Mina the Hollower

0:00David D’Angelo:Yacht Club Games is the studio behind the acclaimed Shovel Knight franchise. Their latest release is Mina the Howler, which is a top-down action RPG inspired by classic Zelda and Castlevania titles. After many years in development, the game recently launched to widespread critical acclaim. David D 'Angelo is a lead programmer at Yacht Club Games. In this episode, David joins Joe Nash to discuss the custom C++ engine built for Mina the Howler, how the team approached Game Boy Color art constraints and audio in a modern rendering pipeline, the game's Castlevania-inspired combat philosophy, how the open world manages saving and collision without load screens, and more.

0:42David D’Angelo: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 Gary's mod, and game development remains his favorite way to experience and explore new technologies and concepts.

1:15Welcome 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. Hi, thanks for having me. 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? 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.

1:47And 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 get a programming jump. What I really want to do is make games. And I applied at WayForward, which had basically 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 Joleneye.

2:22that'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 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 that's awesome so i guess a lot of what we had talked to you about today is mina so we should probably get into for folks who aren't aware can you briefly introduce us to mina the holower and what kind of game it is mina the Hollower is a top-down, like an old-school Zelda action RPG.

3:25You 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 by there perfect and yeah actually that's one of the things i want to ask about because you've got in the press around the game and some of the interviews done so far you've got this like what i think is a really lovely narrative about you know the regression from nes to game boy shovel knight's your mario this is your link or your zelda etc 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 i mean like when we started yacht club we were like we're gonna make a big franchise like mario and then after that we'll make a big franchise like zelda this was sort of like it was always the idea i think the game boy was sort of the surprise but alec who pitched the original idea he was like working on mina as a side project just like working on his programming skills and his art skills and he was like well i can't really like make art of anything like a Game Boy is like in my wheelhouse of art I could make.

4:48So 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 a 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. So they release like close to the same time. But in a lot of 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.

5:18It'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. Yeah. That age point's a really interesting one because one of the things I was worrying about, the game's been developed for six years. You've been working 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 some of your posts about the development process for example you talk about like people going into their like favorite game boy color games and really narrow detail like putting out their favorite colors in 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 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 yeah in a way yes i mean when we hire people we definitely are asking them like what games do you like what did you play like but that said i mean there's always people who you know we hired eli who's one of the programmers on the project and i mean he's like 20 something and probably his first console was a game cube maybe maybe later but when we were talking to him he's like oh yeah my favorite game is gargoyle's 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 got to try punch out you got to 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 excellent very cool so i guess the other question i had about that flip from nes 2d sci-scroller mario to link is top-down rpg very different style of game how was that transition process from like one start to 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 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 shuttle night yeah cool yeah the position for large objects that occupy lots of going back space is really interesting some of the bosses i guess is hope isn't too supportive are quite large and even that you said that there's two in particular i'm like yeah actually i did kind of run into like wondering how far behind them i was that is a really good point 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 spend too long on it but for folks who aren't aware can you briefly summarize i guess like 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 yeah so the art style is like the lynx 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 oh my 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 like the NES has like a fixed palette of I think I 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 have 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 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 like it's probably too advanced to be on a real game boy but it's still like written with the same kind of i guess you would call it synths or whatever like just the sound wave channel like the way it operates is the same way that it would on a game boy and we are doing yeah just a lot of i guess trying to make sure it's not too crazy or like the effects are not so in your face in a way that you might do these days there's not like a billion particles coming out of something or that kind of stuff or like when we write text like they don't say a lot of stuff the dialogue is kept small our script is like probably alone would break a game boy for how much text is in the game but you get the same sense of like oh like when you talk to a guy in pokemon they don't say that many words and that's the kind of restrictions we're sticking to like trying to make it feel the same but yeah at the end of the day it's like it's so much bigger that it wouldn't you know fit but that kind of idea 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 yes all in-house on c++ so there's no there's no points where you're like actually let's build this like constraint into the engine it's all no yeah yeah no point like oh no the sprites are gonna flicker when there's seven in a line or whatever yeah nice see i'd love to hear about the engine and i guess how the tech is set up for the game yeah so we got we call it propeller that's the engine it's basically like this is the core thing that runs the rendering the input the controller or the controller handling input the sound output all the like file handling it's what takes propeller we also have like a suite of tools that we use to like make the stuff we have a tool to like make the pallets 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 hit boxes 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 me know 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 awesome so i guess ronzo correctly mentioned that this is a post shovel knight engine did any of these tools exist for shovel knight or they were built for post shovel knight and mina and what else everything the only thing we're using from shovel knight is the level editor and the animation importer i mean we were basically started this engine from the ground up when we started the game and we just we want to be able to build levels and animation stuff so we didn't know when i have to write those from scratch so yeah those are still used from shovel knight but everything else is from the ground up 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 no no i I mean, we definitely hope to forever and ever use this.

