Retronauts - 575: The Making of The Making of Karateka / Double Dragon Gaiden

Episode Date: November 27, 2023

Double main event! Stuart chats with Chris Kohler about The Making of Karateka, then speaks to Raymond Teo about the recent Double Dragon Gaiden. Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

This episode of Retronauts is brought to you by Uncommon Goods. This week in Retronauts, Pastmasters and Goldmasters. Hello, I welcome to Retronauts. I am Stuart Gip, and I am completely terrifyingly, hauntedly alone at the moment. It's kind of weird having no one to banter with but myself. And I suppose you, the fine listeners of the Retronauts podcast, but I won't waste your time, not today, because this is a bit different this episode. It's a couple of interviews that I did regarding a couple of,

I guess what you could term, beast-up games, hence the thematic connection. I spoke to Chris Kola at Digital Eclipse about the making of Carateco which is the first in their series of sort of interactive documentaries that they're making the next one should be revealed by the time this episode drops or if not then and shortly after

so I'm looking forward to that I also spoke to a Raymond Tio who was the founder of the development team that worked on Double Dragon Guidon which is a really rather enjoyable beat-up game in fact Now, Double Dragon Guiden is, I'm not going to lie it, so we're a little bit behind, I guess,

topicality with that one, because it came out a while ago, but I'm hoping that this interview might prompt a few more people to take sort of interest in it, because it is good, and I haven't seen a huge amount of talk about it, which is a shame because it does deliver, I think. Fans should definitely get the head around it, because there's more there going on than you'd expect, and it's good fun.

But you'll hear that at the interview, anyway. So for now I'll stop this preamble and we'll just head straight into the first of the interviews. of Digital Eclipse. Did I pronounce that correctly, all the way through? Yes, everything. Chris Kohler, and then Digital Eclipse. I think I said Kohler a bit too much like Coca-Cola, and now I'm worried that there's going to be some legal problems, but no, it should be okay. And why we're here? Because Digital Eclipse recently put out something that I would do not think it's exaggeration to describe as groundbreaking, you know, in terms of, well, in terms of how retro gaming is

presented in digital media because the way retrogaming is presented and how compilations are done and how re-releases are done has long been a thorn in my side

and my foot and my head, eyes, anything, all the unmentionables, thorns just, it's gross, you don't even want to... Thorns everywhere. Yeah,

everywhere that one could imagine a thorn and know where one would pleasantly want one. But the point is, that's all irrelevant because we're talking about the making of

Karateka. I'm going to pronounce it Karateka the whole way through, even if that's wrong. Even though I'm reasonably sure that's wrong, I'm still going to do it because I'm just been, you know, when you grew up saying it one way? Oh, yeah. You can never change it. No, exactly.

Like calling Ryu Ryu, I'm not even sure. We all say, you know, Karatica at the Digital Clips Office, then it turns out everybody at Broderbun, Jordan included, said Karateka. So if you said Karateka, you should just keep saying that. I should. Okay, that's good. Yeah, because, right. Now, I want to get into this

because the Making of Carataka is the first installment in, actually, why didn't you tell us what it is? Because I think that would be better coming from... Do you want me to do it? Okay, sure. Yeah. Yeah. Making of Krodica is an entry in a new genre of video game that we are attempting to pioneer initial clips called The Interactive Documentary.

It is very much like if you played Atari 50, the anniversary celebration. The idea is we are bringing back classic games with the respect that they deserve and the context that you need to really understand, not just have a game ROM in front of you running on a modern platform, but to understand how that game was made, who made it, when was it made, and why was it made? So you can fully appreciate the history around it.

And so this is the first in what we're calling the Goldmaster series, which is going to be a series of interactive documentaries, bringing back classic, you know, essentially focusing on, some interesting story of video game history, whether that story is the story of one game, the story of one person, the story of like a genre of games, the story of, you know, one publisher or one developer, or anything in between. And so making of Carotica is not, it is a re-release of the classic 1984 game Carotica by Jordan Mechner, who was the creator of Prince of Persia. It's also, it really is a documentary story about the making.

