES, right?" And it's just like, "Oh, I guess kids these days, if you're the right kind of kid, you're still finding these games and playing them." And it was like, "Oh, then we know like you'll fit in eventually into this culture."

I mean, some people don't. Some people that we've hired really don't find that stuff. But we get that ingrained into them as part of like the process. Bridget, one of the programmers who worked on the game a long time. Basically, every couple weeks, I'd be like, "You got to try Punch Out. You got to try Final Fantasy Adventure or whatever." And then she'd come back and be - when she told us what game she liked at the start for interview process, she was like, "My favorite game is X, Y, and Z." And we're like, "I don't know about that." And then by the end of working with us, she's like, "I don't even like those games anymore."

[0:07:16] JN: Excellent. Very cool. See, 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 one style to the other? Because you were in the Shovel Knight world for a long time as a studio, and then this game for quite a long-focused time. Was there any - I guess, especially technical challenges to reorienting around that new style?

[0:07:38] DD: 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 you're

looking at sheets of paper, going back or whatever, and they're scrolling. And I guess in depth- wise, it always sort of makes sense. You're looking at flat drawn images, which is something you experience in real life.

In a Zelda game, it's like you're looking at it top-down. But if you were actually looking at ti top- down, you'd be looking at the top of someone's head, right? 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. 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. How much 3D space do they take up? We're sort of making it up. And we're assuming the player is 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, checkpoints. Or no time where it could take a break or anything. And it's also saving every single screen. 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.

[0:09:28] JN: Yeah. Cool. Yeah. The position for large objects that occupy lots of going back space is really interesting. Some of the bosses, I guess, isn't too supporting 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.

[0:09:43] DD: Right.


[0:09:44] JN: Interesting. 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. So

don't want to spend too long on it. But for folks who aren't aware, can you briefly summarize, 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?

[0:10:02] DD: Yeah, so the art style is like the Links 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. The name's escaping me. I always forget it. It's like Dark Beast Battle Busters or something. It's like a Neo Geo game.

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 forget. It's 54 colors maybe? But the colors are chosen to you by Nintendo. 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. Basically, we're 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 actually restricting the game in any way that is like real. Yeah, it is like we're pretending. So, we do things. 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. 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. But 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. Just the soundwave channel, 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 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 when we write text, they don't say a lot of stuff. The dialogue's kept small. Our script probably alone would break a Game Boy for how much text is in the game. But you get the same sense of like, "Oh, 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, trying to make it feel the same. But at the end of the day, it's so much bigger that it wouldn't fit. But that kind of idea.

[0:12:32] JN: Nice. Got it. Yeah. Philosophically, trying to restrict stuff. Because it's your own engine, right? It's all in-house.

[0:12:38] DD: Yes. All in-house. All in C++.


[0:12:40] JN: Cool. There's no points where you're like, "Actually, let's build this constraint into the engine."

[0:12:46] DD: No. Yeah. No points where you're like, "Oh no, the sprites are going to flicker when there's seven cross in a line or whatever." Yeah.

[0:12:54] JN: Nice. See, I'd love to hear about the engine and I guess how the tech is set up for the game.

[0:12:57] DD: Yeah. 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 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 pallets to generate them, or like specific pallet effects. 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 a tool to animate those.

We have tools for importing the art and setting them up in sequences, and animations, and putting hitboxes on them and that kind of stuff. The Propeller basically can read all the information from those tools and make it happen in game. And then I guess we have what you

might call a game engine. The game play engine, which is all the systems and stuff that essentially make Mina work.

Here's a set of collection of systems, like collision and animation and combat tools that can use. For any enemy, you can use those systems in that engine basically to 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.

I mean, it's a pretty not the craziest engine in the world. It's very maybe of the era of the 90s too. 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 one part of the engine I guess I didn't mention is we also - basically, there's a core part that runs all those systems. And then like each console, we're building a branch of essentially this is how you render something. That if the game play is trying to render something, it calls these functions. And if the engine needs to draw to the PS5, it knows that these functions should call these PS5 functions. We have these separate branches that essentially run on each console.

[0:15:00] JN: Awesome. So I guess Vanzo 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?

