WayForward Games with Tomm Hulett and Voldi Way

0:00WayForward is a renowned video game studio that was founded in 1990. The company has developed games for publishers such as Capcom, Konami, and Nintendo, and Nintendo, and has released their games across the last year. years. They are also the creators of the Shantae series of 2D platformers. WayForward recently developed the latest game in the storied Contra series called Operation Galuga, which is a reimagining of the original Contra from 1987. Voldy Way is the founder and CEO of WayForward, and Tom Hewlett is a director at WayForward. They join the show to talk about the history of their studio and developing Contra, Operation Galuga.

0:41Joe Nash is a developer, educator, and award-winning community builder who has worked at companies including GitHub, Twilio, Unity, and PayPal. Joe got his start in software development by creating mods and running servers for Garry's Mod, and game development remains his favorite way to experience and explore new technologies and concepts.

1:14Voldy and Tom, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining me today. Thank you. Thank you for having us. Yeah, it's good to be here. So as we mentioned in the start, you're both from WayForward Games, which embarrassingly, I didn't realize until we introduced Voldy, I guess is from your surname. It's the name inspiration there. It is. It is. Yeah. Kind of weird in retrospect, but I started on my 20th birthday, and it seemed like a good idea at the time. Awesome. Well, I think it would be good with that in mind. It'd be good to kick off with introductions for who you both are and how we got here.

1:46Voldy, would you like to start? Sure. I'm Voldy Way, the CEO and founder of WayForward. Perfect. And Tom? And I'm Tom Hewlett. I'm a director at WayForward. I've been there about 12 years now. Awesome. Wow, that's a good tenure. I always love to see game studios with long tenures. That's always a nice sign in these days and times. And we actually worked with Tom before he joined us. While he was still at Konami, we worked with him. Yeah, I produced Contra 4, which WayForward worked on before Operation Galuga on the DS. Awesome. So that actually already sets up, I guess, like a bit of a time jump.

2:21So Contra 4, was that the last Contra title before Operation Galuga? there was contra rebirth which konami did internally in japan after contra 4 then there was a hiatus and then there was contra rogue core which was more of a it came out on apple arcade and other platforms but it was more of a you know you you keep replaying it like yeah and it's not like a roguelike but it's kind of like a roguelike yeah a little bit of a departure from the the classic genre trying new things yeah absolutely well before we get into contra specifically while we're talking about way forward we seem to have a lot of guests on the show who i call prolific often but it seems always be the case you publish a lot of great games and that's your your back catalog is awesome and there's some really interesting ips on there can you tell us a bit about the studio and what kind of games you make i guess vol did you want to kick off sure so we primarily make pc and console games but we have developed actually a couple dozen mobile games and over the years we've been around for almost 35 years and during that time we've developed for you know robotics and eeg neurofeedback and location-based entertainment like cruise ships you know for both princess cruises and disney cruises we've worked with universal studios but primarily console like playstation xbox nintendo switch and pc yeah you've done a lot of the handhelds right i think i saw that shantae was originally a game boy color game is that the right the right generation cool yeah yeah we worked on super nintendo sega genesis you know console all the various consoles throughout the decades very cool so for listeners who aren't aware so i guess straight up like contra as i mentioned is reimagining of a classic what was the original contra tom of your konami background can you introduce us to contra yeah i guess the 1987 classic yeah contra was kind of the seminal run and gun established the genre in the arcade but I think it really became famous for the NES port which back in the day you know now ports kind of strive everything is identical right so no matter which platform you're on it's the same but back then there was a lot of variance based on a variety of factors but on the NES I think they were just trying to figure out since you're not feeding quarters into it right you dropped a chunk of money and now you own the game how do we give players value for that and so a lot of the But on Contra, it just turned into more stages.

4:43There's just more levels. So if you played in the arcade, you have the home version. There's more stages. And then they also gave them a chance to polish the gameplay a little more. So the NES version or the Famicom version in Japan is just quite a bit better to play. It just feels better because they had more time. So that's kind of what made Contra famous. And then, of course, it was very hard. And so there was also a code that they left in the game that would give you 30 lives, which was the Konami code. So all those things kind of together. made it like the famous game. And you could play it with a friend, which again, back then was rare.

5:14So it just had all these things going for it. So at least in my childhood, everyone played Contra. Everyone was familiar with it. And so it has this reputation. Awesome. And this wasn't the game that introduced the Konami code, right? Was it around before then? It was technically in Gradius first, but everyone used it for Contra. So it kind of, back in the day it was called the Contra code, but now I think more people have heard a nerd and be like, it's actually from Gradius. And so. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's the Konami code. I think embarrassingly, my introduction to the Konami code was actually through the Google Pixel laptop.