of Karatica with the games, you know, they're in there, they're fully playable, but we're not saying like we're just selling you these games again. We're selling you a story that even if you have never heard of Karatica, even if you have no nostalgic attachment to it and you don't necessarily want to, you know, play it again, this is a story that should be interesting to you and might even make you a fan of Karatica if you weren't before. Yeah, absolutely. Because now, I mean, coming from my personal experience, I have never played. caratica um until now you know um it and it's it's it's i knew it existed because i've read jordan i mean i know about old games a bit i've read jordan mechna's prince of persia diary in which it's

mentioned many many times of course but i hadn't really sat down and played it because it wasn't i didn't have a system i had it on or i didn't have it on the system uh on the spectrum which would have been i guess the only place i could play it but um and even if you had played the spectrum version, you wouldn't really understand the appeal of Carotica. The spectrum version of most games is really just a flex Emily. It's just like someone wrote the idea of the game

down on a napkin and I said, here you go to town. Now, though, coming from Atari 50, which is, of course, it's that sort of philosophy applied to the entire history of Atari. I've got to ask, where is the gem for doing this for a single game?

It was the very beginning of this. I'm curious. Was it around before? Atari 50 or is it something that came up as a result of Atari 50? Yeah. Oh, it was around before I joined the company in 2020. When they revived the Digital Eclipse brand back in 2015, you know, Mike Micah, our president, I mean, he, you know, he knew Jordan well, and they really, he was a big Carotica fan from back in the day, and actually so was Tom Russo, our director of business development. They were just huge, it's like, it's like a formational game for them.

And they knew that it hadn't been brought back, and they knew that Jordan personally owned the rights to Carotica. So it was something we could negotiate directly with him. There didn't need to be a publisher involved in any way. And so essentially, they identified Carotica as a great opportunity to go in and do an independent, you know, it was essentially like supposed to be a smaller independent release done in between these big projects that Digital Eclipse was getting because Digital Clips was doing, of course, you know, big games for Capcom and, you know, Blizzard

and Konami. Right, right, right. And so basically this was a sort of a downtime project where, you know, we could work on this, you know, between projects. And so when I came in in 2020, there was already a version of it that had been done by, you know, mostly by people that had since left. Right. And it had the interactive documentary kind of vibe to it, but it was more like, if you imagine, like, kind of rudimentary kind of like non, you know, edited, like film clips that were then interspersed with interactive elements. but it was really kind of told in a linear way. And there might be something to that.

There might be something we can do later on down the line with that concept. But, like, basically it was that. And then there was more of a traditional retro collection kind of vibe applied to it where you could play the versions. There was a museum. You know, a lot of the content was sort of organized by category rather than in a narrative way. And this project was basically handed to me. And I decided to go all the way back to the beginning. You know, it's like read through all of Jordan's journals and, you know, redo the research and look at all of the stuff that, you know, that people had looked at. And it kind of occurred to me that like, oh, there's just such a wealth of material here because Jordan Mechner, when he was a teenager, he was a teenage college student at Yale University when he made Carotica. And he, in a very kind of like, in a way that nobody else really did at that time, you know, game developers or otherwise, he kept a daily journal and he wrote down every.

everything he did that day. And you could see all of his emotions and frustrations with not only Carotica, but the other games that he was working on. And not only that, but I mean, everything was dated. And so, you know, kind of realizing, oh, my gosh, like, we can take this journal and we can take these scanned documents because, of course, he did all his design documents on paper, saved every single one of them, donated them all to the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, New York.

So those are all preserved. Yeah. We had scans of all of them. And then we also had Jordan's floppy disks, which Jason Scott and Tony Diaz, people from the Internet Archive had 10 years ago now had dumped and preserved all of the data on those disks. And we had access to all of that. So between the early stuff on Jordan's floppy disks and the design documents and the journals, you know, it's like we could tell a chronological narrative story. And so really taking inspiration from, you know, the way that museums set up a narrative sort of existence. We tried to, you know, put together a, you know, kind of totally redesign the way the user interacted with the items and built out brand new timelines and stuff like that that would incorporate everything and tell it in a sort of a narrative way.

Again, kind of taking inspiration from the, you know, sometimes you go to a museum and there's like a pair of headphones and you put it on and you're listening to like an audio exhibit. I thought, gee, I've got my friend Kirk Hamilton who does this amazing podcast called Strong Song. in which he, you know, he's a musician and a podcast host, really talented, multi-instrumentalist and music theory guy, and he breaks down the music theory behind pop songs. And Karatica's soundtrack was so strong. That was, that was created by Jordan's father, Francis Mechner, who was a classical pianist. He brought in light motif, the idea of...