15:44The Shovel Knight engine was sort of like, oh, this is a one-off. We got to just get this game out the door. Yeah, so now we're like, how do we make something that lasts a long time? 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. A really extreme parallax kicks in. is this a 3d engine technically it's like i mean these days it's like hard to write a not 3d engine right the way it actually works is it is set up like 2d planes so it's not like what you might call like an orthographic perspective it's essentially like this is flat 2d way of drawing it it is set up that way and what we do is we just we give each layer has a parallax value which is like if the camera moves at what percentage does it move with the camera so you something like that room with a lot of parallax in it what would be like basically those layers are told like this layer is so far back it should never move right and this layer is like halfway to the player's eye so it should move half as much as the camera does so it's just like yeah sliding based on where the camera is awesome and then another related question i had so obviously you're building new engine new technologies were trying to emulate stuff that was very much rooted in like technical restrictions on hardware restrictions in particular and there's an interesting line in one of the blog posts which was that under the hood mina draws textured triangles and not sprites can you tell us a little bit about i guess how you implemented the art style and managed to like make it feel authentic in a modern setting 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.

17:37And 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 is triangles so i mean we're doing that so we're essentially we do in a way still sort of set it up like an old game which is for example like in mega man the character is actually two sprites because they have a different amount of colors for the face and a different amount of colors that they want to use for the body and they want them to be like two tiles tall which is like makes them need to be two sprites so they draw a sprite for the head and they're about the 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.

18:54So it's like two boxes that we've essentially set out and those draw like two triangles per box. So it's, you know, like if we had to like work in a sprite system, it'd be like set up to do that in a way. But yeah, we're very much like drawing it in the modern way where it's we're figuring out how to turn it into triangles that have textures on them. Nice. Awesome.

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Your AI is only as good as your pipeline. estuary.dev so on to you know i've been playing a fair amount in this game really been enjoying it and i think one of the things that really stood out is there's a lot of moments where like every screen is very densely packed and there's a lot of moments where like you're trying to like nail your positioning while you're attacking while you're avoiding something the burrow mechanic is like if you're an action rpg player like you 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 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 like and when we're looking like old castlevania games they're more set up so the positioning is the important part like you have this really long whip and it's more about like am i in the right position to not get screwed in this situation and they also have that like you can duck or stand up straight right so like if someone's coming at me do i happen to 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 megaman 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 play style we do have ways like for example there's like trinket called the dodging pendulum where just some if someone's hitting you and you jump right when they hit you you'll be invulnerable for a period of time so we do have like mechanisms to make it so maybe you can like baby step your way into this style of playing the game but yeah it's more about trying to figure out something that was like a little different than what all the other games out these days 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 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 attacks on the ground or there could be attacks in the air and so we were like thinking about those three layers of combat a lot so for the beginning of the game often like you can burrow and avoid everything but as you progress there's going to be guys that start like slamming the ground and attacks come out of the ground and you have to it's like oh now i have to jump to get out of the way of attacks as opposed to burrow to get out of the way of attacks cool so trinkets and sidearms will definitely come back to because that yeah they're really interesting but you mentioned you know positioning and weapons there which i started with the whip and i had i was having so many feelings about the fact i couldn't attack diagonally and then i got the battery buster i was like oh the game has changed everything is everything is lovely i'd love to hear about i guess the weapon design but particularly you know the choice is the choice to allow like to lock certain weapons into like axis attacking again like an aesthetic sensibility one like where does that come from i mean it's the same castlevania It's the same like we want to make it positionally interesting and engaging.