[0:15:11] DD: 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 want to be able to build levels and animation stuff. So, we didn't want to have to write those from scratch. Yeah, those are still used from Shovel Knight, but everything else is from the ground up.

[0:15:32] JN: Cool. And yeah, the fact it's got a name. It's called Propeller. Is this now an engine you'll take on to subsequent titles? Or is it very tied to Mina in the style of game?

[0:15:41] DD: 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 got to just get this game out the door. Yeah. Now we're like, "How do we make something that lasts a long time?"

[0:15:53] JN: 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? In the bayou, you enter a house and you've got like the floor below. Like really extreme parallax kicks in. Is this a 3D engine?

[0:16:14] DD: I mean, these days it's like hard to write a not 3D engine. The way it actually works is it is set up like 2D plains. It's not like what you might call like an orthographic perspective. Essentially, this is flat 2D way of drawing it. It is set up that way. And what we do is each layer has a parallax value, which is like if the camera moves, at what percentage does it move with the camera?

Something like that room with a lot of parallax in it, 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. It's just like, yeah, sliding based on where the camera is.

[0:17:01] JN: Awesome. And then another related question I had, 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 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 make it feel authentic in a modern setting?

[0:17:24] DD: Yeah. The way the old systems would work is basically you could draw sprites which usually meant 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. 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 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, modern rendering API is basically like the main way you draw things as triangles. I mean, we're doing that. Essentially, we do in a way still sort it set it up like an old game. For example, 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 him to be like two tiles tall, which makes them need to be two sprites. They draw a sprite for the head and they build a sprite for the bottom. And those pieces 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 the head. It will be like one draw. And the bottom will be like another draw. It's like two boxes that we've essentially set out. And those draw two triangles per box. 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 drawing it in the modern way where we're figuring out how to turn it into triangles that have textures on them.

[0:19:13] JN: Nice. Awesome. 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 every screen is very densely packed. And there's a lot of moments where like you're trying to nail your positioning while you're attacking, while you're avoiding something. The burrow mechanic is if you're an action RPG player, if you played Souls, it kind of has like the dodge function, but it's not quite a dodge roll. It 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.

[0:19:13] DD: sOh, 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 interesting and maybe not something you've experienced before. But at the same time, we want to make sure that everything in there is consistent. And when you do an action, 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 deliberate and position-oriented on the screen. When you play most modern combat games these days, like Souls, or Zelda, or basically pick anything, Hades, they have 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. 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. 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 that you can duck or stand up straight, right? If someone's coming at me, do I have to keep a lower position or a higher position in order to not get hit or hit them?

You are very sluggish in the game. And it is hard to move. And it is hard to escape. If I'm close to an enemy, I better have 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. 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 they're hard to control in a way that 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. 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, where are you positioned on screen compared to the enemy and compared to your weapons' attacks.

And so part of that was making it. 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, it's like a 30-frame jump or something like that.

There's a good chunk of time where you basically can't escape. 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 equipment in the game and stuff that if you're really not able to come around to that play style, we do have ways. For example, there's a trinket called the dodging pendulum, where if someone's hitting you and you jump right when they hit you, you'll be invulnerable for a period of time. We do have mechanisms to make it. 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.

[0:23:30] JN: That's awesome. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. The burrow is so interesting that big time to jump. But also, I might be wrong on this, but it doesn't dodge all attacks when you're under -

[0:23:39] DD: No. No. Yeah. I mean, that was very similar to Castlevania. We're sort of thinking of it like a duck. there could be attacks in the ground, or there could be attacks on the ground, or there could be attacks in the air. And so we were thinking about those three layers of combat a lot.

For the beginning of the game, often, you can burrow and avoid everything. But as you progress, there's going to be guys that start slamming the ground and attacks come out of the ground. 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."

[0:24:10] JN: Cool. Trinkets and sidearms will definitely come back too. 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 accessing again an aesthetic sensibility one? Where does that come from?

[0:24:38] DD: I mean, it's the same Castlevania thing. It's the same. We want to make it positionally interesting and engaging. The fact that you cannot attack diagonally, at least with some weapons, means 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 on another character. When we were making Shovel Knight, it's a very similar idea, which is when 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 figure out how to use your move set to take advantage of the situation.