5:46The Google Pixel Chromebook had the Konami code built into it that made all the LEDs do something. And that was the first time I'd ever heard of it or experienced it. Yeah, there's kids toys from maybe Fisher Price. Anything video game themed, if you put in the Konami code, it does like a special thing. Like all of them. So it's pretty funny. There must be a database somewhere of like all of the Konami code implementations. Very cool. So that'll make sense. The NES port. that's really interesting just one of the things you mentioned there was you know the economics and working that out which i guess we've seen versions of that you know you mentioned working on apple arcade games so like we're kind of like what we've seen lots of iterations on game monetization obviously microtransactions are like a big one but that's just really yeah had never really thought about that jump from feeding quarters into machines into the home and what that must have meant for games developers so how many stages were there on the original if that's not a too esoteric question versus the new one i'm gonna get fact checked but i want to say it's like six and then eight okay so they expanded by two stages i want to say maybe it's seven and eight yeah there's at least one extra stage okay awesome cool so bring on to your new game oh i guess it is march this year march 2024 cool yes yes so we kind of pitched it as a as a reimagining but i know it's been you know there's lots of stuff added there was like questions early on is you You know, is this a sequel?

7:04Is it a remake? What is Operation Galuga? Vol, did you want to take this one? Well, actually, I'm going to pass this over to Tom because as the director, he is the visionary for this. So that one, I'm going to pass it to Tom. Yeah, then I'm going to ramble for a long time. Great. So at the start, Konami approached us. They didn't tell us what Operation Galuga was yet. They just said, hey, way forward, would you like to work on a new Contra game? What would that be like? And so we just got to pitch what we would like. And it was obviously a 2D gameplay game. Oh, we hadn't decided on 3D graphics yet, but it's just like 2d game here's what we would do we'd have a bunch of characters and a bunch of weapons and we'd do these overload things which is a new feature from it and what do you think and konami said hey that's all great we agree it should be 2d we're doing this reimagining of the first game and then we got kind of the download of what the game would be so what operation beluga is is bringing the classic gameplay of contra that people would want why it's beloved bringing that into 2024 which means it's not the reason konami didn't want to do like 2d pixel graphics or hand-drawn is they didn't want anyone to look at a screenshot and go oh that's a throwback i'm not in the mood for a throwback like whatever like their vision and this is maybe now more clear because we've got the silent hill 2 remake just came out we've got metal gear solid delta and things but like it was no no this is like the contra you love it's why you play contra but it's new and it's modern and it's a current game in 2024 on your sony xbox whatever so to that end they also wanted to start i mean you know you don't play contra for the story necessarily but they didn't want anyone to be confused and be like this is the 11th contra what do i need to know and then put it down so it's like no no this is the first mission this is a recreation of contra one in story like in premise let's say but there's new story there's new characters you obviously start in the jungle and you're going to move through the island and get to the weird alien gross stuff but the stage designs themselves are all new this is a brand new contra game so fans who did play that original arcade game this isn't just the nes port or something beyond it's like this is the 11th contract or whatever but it happens to be a recreation of that first storyline premise so everyone can play it and then the mechanics quality of life stuff all that stuff is like we had to find ways to make it accessible to modern players but to take this hardcore genre that's very difficult and then like make it gentle for them to play it and understand why it's cool and not be put off by you'll never beat this game like everyone should be able to find a way to beat it and be satisfied with the contra cool so oh god a bunch of things i want to talk about that so you mentioned that it's brand new stages they follow the same you know so it's the same story same ordering so like the theme of the stage is the same right mainly the one that like i think the one that always stands out to me is like the inside of the alien you get to that like it so each stage broadly speaking is like will be recognizable to players of the old one and then it's the actual levels encounters in that so yes and no so how we approached it so you got to have the waterfall you got to have the jungle like i said sure you have to have the inside of the alien yeah there's no field there's things people expect but then we also threw in new areas there's a village now the storyline konami wanted to tell was why this island why the aliens are here there's an ancient artifact that's been buried here so we have a temple so it's kind of fun taking here's these mechanics we want to hit from the original but here's this new stage that never existed so like right where's the crossover and then we also pulled in things from super contra the sequel both in the arcade and the nes so it kind of becomes this like reimagining of the eight-bit contras so we can pull in bosses from super contra we can put things out of order for example there's a big truck with spikes on the front and in the original contra that's in the snow field which i believe is stage five and now it's in our second stage because we have a motorcycle stage so we put the car in there it's something that so we tried to surprise players and then it's been out now i can spoil it like we even have a gross alien stage that's not inside the alien okay so players who are like oh okay they're doing this it's the last stage and maybe we don't go inside the alien anymore and then we go inside the alien so it's we tried to like fake people out or play with expectations a little bit very cool hey tom i'm gonna let you fact check me on a live podcast but yeah i've been saying that the operation galuga shortened is og and it's short for like the og contra the original contra then i've heard people on the team actually say wait no that's not a thing so did i just make that in my head or is that a thing okay it's the og contra i'm gonna brag a little bit i've named a lot of contra games contra 4 which we were pitching with way forward i was a producer in konami like we said we were trying to communicate this is a return to the old contra games it's like contra 1 2 3 and now our game we're not erasing anything after that wasn't the point but it was like how do we communicate to the jaded consumer base this is the true contra that you've been waiting to play since you finished contra 3 and i said let's call it contra 4 and that stuck and then when it went to Japan, where it wasn't called Contra 3, it was called Contra Spirits, I said, well, it's on the DS, let's call it Contra Dual Spirits.