Yeah, it's heavily featured in the videos as well, which I thought was quite poignant, honestly. I thought it was quite fascinating, but sorry to interrupt. Yeah, no, no, no, not at all. So we had this, yes, we had this extensive, you know, video of a home video, basically, of Jordan and Francis Mechner sitting at the piano in his father's apartment in New York City, where Francis Mechner had composed the music and Jordan had sat next to him with an Apple II, like programming, you know, the music that he

composed. And, you know, Francis Mechner as a, as a classical pianist, really brought a sense of, well, we got to have light motif for these characters because there's not much we can really do with the Apple II. So if we're restricted to these very short melodies, then we do as a light motif approach and that that helps you with your storytelling you know and it's like the music was really composed to accentuate the storytelling of the game in a way that really nobody else was doing in 1984 um and so uh we had all this so kirk did a 15 minute audio podcast which i think he i mean he did it back in like 2021 or maybe maybe even like early 2020 i mean you know we were i was working really hard on this in 2020 and it had to keep

getting shelved because because we just had this parade of major projects coming in that we had to work on. And there was even a point we were going to bring it back at the beginning of 2022. And we had meetings and stuff like that for like, oh, how are we going to get Carotica to the finish line? And then we signed Atari 50th anniversary celebration. That had to get done in 2022 for the 50th anniversary year. So shelved again.

But then, you know, fortunately, we were able to. with all the learnings that we had from Atari 50. Because Atari 50, basically, and so kind of getting back to the question that you asked, with Atari 50, since we had already been doing all this work on the interactive documentary, the making of Karatica,

and, you know, sketching out like how that was all going to work as a documentary first type production with the interactive timelines and stuff like that. We were able to pitch to Atari, and Atari was looking for something. Atari needed something that wasn't a collection because they already had,

had collections of their getting they already had Atari flashback yeah it's already existed they needed something that was actually different and so you know if that's why they came to us and we were able to pitch look you know we're going to do this documentary story about the history of Atari and the games are going to be integrated into that and so again just getting to the point where when you press start on the Atari 50 title screen it doesn't jump you into a menu that says games and museum and options and stuff like that it literally you press start and it goes into the timelines and it's very clear to the user like this is the key user experience here you get to start going through and looking at these timelines and

you know it's a gamified sort of thing where it's like here's your progress you got this node you got that node um but that was a it was a risk but it was really important to us to you know really finally try to do this this project that we've been thinking about for a long time of like you know centering that museum that timeline that historical experience front and center. But, you know, and the thing that I was really, you know, passionate about was just doing it as a chronological narrative, you know, to take the player through the story. Then we were able to take a lot of those learnings that we had through doing Atari 50, finishing Atari 50, because, you know, it's one thing to start something and it's quite another

to take it all the way to the finish line. And you learn a lot doing that. And then we were able to visit that back onto all those learnings back onto, you know, the gold message. series, with Carotica being the first game for that. And so that's kind of, it all kind of took place simultaneously. It was neither before, Atari 50 was neither before nor really after truly making Carotica. By the time you hear this ad, Cyber Monday will be part way over. And that means you're running low on time to figure out, what the heck you're buying for those last few weirdos on your holiday shopping list?

You know, the one whose personal interests are shrouded in mystery, or the ones who respond to your every gift idea fishing expedition with a mumble and a half-hearted shrug. The good news is that even with time running out on the holiday clock, you still have time to find a perfect gift for even the most cryptic recipient on your shopping list, thanks to uncommon goods. Their enormous array of offerings runs the gamut from classic to eclectic, just like your friends and family.

My guy who doesn't seem to have any worldly interests outside of his afternoon bubble tea, he's getting a DIY boba kit from Uncommon Goods. The cousin-in-law, whose daily hydration routine involves switching from coffee to wine sometime around mid-afternoon, I'm going to save her a step by giving her a packet of Merlo-infused coffee beans. Shopping at Uncommon Goods doesn't just benefit the folks on your holiday list. It also supports artists and small businesses, many of whom make their products by hand. That's why you can be sure that everything you order from Uncommon Goods will be as high quality as they are unique,

whether you're buying apparel, jewelry, food, tools for the office, or even virtual lessons and other experiences. And for every purchase you make it on Common Goods, $1 goes toward a nonprofit partner of your choice. They've donated more than $2.5 million to date. To get 15% off your next gift, go to UncommonGoods.com slash Retro. That's uncommon goods.com slash R-E-T-R-O for 15% off. Don't miss out on this limited-time offer. Uncommon Goods.