When we were designing all the weapons, essentially, we're coming up with what are the strengths and weaknesses that allow you to positionally be interesting. 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 can't do with any other weapon. But it is also 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 pretty limiting. It's not like you fire hard on those directions and your bullets pretty small. It's like you still have to 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.

[0:26:27] JN: Cool. To come around to the trinkets and sidearms, I guess first question I want to ask about this. The trinkets from navigating the open world, both the trinkets and sidearms kind of allow you to ease getting access to areas. Jumping over big pits is 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. That, I imagine, 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. I feel like placing them must have been - and I don't know whether I was doing it wrong. But 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 what challenges they might help you navigate?

[0:27:14] DD: 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 mathing it out.

Okay, we want every area to have a new one. That means there's going to be three old ones, but we don't - if you go to this level or this level first, we want to make sure those ones have different sidearms, right? We're figuring out. Basically, there's like a set of four sidearms in each area, and we figure out that set. And then we're figuring out where does it make sense to place them. Oh, if you had that thing that throws stuff in the sky here, that will help you with all the flying enemies, right? We'll put that nearby. 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 walk into a place and find the sidearm that you want or find the sidearm that maybe you don't find till a later stage, you find it here. There's a lot of that. But in terms of, 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 - the stuff that lets you get over big pits that breaks it a little bit more wide open, we tried to spread out a little farther away at least from just the beginning area.

Even if you found it, 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 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 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 save one of your sidearms there. Or if you die - yeah, there's called a sidearm saver keeper.

[0:29:15] JN: Completely missed that.


[0:29:16] DD: Yeah. 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 build that stuff. We knew people would find later in the game. But basically, we wanted to 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 more likely that you have the stuff you want and aren't searching the whole world for it if you really want that specific thing.

[0:29:41] JN: Yeah, that explains a lot. I was wondering why, at one point, my sidearm respawned, and I had no idea why that happened. I guess I must have accidentally tripped the same sidearm for the first time after 20 hours in the game. Great. Cool.

And then the trinkets. Yeah, as I guess you got into earlier, there are trinkets that completely break open and change the style of the game or change how you need to think about. I feel like the proto spark has been like a fairly discussed one already just in terms of changing the difficulty curve.

You spoke a little bit, I guess, about your design of those. 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 gameplay milestones?

[0:30:20] DD: 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 Secrets, often times it's like, "Oh, I get one quarter of a heart." It's like, "Great. Who cares?" We wanted things that felt like, "Oh, this is really interesting and good. And I'm glad I found this. Or 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."

We initially thought we needed a lot of stuff. So, there's 60 trinkets in the game. Because 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 often times what we were thinking about is it helping with some part of the game that you might be having trouble with.

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 all I want is to have more defense because I just like taking hits all the time. 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 move set. Like I was saying before, you might be like, "I want 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 turns into your health. And some people are 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 help influence each other's makes me really good in this particular way. It's like, "Oh, I can use way more sidearms if I put these three trinkets on. And they'll be powerful. And I will be spamming them like crazy." Basically, 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 break the game in a lot of ways right from the start and figuring out the right balance of you can make this game really easy. Or the contrary, if 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 got to move it over here. Then we have 60 trinkets that are like, "Oh crap. We don't know where to put them." Yeah. So it's 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.

[0:33:41] JN: Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. I think one of the things, it's been 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 with this game because of the builds. Definitely, I've just got the - this is a spoiler, folks. 30 seconds in, I've just gotten the wall burrowing. And immediately, I was just like, "Okay, I can see some ridiculous stuff that would happen with this." You've got the feet for speedrunning already. I know you thought about this.
What is the most unhinged build you've seen that's like sped up the game, if there's one on top of your head?

[0:34:11] DD: I mean, there's a fishing rod sidearm that really breaks it wide open. I don't know. We had speedrunners in our play test. I haven't seen the speedrunner since the game has come out that much. But in our play test 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 larger areas quicker or combat getting the most out of it. 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. They'll be figuring out ways to essentially cheese that so they can get more hits in quickly to build up that combo, so they're doing enormous amounts of damage to a boss and can get them down in a couple seconds. Seeing that stuff has just been so much fun.