12:12And that stuck. And so I was very excited with this game, because Konami was calling it Contra Galuga, and they said, what should we name it? And I said, Operation Galuga, because what Voldy just said. It's the OG Contra. That's amazing. I love that. He is a genius at naming, because, and Joe, just so you know, there were like, what, 11 Contra games before Contra 4? Something. Something like that. There were at least 10. Anyway, there were a bunch of... So, forward-forward to listeners, Tom is currently counting in the air. There we go. Seven, yeah. There were a lot. There were more than four.

12:50It was not the first time. Unfortunately, you know, it was kind of like... I mean, like Tom said, it's not a snub against the other games, but it was a very subtle way of saying this is a continuation of the original three. well you know you refer to silent hill and i guess the resident evil you make as well like there's there's been like you know gamers have been kind of trained to this with like i think call of duty does it and resident evil does it where they have games that are following the number system being released interwoven with games that aren't and they're different continuities and it's the same universe but like you know different you expect different things from them so that makes sense i think that i think that totally works so i guess one thing that would be good to go back to so you mentioned run and gun and the genre we spoke about the classic gameplay but for folks who don't know what that means what do these games play like i mean for me it's a very evocative image like it's this genre is like it is what you would see at least for me it's like what i think officer arcade games most of the time and other than like you know time crisis kind of stuff but like it was like you know it's a classic thing but can you describe it i would say a running gun has platforming and shooting lots of shooting the more bullets the better with operation glue guy a couple times we tried to get as close to a bullet hell as we could bullet hells are more space shooter things where you have free movement around a running gun is like a space shooter with gravity so you're on the ground and you're jumping but yeah and i'd say not generally it's linear not too many adventure elements or rpg type elements it's more you have your your settings and your guy and then you're like improvising with what happens in the stage so if something drops and you can grab it that's great if you miss it you've got to make do and then yeah cool does that cover it foldy how would you describe a running gun Voldy has played a lot of my running guns.

14:29Well, I always describe them as like a shooter with platforming, but much like you said, a space shooter, but with platforming. But you went into a lot more details and that's better. So there's a couple of genres that haven't stood test time or been like, you know, overtaken. First person shooters have kind of become everything in a lot of ways. And you mentioned making it accessible for a modern audience. Like what are some of the, I guess, concerns to bringing something like contra out in 2024 and like what kind of things were you looking to tweak in that accessibility front i think it's easier now than it was for contra 4 contra 4 hit before the indie boom it proceeded like megaman 9 and all that's like it was on the cusp where people were still asking like why would i play a 2d game would you just jump and shoot nowadays we've had the indie boom and all this stuff and so not just old people like us have like oh no look guys everyone loves these games but like new players are being introduced to these concepts so they're not going to see it and think oh gross that's dumb they're like oh that's like this other game i played maybe i would like this so yeah the concerns were and again this was a concern we have a way forward that voldy specifically doesn't want my games to be too hard spider source which is a contra like that we made it's an internal property voldy was on my case it was too hard he would play it tell me i can't beat level one yet you got to make it easier are you the benchmark folder no i'm kind of like more like the granny player you know because like i'm the low end i should say i'm like easy mode benchmark and then we have some people who are like the high end like if it's not tough as nails then they're gonna you know complain that you're treating them like babies yep so it's a concern we have obviously but then konami also was a great client they again they didn't want to dumb it down it wasn't like make a contra anyone can play it was everyone has to be able to play it but we also need the hardcore people to feel like it's difficult it can't be a skill ceiling a high skill ceiling yeah yeah yeah it can't be someone goes i beat my first contra and then everyone's everyone in line is like yeah but it wasn't a real contra it was like the easy one like we couldn't have that so we knew how to make the hard game that's not a problem we're making the true contra game that's the easy part it's what elements of that what can we tweak how can we make it accessible what's too far what would break it or have we not push this far enough so there's things quality of life things like you can aim in 360 degrees you're not limited to the eight directions like i mean it started on the d-pad yeah on the nes right konami really pushed for this this is something i pushed back against but then once we played it it was like oh this feels better and the reason i think it feels better is you have a wide screen now old screens were basically square eight directions covers the square sure when you widen it eight directions covers your half of the screen and then there's all these enemies you can't really get a beat on and so having 360 lets you hit them we also added a life bar which if you look at nintendo once they added features that would like if you die too many times in this mario game we play the level for you right once they implemented that they went back to making hard levels so having a life bar we can make a hard contra level we can make a bullet hell boss because you have a little bit of leeway but then with those features we let players turn them off you can go back to one hit kill like the classic contra which i guess we didn't say out loud, but old Contra games, you die in one hit.