26:45The 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 of another character. When we were making Shovel Knight, it's a very similar idea, which is like when we were first testing it.

27:19In 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. thing you would just kill the thing right it's like you need to walk out of the way you need to like figure out how to use your move set to take advantage of the situation so when we were designing all the weapons essentially we're coming up with like what are the strengths and weaknesses that allow you to like positionally be interesting and when you get something like the battery the buster what you got it's cool because it allows you to do diagonal which you like can't do with any other weapon but it is also like behind this you have to like hit enemies first and build up the ability to essentially do that to switch the other weapon and get the diagonal out of it and even that said it's still like a pretty limiting it's not like you fire hard on those directions and your bullets 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 cool so to come around to the trinkets and sidearms i guess first question i want to ask about this so the trinkets from like a you know navigating the open world both the trinkets and sidearms kind of allow you to ease getting access to areas like jumping over big pits is like the one of the ones that there's both trinkets and sidearms that help with that and so i think the trinkets positioning them feels like a fairly typical like metroidvania setup so like that i imagine is was not like super challenging but the sidearms intrigued me because you've got like a couple of sidearms that really give you better traversal powers, but then they're temporary and you lose them.

28:58So 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 a 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? 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 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 like over the course of the game and then we did put in tricks i don't know if you've gotten to this far but we did put in tricks so you could eventually hold two side arms or you have a 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 like save one of your sidearms there or if you die like it's yeah there's a called a sidearm saving 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 yeah that's awesome that explains a lot i was wondering why at one point my sidearm and respawn and i had no idea why that happened i guess i must have accidentally trinket the saving sidearm for the first time after like 20 hours in the game great cool yeah and then the trinkets yeah 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 what you think about i feel like the proto spark has been like a fairly discussed one already just like in terms of like changing the difficulty curve you spoke a little bit about i guess about your design of those you know like allowing people to play in ways that they might be more familiar with other games and stuff but were there any other i guess design challenges or particular things that you wanted to achieve with the the trinkets after certain like gameplay milestones 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 gonna go sell it at the pawn shop and I'll get my money's worth out of it so we initially thought we needed like a lot of stuff so there's 60 trinkets in the game because we wanted like we wanted when you went down a secret path for that path to be worth it or if you went to the shop for like there to be things to buy from the shop and then we wanted each of those items essentially to be meaningful in a way that oftentimes what we're 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 enemies if i'm not very fast of a player this helps me be faster if this if i'm you know all i want is to have more defense because i'm i just like taking hits all the time i just like i'm the kind of person that just likes getting hit and hitting the guy back as fast as i can basically we're trying to like fill the holes in the moveset like i was saying before you might be like i want a quick dodge in some way how can we give that to you 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 your 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's 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 spamming them like crazy basically like playing into like the way you can make the character yourself in a way that's like cool and fun and maybe no one else is making that character and that was challenging because the game is open and you can go any direction you want and you can do anything at any time and so you can really like break the game in a lot of ways right from the start and figuring out the right like balance of you can make this game like really easy or you know on the counter 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 now we got to move it over here then we have like 60 trinkets that are like oh crap we don't know where to put them yeah so it'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 yeah awesome yeah i think one of the things it's a bit of a tradition of asking devs what they think of the current or how much they designed for speed runs and what they think of the current record I'm excited to see what happens in this game because of the builds there are 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 particular stuff that would happen with this you've got the feet for speedrunning already so I know you've thought about this, what is the most unhinged build you've seen that's sped up the game if there's one on top of your head?