I mean, the game, for anyone who doesn't know, it's like 20 to 30 hours long. And 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.

[0:35:29] JN: And the feat is at 4 hours, right?


[0:35:31] DD: And the feat is four hours. Yeah.


[0:35:33] JN: Yeah. That's already a good chunk down from the feat. That's awesome.


[0:35:36] DD: Yeah. On to, I guess, the related topic. The game includes a manual, which I only know because it was very helpfully included in 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 was just seamlessly conveyed to me telepathically. How did you approach, I guess, tutorialization and teaching people the core mechanics in the game?

[0:36:06] DD: I mean, yeah, that's the stage that you play through. 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.

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 that has like a notch in it, it will break and blow up. This room teaches you, there's a treasure chest. And you have to hit a treasure chest to get what's inside. This room teaches you that some enemies shoot projectiles at you. On and on and on and on.

That example you give of the burrow jumping farther is - at earlier point, we teach you that a burrow goes under a fence. 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. You naturally go like, "I'll jump going under the fence." And you jump a longer gap. It's basically we're forcing you to learn

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

[0:37:36] JN: Nice. Cool. Yeah, it definitely works very well and very subliminally. Apparently, I didn't recall that. But now that you said it, I do. There's a lot of fencing over pits. That's cool.

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. One of the I guess modern embellishments on the 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 green field. How did you approach designing like that style of like post-game for a Game Boy Color RPG?

[0:38:17] DD: 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 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, it was cool.

There's a concept at the time. 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'm thinking about it, I could have gone to like the third dungeon first, couldn't I have?" I think it's your instinct to go back and try that, right? I'm going to go see what it's like if I do that. I mean, that was basically - we got to encourage that kind of mindset.



Like you said, New Game Plus carry over your equipment kind of thing is - 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, I guess we were just thinking about combining. 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 again? In ours, there's actually like seven rounds of new Game Plus. And each one changes how the game plays. The first one is like more standard. You keep your equipment, stuff is harder, there's less checkpoints. But the second one, for example, flips the whole world horizontally, and you lose all your items. 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. Our hope is like it's harder, but you're 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. Randomizers became very popular 5 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. Yeah, we took a stab at that. And when you do the third one essentially, you lose all your equipment again. And now things that will happen - 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. We just really wanted to encourage basically going and playing through the game in different styles and different ways.

And later, New Game Plus is you can go anywhere in the world. But level one, the enemies are scaled to be easier than level six. The enemies in level six are 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, now level

one has the weight level six style enemies in it or whatever. We shuffle those around. We basically are playing 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.

[0:41:42] JN: 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?

[0:41:48] DD: Oh, I don't even know. That's a good question.


[0:41:52] JN: And this could be your favorite trinket to play with or your favorite one to have designed and implemented. Either is fine.

[0:41:57] DD: Oh man, I got to like look him up. I'm not even sure.


[0:42:00] JN: Get into the spreadsheet.


[0:42:01] DD: This is real serious.


[0:42:03] JN: The Yacht Club Games internal trinket tier list. I want to see that as content.


[0:42:09] DD: Maybe the vascular syrup might be my favorite, or at least I think it's like a cool thing. Which is basically if anyone's played Earthbound, or Mother 3, or the Mother games, when you get hit, there's a standard JRPG. But when you get hit, you have like a rolling health bar. 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.

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 health a little longer than you think. And then it's like, "Oh, I get healed. It's clutch." I really love that feeling. And when you're in New Game Plus seven, it becomes vital. I'll tell you that.

[0:42:59] JN: 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 explaining where it's come from and how it works. Now I'm like, "Cool, that sounds great."

[0:43:08] DD: Yeah. 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 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 trinket." It's like fun that you get to experience it and sort of, basically over time, learn why those things are cool or not.

[0:43:30] JN: Well, that brings us to the end. David, thank you so much for joining us today.


[0:43:34] DD: Thanks for having me.


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