17:46So you can set Operation Galuga to do that. You can set it to do eight-way aim if you want. That's fine. And then on the other end of the spectrum, we added perks, which you can unlock. It's not microtransactions. You get coins in the game. You don't buy them. That's important to note. So you can purchase the perks you want, and then you can use those to tweak your game. So if you want to start every game with a spread shot, that's a perk. If you don't want to lose weapons when you die, if you think that's unfair, that's a perk. We established the contra rules and you're breaking them as you want.

18:21The important part about both of those spectrums, making it harder or making it easier, is you are not penalized or rewarded for doing anything I just said. Nothing in the game is saying intrinsically you played it wrong. At the end of the game there's a result screen. You can post it on Twitter and brag about it. Look, I didn't use perks. and I used one hit kill. I'm the best Contra player ever, right? But the game is not giving you any motivation to do either direction. And that's kind of how we did it to make it accessible. And then we just made the hard Contra game. And it seems to work out.

18:54That's awesome. No, that's a really interesting approach. And I guess like, you know, on the result screen, there's no like score that's like, oh, you use so-and-so perks. You're on like a 0.25 multiplier, whatever, which is like some other stuff I've seen around that. People were assuming that at first, but I don't know if anyone's data might. yet but yeah that data's there but you're not being rewarded or penalized you're actually being rewarded for things like playing with multiple players or how many weapons you picked up besides just killing enemies how many overloads you used things like that cool speaking about multiple players this has four player co-op on the challenge mode right it has four player co-op on arcade arcade mode cool yeah so they're on the main story mode we can cover that really quick there's story mode which is all the story that's two players just because it lets us tell a story that feels like your two guys are the ones doing it it has unlockable characters you can swap them then we have arcade mode which is all the same stages all the characters that you've unlocked but up to four players and then the bosses also have a little extra attack in arcade mode and then there is challenge mode which is focus challenges like a little 30 second to two minute skill check that it'll help you unlock more coins that you can get more perks faster if you want awesome okay so i have a bunch of technical and direction questions but before we get to that i guess you know we've kind of you know you mentioned that konami approached you and you mentioned that you know there's been other games built in the meantime but i guess one of the questions i wanted to ask was why revisit the og contra like now i guess it's nearly 40 years but i was there something particular about the timing that made you know you or make konami want to build this game at the then speaking for konami so take it with a grain of salt but again based on and this isn't any secret info this is me as someone who worked on a konami game yeah that we're talking about looking at the rest of their games recently i really think konami feels like they're going hey we're here to prove that we're back and we're going to take the best most like the legacy entry everyone's imagining when they think of this brand and we're going to bring it back out in a relevant way and And that's why we have Contra OG.

20:54Everyone thinks of the jungle and going inside the gross alien. So our game has that. Silent Hill 2 is Silent Hill 2. And then Metal Gear Solid Delta is 3, which is, these are all like the big, someone was like, what's the best version of this game? These are the ones they would say, right? So I think that's the motivation, but that's just me speculating. Yeah, that makes sense. Valdi, how do you, you know, as we mentioned, WayForward covers such a breadth of types of games, but also IPs. How does a reimagining fit into what you do and how do you think about it commercially? Well, reimaginings actually kind of started falling into our lap.

21:30I think it was A Boy and His Blob was maybe one of the first and then DuckTales Remastered and BloodRayne. And we ended up doing a lot of them, even smaller ones like Lost Vikings and stuff. But I think what happened was we've been around so long that games that are, you know, the classic games, I'm doing air quotes for those were ones that we remember when they were in classic. We're old enough to remember them. And so it kind of became a natural fit for us because we had actually worked on old school, you know, 8-bit, 16-bit games. So it wasn't originally part of our strategy. It just kind of like got pushed on us, but we embraced it, of course, because we remember when those games were new.