We're all out of the ordinary. It seems to me like the sort of natural, I'm not going to say conclusion because that implies that you're done. But it seems to be like going from, say, I'm going to go right back here to like the Mega Man Legacy Collection, where sort of the main drawer is all this high-res artwork that's never been seen in this high-res

before. You've never been able to look at it in this detail not even the art books of that detailed. And moving from that to, I mean there's a lot in between, but I feel like the very, like the catalyst, or not the catalyst, I don't know if it was in development at the same time or what, but the museum

in the Aladdin and Lion King collection feels like a formative version of this in a way because it is more like showing you it's more linear it's more of a kind of each page of it

is more exploratory and more explanatory I mean of course there's not as much material to work with for whatever reason but it does feel like with the making of

Karateka it's brought that to the forefront over as you said over the actual I hate to say over the games but it just centers the whole experience

you know what I'm trying to say it's very hard to get this well I mean it does it does teach it does enter the games and I think that's important especially when like taking a you know really a realistic assessment of the games themselves and saying does you know can these games in you know 23 can they stand on their own and sell this product and I think that it's like look there

have been Atari game collections since the Super Nintendo you know like the Super Nintendo had like you know emulated collections of Atari games and so and and at that time I think about a lot of people. Because again, at that point, those Atari games were barely 20 years old at that point. Some of them weren't deep. You know, we have games from the, you know, if you had an Atari collection in the 90s, you know, Atari was still making 2,600 games in the 90s, you know? And so that meant that there were lots of people who were just waiting for the chance to play those games again. But today, with Atari 50, I think you're going out there to an audience of people who may maybe they've never played any of these games. And so you can't rely on their pre-built-in nostalgic attachment to them. But the thing is, it's still worth playing them. And so a thing that I, I mean, what I tend to find is that I think that the behavior of a lot of people, when they get a classic collection of like a hundred Atari games, something like that, is they jump in and they play these games for like a few minutes each.

And so a lot of the question is, how do we harness that behavior and turn it into something, that feels like a larger connected experience because like when I get like an Atari collection and I jump it's like you know you jump in you play some asteroids like oh right yep that's asteroids then it's like oh let me look for another game oh food fight that's interesting I'll play that okay yeah interesting and then after an hour of just like messing around with these games you can start to feel like maybe this maybe this product is not for me like I'm not finding anything that's grabbing me and so if we can take those games de-center that from the experience,

put the focus on the journey, the historical story that you're going through as if you were watching a film documentary and then use the games as artifacts. Well, then it's okay if you are maybe only playing that game for a little bit because it's all adding up to something from Pong on one end to Tempest 2000 on the other end. And so the fact that Atari 50 then came out

and people kind of got what we were kind of trying to get at with it is very good because it gave us the confidence to say, well, we can do this with Carotica, which is literally an interactive documentary about a single game. And it's like, Carotica, you don't even play the retail version of Carotica itself until the end of the third of five timelines. So you spend, if you're going through this linearly, which again, you don't have to do it. It's a video game, you know, you can go wherever you want. And in that sense, it is just like a museum because, you know, a museum can lay things out in a narrative way and they can use artifacts to tell a story, but they can't force you to look at things in a

linear way, right? And you need to have that control and you need to have that control when you're sat in front of a TV and you've got a video game controller in your hands, you must have that, you must feel that controller you're going to get frustrating. But, and what we found, though, is that people do want to go through in a linear way at their own pace, but like they have no issue. It's like by the time they finally get to the game this is all this was all built around they've got so much more context and it's

you know, they're so much more interested in emotionally kind of invested that when they finally do play it, it connects with them so much more. And I've got to ask because I will come back to the sort of the whole philosophy behind compilations because that's what

interests to me the most how old games are presented. But talking more about the making of Carateca specifically. Could you tell us about Caratega remastered and the other new projects, the other new games that are in here, or the new game that's in here, I should say? The ones that we did or the ones that are unreleased or just everything?

Oh, no. Well, everything, really. But I'm thinking mostly of Caratega, the remastered Carreta and Death Balance 2000. So all told, there's 14 different games in this package, even though we're saying it's really about one game. And so we were able to, you know, get permission from our friends at Atari. And we were really appreciative of this, that they had no problem with us publishing the clones of asteroids that Jordan made when he was 16, asteroid blaster and star blaster.