36:12I mean, there's a fishing rod sidearm that really breaks it wide open and And I don't know, like we had speedrunners in our playtests. I haven't seen the speedrunners since the game has come out that much. But in our playtests, like with our friends and family, we had a few of our speedrunner friends playing it. And every time they made a speedrun, it's like they had a different build. And it would be interesting and different. A lot of them were focused around either being able to traverse over like larger areas quicker or combat getting the most out of it. like so we have something like for example we have something called the combo capacitor 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 who doesn't know it's like 20 to 30 hours long and their speed run i think the best speed run right now is like an hour and 20 minutes it's like very big gap from going fast to playing it for reals and the feet is at four hours right that's and the feet's four hours yeah that's already a good chunk down from the feet that's awesome yeah so on to i guess a 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 it just happened it just seamlessly it was just seamlessly conveyed to me telepathically how did you approach i guess like tutorialization and like teaching people the core mechanics in the game 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 where and from the main town you branch off to all the different areas so that main intro stage is basically where we are meticulously designing every single room to teach you a different idea this room teaches you you can jump over a pit this room teaches you when you hit a wall it will like that has like a notch in it it will break and blow up this room teaches you like there's a treasure chest and you have to hit a treasure chest to get what's inside this room teaches you that like some enemies shoot projectiles at you you know on and on and on and on that example you give a 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.

39:04So you naturally go like, I'll jump going under the fence and you jump a longer gap. So it's basically like, we're forcing you to learn that just by like, you'll make the connection. Here's what I did before. I'll try that thing again. Oh, I guess I can go farther when I do that. Right. It's like just a step by step, like we're feeding you the information you need to know in order to progress. And you can't really progress until you learn that thing, or at least have done it 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 that's cool yeah well it definitely works very well and very subliminally apparently i didn't recall that but you said it i do there's a lot of uh fencing over bits 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 formula is as clearly a fair amount of like souls-like influence you've got the spark system and i guess the flasks in general but you've also got new game plus and like all these amazing post game stuff but that feels to me like probably slightly less trodden territory and like some of your influences and like probably places where you're having to i guess go a little bit more greenfield how did you approach designing like a that style of like post game for a game boy color rpg yeah i mean the concept of new game plus i think i mean original Zelda had a sort of similar concept.

40:24It 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? 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 mindset like you said new game plus carry over your equipment kind of thing is is a i think the first game maybe to be popular with that was chrono trigger or maybe invent it which is like around the era of when we're starting but definitely hadn't like picked up by any means as like a popular thing but yeah so i guess we were just thinking about combining like what would be interesting new game plus wise and what would get you that same feeling of like old zeldas where it's like going in and playing again so in ours there's actually like seven rounds of new game plus and each one changes how the game plays 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 like go to different areas and do different things and in the first new round you have all your equipment so our hope is like it's harder but you're like figuring out how to slot your equipment in different ways and the third new game plus is we actually have an item shuffler in the game so like randomizers became very popular like five or ten 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 you things that will happen like for example when you start the game there's a character who gives you your healing vials which you use throughout the whole game but if you start the game with the item shuffler you're not going to get the healing vitamins 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 going and playing through the game in different styles and different ways.

43:04And later, New Game Plus is like, you can go anywhere in the world, but level 1, the enemies are scaled to be easier than level 6. The enemies in level 6 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 1 has the weight, level 6 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 that's awesome we are coming up on time so i wanted to end i guess on a little bit of silly question which is what is your favorite trinket oh i don't even know that's a good question and this could be your favorite trinket to play with or your favorite one to have like designed and implemented either is fine oh man i gotta like look them up get into the spreadsheet this is real this is real serious the yuck club games internal trinket tier list i want to i want to see that as content 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 as a standard like jrpg but when you get hit you have like a rolling health bar so your health say you take a kill that would kill you and you have 500 health you watch it go from 500 to zero and if you can heal before it gets to zero you're actually still alive so we basically that 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 it's clutch i like really love that feeling and it becomes when you're in new game plus seven it becomes vital.

44:58I'll tell you that. That's actually, I'm really glad to ask you this now, because I've got that drink here and I read it description. I was like, oh, I don't know why I would want that. And now you're explaining where it's come from and how it works. Now I'm like, cool, that sounds great. I think there's a lot of stuff that you might initially like, I like the things I have, I'm not going to switch, or I don't really get why that's valuable. Because, you know, when you have the item shuffler and that's your first item, it's like, well, I guess now I'm going to see why this is a good drink. So it's like fun that you get to experience it and sort of like basically over time like learn why those things are cool or not well that brings us to the end david thank you so much for joining us today thanks for having me