22:13Right. And actually with the River City Girls and we just launched our Double Dragon, DLC and you know I remember playing Double Dragon in the arcade when it first came out so yeah I wouldn't say it was part of our master plan strategy you know it was really just something that came our way and we embraced it just a perk of being a game studio that's to the test of time I guess you get to revisit the things you've built and played back in the day so I guess on to yeah some more like getting into the weeds of Operation Collegas so you know you mentioned earlier that the game does the 3D graphics and you had avoided pixel art for reasons how did you come to decide the style and the visual identity of the reimagining with that in mind like what was your approach to deciding you know the general graphical direction it was a lot of back and forth with konami really i mean once they said no pixel retro look it kind of set us in the right i don't know neighborhood i was just dialing in what style here looks right and the end we had some more japanese inspired styles people have seen them on constant part things that have been posted on social media but konami really wanted to go with like a comic book look i think to a japanese audience the american comic book look is like american right and contra is this buff soldier brand i think it just fits so it was kind of like well we know this style will work for americans and then for japanese it might feel like it was appropriate for contra and then just dialing in i mean we also recently worked on bloodstained ritual of the night which is similarly 3d art but completely 2d gameplay so we had some artists who had worked on that and done some really compelling backgrounds and so we just besides just the characters we set about you know doing like deep backgrounds what i wanted from a design standpoint is i didn't just want it to be running completely left to right we have a little bit of spline work so that the levels kind of zig and zag and you wind through the jungle so you're going around the corners the big like or right It's really cool.

24:07You can have a nice like, oh, there's a log in the way. And so we kind of turned around it or it's still 2D gameplay, but it's a little bit progressed. You feel like you're in this space. I thought it was really nice because the original I know had that faux 3D shooting gallery thing. So I kind of took that as like that was an intentional nod to what they were playing with in the original. I don't know if that was the direction of it. I did imagine I was like, how far can we push it? Can we have a moment that's kind of turned? We have some boss intros that turn to that perspective. obviously with gameplay with you're shooting bullets that travel in a straight line there's a little bit of a we had to find the sweet spot that was acceptable but in level editor you could you know unhook the camera and we had some compelling views of like oh this is really neat or let me go look down at the player but yeah and then we replaced those stages that you're talking about with vehicle stages which is where we totally we go crazy with the angle swaps you're zipping through a base so you do a 90 degree turn into a service corridor and stuff like that and then there's one later with a train that you kind of are zigging and zagging in z space with the train so yeah there's things like that we can take this genre that started off like the 8-bit interpretation of an action movie and then just do like here's some cool action movie stuff right that you couldn't do back then it was all abstracted and now like look there's a train it's actually moving around in 3d you're actually interacting with it and then a couple bosses the camera turns face head on and you're driving towards the camera and shooting behind you and cool stuff.

25:30One other note on the art side is we tend to shy away from anything super photorealistic, not because it wouldn't be fun to do, but you know, you hit that uncanny valley and all of a sudden it takes a lot more time, a lot more effort, a lot more money. Like you need a much bigger budget to get that photorealistic look. So from the start, we said, look, we hope you can, you're okay with doing the stylized because we don't even want to attempt to enter the uncanny valley. And And fortunately, they were happy with that. So part of the decision was to not go too realistic, try to make it a very stylized.

26:05And part of that is I carried through, I think it was something Matt Pozon put together for Contra 4, but it was like to communicate WayForward's intended vision, like Contra is colorful. And it had like screenshots of the NES, like this is a blue and this is purple. Like this isn't a gritty brown thing, right? We're not talking CPU washover, right? Right. Contra 4 was contemporary with Gears of War. obviously totally different games but like people can remember what that era looked like and so i did the same thing where it's like like contra is colorful and kind of was like yeah yeah we know it's like okay cool then we're all we're all on the same page perfect i think this is a bias i've i've nursed since like my early days of playing console games but like i'm glad we've kind of put the boot into the photorealism thing and we're back to like no style let people have an artistic style and let it be wacky and let it be out there or let it be just like completely absurd and we're not on the ever escalating arms war of photorealism now.

27:01I think that's good for the industry. I think it's good for players. I'm glad to hear that's kind of the reasoning behind it. So I guess moving on to how the game is built, it's a Unity game. So I don't really know if these are coherent thoughts, but when, and I guess it's kind of answer by the fact you built games in between, but like what did you have from the original in terms of assets? and like do you have a playable copy of the original what were you able to draw on as you came about you know designing this well you can't use any code or anything of course konami's assets are limited because it's very old that if anyone's played the cowabunga collection the turtles game they dredged up a lot of sort of stuff on there in the special features so something like this it's really just the ideas and the concepts and so yeah playing a lot of the games obviously the the Konami's released the anniversary collections for Contra and their other games.