And we were able to, then we published four different prototypes of death bounce, which was a shooting game, an arcade-style shooter for the Apple 2. and that was what Jordan was doing before Carotica. That got rejected also. That's never been published before. There's multiple prototypes of Carotica leading up to, you know, the retail versions. There's three retail versions, Apple 2, which was Jordan's original, and the Commodore 64 and Atari 800 versions, which are what was, those were made at Broder Bun kind of under the supervision of Jordan. So those are considered to be like the good versions as well.

And then we've also got Carotica remastered in DeathBounce Rebound. rebounded. Carotica remastered is a new version of Carotica, done by Digital Eclipse's president, Mike Micah. It's smoother and faster and has upgraded graphics and sounds, but still retains, you know, the core of what made the original fun. And then also there's a commentary track that Mike put throughout that in which he discusses the, you know, essentially the behind the scenes of how he made it. He discusses, you know, his research into Jordan's original game. And so that kind of like accentuates the narrative and the story that we're trying to tell as well

and then finally you have DeathBounce rebounded which was done by Jeremy Williams and Dave Reese who are two amazing game designers that we have here at Digital Eclipse. Jeremy did Vector Sector in Atari 50 the anniversary celebration That was so cool. Yes and Dave worked on

haunted houses and Sword Quest's Airworld and so yes and so they actually did Death Bounce Rebounded that was actually basically finished before we started on Atari 50. And so that was the first game that they did in the Eclipse engine, in our eternal engine. And so they have made this wonderful twin stick shooter that, again,

is based on Jordan's original. They looked at the journals and they looked at the original game and they tried to, you know, take inspiration and direction, you know, essentially from young Jordan, from his journal. journal entries. So when they integrated new enemies into death bounce rebounded, they were doing it based on ideas that Jordan had. You know, and obviously it's not, you know, it's, it's not a one to one sort of thing based on his design documents, but it's, you know, it's essentially as grounded in the history as they could make it. And death bounce rebounded, it sort of serves as the, it's like

Jordan was never able to publish death bounce. And now we have this, this great version of it that really shows like that his original ideas were very interesting and it's almost from like a parallel universe in which death bounce did get published and it was a big hit and then there were all kinds of sequels to death bounce and then you know this is you know and then this is the 2023 version you know there was probably like a really ill-considered move into like you know uh polygonal 3d for death bounce on the end 64 and then they pulled back and then there was probably like xbox arcade Death Bounce, you know. I'm thinking about DeathBounce.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I say some surprise, but I think this is growing up from the old, like, microcomputer perspective again. But when I played DeathBounce, the original, or one of the originals in, in the making of Caratega, I was pretty, like, I was pretty much, I know, to be honest, this is pretty sick. I quite like this. Like, this is quite fun.

So I'm a little bit surprised it wasn't published, but then again, I'm not too, I wasn't too familiar with the Apple II sort of scene or standard. Oh, so Death Bounce was really good. And it was a perfectly serviceable game. I mean, I saw that the correspondence, obviously, it goes into this, which I read as part of the compilation as part of the collection. But it still fascinates me because it seems like such a fun game that it's a surprise that it didn't get picked up. Yeah. Well, that's the thing.

It's like, you know, well, that's interesting because I think that Jordan really, really wanted to get this published by Broder Bund in particular. He really had a love for what Broder Bund was doing. and he seemed to be hyper-focused on getting something published through Broderbund in particular. And so he could have, I think, taken death-bounce to some other publisher and gotten it published. And quite frankly, Broderbund, they could have published it too. It was fine. It was more than fine. It was very good.

But it just shows you that at Broderbund, at the time, they were very worried about becoming stagnant. And they, I think, saw, and I think this really, really is down to a lot of the influence of Gene Portwood and Lauren Elliott, you know, you know, Gene Portwood in particular, the ex-Disney animator that they had hired who, like, he wasn't a game designer, you know, he wasn't a programmer. But he was like, he had, you know, was a wonderful animator. And he was really pushing to, like, we have to make video games that have this human element that have people, that have stories. because, you know, I think he was looking and he was not really seeing a whole lot of that. And, like, he was really feeling like video games were a storytelling and animation and narrative medium. And so, you know, he was, and he influenced games like Choplifter by Dan Gorlin, you know, to get those, the characters and the story elements.