27:55So we had, you know, all that for reference. Cool. But I have access to all those games anyway. It's more for the younger staff where it's like, oh, you haven't played a Contra and you're programming this boss. Here's the collection. Right. Like it's a great resource for them. But for us, I mean, I was playing Contra games as research for Spider-Sores, which I mentioned. And then we worked on Bloodstained, which I'd been playing some similar games in the Konami library, I think I'm allowed to say. so I've been in Konami Zone for years now so it was great having Contra as kind of the button at the end of that where it's like oh I've been working on these Konami similar games and now I'm working on Contra again this is fun but it's just bringing all that knowledge and obviously having worked on Contra 4 there's things myself and then just way forward as an entity have been like oh it would be cool if we had tried that or here was an idea we didn't get to so being able to bring that in is cool but yeah I guess reference wise as an old guy i just make all the young people play my retro games and then but i get to hear like someone who worked on we're on spider shows bloodstain and contra and then he was just playing different games that he was catching up on this summer and he was like i just played symphony of the night this game's really good it was like yeah surprise yeah this famous genre defining game is is pretty good well actually matt boson our creative director he used to like force everyone to play if they had well first of all I think before that it was like well if you haven't played it you have no place as a designer here but then he got over that but then he started making everyone play Symphony of the Night and Super Metroid I think were like the two that were his like okay this is part of our DNA you have to play these games and then I got hired because I was pre-seasoned already I didn't need to play those I was already good to go.

29:43If you mention them in an interview you've heard it here first so because you want to join way forward those are the games to quote so the reason i asked that i guess is i think a lot of the reaction i've seen to like fans have obviously had to go go through youtube and see what like you know old school fans were saying about it there's a couple of like reactions that really stand out to me i mean one we've kind of already touched on which is like i was not surprised but like basically everyone i saw was like oh it's really cool that this explains the story i never had any idea what was happening in the first one and now i know why it's happening which is great but the other one i saw was people constantly commenting on like the feel of the player control and you know both it being accurate to their memory of like i guess the power fantasy that had played in the first game but you know also being super slick and super smooth and you know you mentioned the 3d direction already but i guess i i wanted to know like what goes into like if anything goes into it at all replicating the feel of you know those old games whether whether that's played on joystick, whether that's played on NES, in a modern engine like Unity?

30:44How much work are you having to put into the player controller to get it to feel like where you want it to be, if that makes sense? We spent a lot of time on this because we pride ourselves on really digging deep and fully grokking the games that we're remaking. And we'd like to say we play them the way you remember them, not the way they were, because some of the games like A Boy in His Blob was actually kind of terrible. There were a lot of like really poor design decisions and we kind of fix those but people play it and it's like oh this is just like the original yeah because it's how you remember the original same with ducktales remastered same thing but contrast since there were so many people and and it was actually i won't say like polarized but some people were like no you have to stick to the hardcore it has to be like eight angles it has to be all that like and then other people were more like just is that because you guys are sadists and you hate your players and then we did a lot of focus testing We had a lot of external opinions, a lot of people who on both camps, you know, people who were hardcore original Contra fans and then also people who had never played any Contra games before.

31:47So I guess I'm setting the stage for it. There was a lot of thought and effort that went into that. And then take it away, Tom. when i worked at konami on contra 4 i don't remember if i'm if i'm folding time here but my memory of it voldy is uh me and simon my co-producer traveled the way forward and we said hey we want you to work on contra and then they got excited and then we came back to the office and in a day or two they'd sent us this demo with the sprites from contra 3 and with the perfect contra jump and we're like this is the jump from contra and so that is in my mind as the gold standard of what we need to achieve so i carry it with me like a burden so the first step is getting the jump the contra jump in og is not as you remember it it's literally the same jump same ascent same descent same angle same arc fascinating it's and part of that jump is it's not a variable jump like a megaman or a mario where you can release it and jump shorter contra has a fixed high jump to me that's fundamental the reason they did it back in the day is you can aim in the air and so to make it accessible to any player not just an expert you need to take away something they're worried about to let them aim in midair because they're going to be worried about aiming so you eliminate some of the jump freedom i realized that on a different game that was a demo that never came out but i carried that back to contra og so the one thing that i wouldn't budge on is the jump can't be variable that's going to be too complicated for novice players to do especially if we have 360 aim that would be bonkers but then everything else like boldy said we know how to make it feel like you remember the old one we probably know why it was like that we probably have a compelling argument to keep it that way but should we and so that was tested in various ways and like i've already talked about we usually gave you the option like if something if it's something like aiming we're like okay this is better we're gonna make the game around this but you're you have your freedom to do this it's fine it's in the game but then when it came to things that were new contra 4 we added a grapple that's back in this game but this game also adds dashes double jumps which are just jumps in midair that's easy yeah there's slides as well right i Slides, slapping bullets away, things like that.

34:10Then it's, okay, we have this game that we made feel authentic, and now we have a new thing that didn't exist. How do we make that feel authentic? Because you obviously can't have a character that feels disjointed. It all has to feel natural. So things like that were a lot of interesting thought. And like, I think this will feel right. And then we would test it, like Boldy said. And some of the people were like, this is great. And some of the people are like, this doesn't feel right. And it's like, okay, well, we know it can feel right. So do we tweak the speed? Do we tweak the range? What are we tweaking?

34:42And there's all sorts of little cool... It feels like you're excavating an old school game when you do it. Like, there's a character named Stanley who's new for this game. Konami wanted this guy to be like a rival to build a lance. And he's in a mech suit, like an Iron Man mech suit. And so he can hover. That makes sense. but then you know how does can you disable the hover can you hover and cut it off can you how does it work with your with a double jump can you double jump into a hover what is that do you fall straight down do you fall like all these choices about hovering and what i stumbled on is okay you can cancel hovering you can resume it so it's not like princess peach where she just falls she could like you could do like a staggered hover i'm so glad you said that i had peach in my had the whole time sorry but originally he would just drop and it felt weird like you couldn't dodge bullets right you cut it off and you'd fall right into the bullet and so what i what we added was a little hop so if you're hovering and then you cut the hover he kind of does a little mini jump but then you could resume the hover so now as stanley you can you can i'm motioning this for people who don't have video which is all of you but you can be hovering in a straight line you can cut the hover and do a short hop over a bullet and then keep hovering in a straight line That's very cool.

35:59So, which also extends your hover because it's set to a set time, but when you cut it, pauses it. So that was like, I found this elite min-max stat strat. I'm like, this is great. And it's in a game that I'm making that isn't out yet. I found it. So just stuff like that is like a nice Eureka moment where you're like, no, this is perfect. This is something you'd find on a games done quick. Someone would be explaining this to you from an old game from 30 years ago. It's like, this has to go in. This is how it works. So yeah, stuff like that. We look for those moments in these new mechanics. And just one more thing to add to that.

36:35I think matching the original feel was probably the easiest part. Coming up with something new for like modern sensibilities that, you know, modern gamers might feel more comfortable or more like what they're used to. That took more time. But then a lot of it came down to since we had both in the game, what is the default? And I remember we went back and forth for a long time on that is 360 aiming the default or is that an option like, you know, like a perk. So anyway, but that's where focus testing was really helpful. It's like, oh, well, people prefer this. So we're going to make that one the default and then go in the eight way aiming as like the option.

37:15Yep. Yep. And for a while, 360 was the option. And I think Voldy thinks I was I was done fighting by then. I was actually only playing 360 at that point. but Voldy probably thinks I was a holdout. Our creative director, Matt Bozan, he was hardcore in the 8-way aimer at camp. Actually, yeah, I did think that you were in that camp. No, once it had to go in to design the game, I had to play that way. Because I couldn't otherwise a boss would be broken. If I was designing for 8 and you could use 360, the boss would be easy. So I was doing it, but then I was like, this is more fun. And then once Konami mandated that I was like, yeah, okay.

37:52But Voldy made me remember another thing so on the end of my rant the other thing for bringing old school gameplay in is i insist on our rectangular hitboxes i know capsules are more modern and you can make them work like rectangles but i'm a jerk and i use rectangles that's perfect it's funny actually i saw a youtube short of a tutorial explaining why we use capsules the other day so yeah very good point that brought up another question that i completely or bosses we mentioned bosses a bunch again kind of bosses are another uh another situation where like the level i'm interested in what has changed because you've used a lot of the i guess the appearance of the bosses also been updated and brought into 3d what was your approach to the bosses for a boss i generally try to think of so generally with this operation we didn't try to recreate old boss patterns there's things we used and obviously people can play and see familiar things but that wasn't the goal it wasn't like let's remake this boss and then add stuff so i approach a boss okay he looks cool what type of boss is it is it a back wall boss where i'm shooting at the head or something or is it is it a character that's moving around and then what are cool things it looks like he could do and then once i design that it's like oh now he exists and he's doing cool things because he's a cool guy then i look for the holes in that i'm like oh if i stand still i can totally school this guy and then okay well he needs like a fan of bullets or something right so then i'm filling in holes so it's like i'm i take the prototype boss and then i run the fight in my head okay now i'm a smart player what am i doing to to exploit this guy's weaknesses and then filling in those holes but then obviously you're leaving room you're figuring out the strats like okay well i want you to be able to stand here for this long or the weak point for this attack is this and then i'll make an attack with a different weak point so you're constantly moving i guess my goal is that you're going to have multiple strategies.

39:44You're going to have to adjust your strategy. What is he doing? How do I react? And then we just test that and then adjust speed and whatever. And then once in a while, a player will find an exploit that we missed and it's like, okay, well, it's probably late in the game. It's like, what can we do that's quick that mitigates it a little bit? Yeah. Stuff like that. Awesome. Cool. I know we're running a little bit short on time. Squeezing two last questions. Earlier, you mentioned games done quick and the minute you explained how you're layering on the mechanics and the results screen, obviously my mind went straight towards I bet the speedrunning community is having a blast with that.

40:19Is that happening? Are you seeing speedruns? Are you seeing GDQ submissions? Are you seeing deranged people trying to make it as hard as possible situations? I've seen speedruns. There's a Japanese player named Game Commander who really rinsed it. He was doing four player speedruns online at one point. I'm getting it down to speeds I didn't think were possible. Wait, it was him playing all four or having three friends? No, no, no, no. He had people join him and they all. He's mastered the game to a ridiculous degree. I haven't seen it on the GDQ schedule that just came out, which makes me sad.

40:48So to that point, we're never designing games just for speedrunners. because that right it's a very niche but i think for the whole time i've been a way forward i've been conscious of speed running when i'm making a game so we are thinking about how will speed runners play it and sort of eliminating unfair randomness like well this can't be that random because speed runners have to be able to play it interesting and then every once in a while you'll come up with a not a bug would fix but like uh this is an unintended result of this level design and we will evaluate like okay is it bad or is it like speed run cool yeah and so we do leave things in that we find like oh speed runners are gonna love this like that goes in the game right there's like a secret skip that you'll sit there be like i can't wait till they find this kind of thing right yeah yeah that happens more often than you'd think because you know i've many times use it as rationalization for leaving a bug in the game even in we released uh retro realms games recently they had like a halloween and ash versus evil dead game there was this one situation that was so it was just so weird it was completely reproducible but so weird so only someone really trying was gonna find it and we're like you know so we're like let's just leave it in speed runners will love it but it was also us just being lazy and not wanting to i would say i would say like the deadline was approaching it's like uh we're not gonna mess with that right but yeah that happens a lot it's good for like balancing a boss i think you know a game like contra there's so many weapons and there's so many different axes of balance that we did a lot more work than i've done on a project before balancing it but you'd still come across like oh if they have these exact weapons and these exact formation and they get here they can just nuke this boss and at that point it's like yeah but that'll look sick on a speed run right like if they can hold on to those weapons and do whatever other tricks they're going to do to get here and they can do it like contract just earned a charity a million dollars that's great so well plus sometimes it's just funny like i remember the what was the backdash in risky's revenge shante risky's revenge or something where you could make it to a level faster by just backdashing like all the way through the level and it looks totally silly but it's like i mean it's hilarious on a speed run but you know it works i guess we could have fixed that but you know it's more fun to leave it in yeah absolutely very cool and then yeah i guess like last question about way forward is yeah i it's just generally as a business like how big is the studio how do you organize just your teams on games i imagine you're working on multiple games concurrently is that you say it's correct yeah yeah we have around 120 employees full-time i mean we have some freelancers you know we pull in but 120 full-time staff and we tend to work on five or six projects at a time and that is by design actually and we learned that strategy back in the 90s from a client who who recommended it because when you work on like one or two games and one of them gets delayed or you know or canceled which happens for random reasons you know out of our control then you're kind of screwed right so having five or six going on at once helps even out cash flow and it also makes it not as painful if something happens to to one of the projects so i mean on the flip side it means we probably won't have those you know huge like you know spider-man games or you know or quadruple a 400 million right exactly exactly but you know i think it is probably one of the reasons we've survived for almost 35 years now knock on wood you know so yeah that's that oh and then to answer your teams we don't have dedicated teams it's not like oh this is team a this is team b we do have some shared disciplines.

44:30It started out with just audio, but then we added on a UI shared discipline because, you know, so much of the user interface elements, even though they look different, they're the same elements across projects. We added a VFX team. Actually, I think VFX was even before UI. We have a, well, more recently, we kind of carved out some of animation because it used to be all the animators were embedded in the team. Now the programmers are still embedded in the team. back in the day we had an engine team when we were developing our own tech but ever since we've been using unity and unreal for everything we haven't had a engine team right so all the programmers are basically dedicated to a project but there are some shared disciplines that come in yeah that's really cool awesome it reminds me of um i don't know if you're familiar with strange scaffold but they're working across multiple games i can't remember his name which is terrible of me strange scaffold is a very interesting studio but they do very small they're an indie studio but they do very really quite small games but they also work on an absurd number at once and i believe for them it's mostly a cash flow thing as well so it's really really interesting yeah i'm aware we're out of time so tom foldy thank you so much this has been super interesting um and yeah operation galuga was out in march highly recommend checking out it looks like a blast thank you for joining me today yeah thank you so much for having us

45:55Thank you.