And then that ends up, you know, kind of influencing Jordan as well. And then Gene Portwood, as you know, and Lauren Elliott end up then coming, you know, working on Carotica when it comes into Rotterbund. And essentially it's like, you know, Death Bounce was a good game, but it was a good game from six months ago. And Broderbun saw the writing on the wall as like the games that are going to be popular now and a year from now are going to be more story and character and narrative based. And so that was, you know, again, they could have just taken it and published it. But instead, I think they, well, first they tried to, they really tried hard to get Jordan to do essentially a new version that, incorporated the character in the animation. And then, you know, it just, it just didn't work out.

Like, Jordan was essentially chasing something that had already been a success. And what he really needed to do was he needed to try to figure out what was going to be a success a year or two years into the future. And so that's why you make that point, you know, in the documentary that, like, the rejection of death bounce was really what inspired the creation of Carotica. Yeah. I mean, I thought that was, I mean, the whole thing is fascinating to me. but I really did enjoy that stretch because it's so rare that you get the insight into the sort of that much

the sort of rejection process or the public attempting to get out of publisher. All of the correspondence just I thought was fascinating how kind of nurturing it was because they obviously saw something there. Something I want to ask, I want to ask something that's sort of a bit broader

about this to the clips, if that's okay. Out of curiosity, really, I'm just interested in how sort of development works there. And obviously, you can be a vague about this because I'm not going to try and sneak any details out of you. But I'm curious at sort of one time, how many projects are generally sort of being worked on? Um, if you can answer that in vague terms, if necessary.

Sometimes a lot, you know, sometimes again, it's like, well, there's, I mean, basically, I mean, there's, there's multiple, um, loose sort of teams of people. And obviously those teams will shift around, um, you know, based on what kind of thing is going on. Uh, like right now without revealing anything, I know that there's, you know, there's like one, two, three, four. and I hope I'm not forgetting anybody. You know, there's like four, like, projects that are in, like, active development. And so, um, there might even be five. So, yeah, it's like there's, there's usually a lot kind of going on and there's a lot of crossover and stuff like that. I mean, this editorial director, I'm across all of the, you know, historical research and

writing and stuff like that. And I have a, you know, I have a team now. It's me and Dan Amric, um, who, you know, former, uh, former Ubisoft guy, former game pro editor from back in the day. And so, you know, between the two of us, it's like, you know, we're on everything, you know, from whatever the editorial needs of that project are. And then, of course, you know, across, you know, working with the publishing team on all of our comms and stuff like that because, again, we're like, we're a small, we're a small developer.

You know, so I'm like, right, you know, I'm writing the email newsletters and things like that as well. So it's a, it's a very unique position to be in because, but yeah, basically it's like, you know, at any time there's there's multiple things going on um now i think this is sort of a short answer but do remind me because my mind has gone blank is there anything currently announced that we know about i don't think there is this there because i i can't think of anything off top of my head no i mean the other thing i should mention is uh wizardry uh proving ground yes of course i knew there was something the wizardry remake yeah so it's a full 3d remake of the first game in the wizardry series uh it's available now in early access on

Steam and Gog.com. And again, it is early access. So, I mean, you know, go in there are expecting there's going to be bugs, but yeah. I knew that it was something. I feel so foolish now. That's like built over the Apple II version, isn't it? Like, that's crazy.

That's insane. So it's, right. So basically like, you know, again, like really adopting the, you know, making sure we're, you know, adopting the digital eclipse ethos, even when, even when it's something where it's a remake, you know, know of a classic game like there's no like there's no editorial component uh to this project at at this time like it's entirely possible that like you know later on down the line you know we can add stuff like that we would love to add stuff like that if it becomes possible um it must be it must be a

harder game to research than many of the others and this has not been available for a long long time right like uh yeah i'm taking away in english we you know we have a general sense of of the story and you know it would be something we would really like to do but you know at this at this time the project is, you know, it is a straightforward 3D remake. But the point that I want to get it is, even though it's a 3D remake, again, it's being approached with that, that commitment to the historical accuracy. And so essentially the way that they started was they took the source code, which is written in Pascal, and they ported it to Unreal Engine.

So it is, it's a remake, but it's literally, it's a port. It is literally a port of the original code. So making sure that. Everything under the hood is working the exact same way. But, you know, also, and then, of course, you can bring up the way the Apple II version would have rendered on the screen as well as an option. And so... So good. Yeah, yeah.

And so everything is just being done with that, with that level of commitment. I see, I'm kind of fanboying now, but it just reminds it because I'm laughing because I'm just, I'm not incredulous, but I'm just kind of in awe of how crazy that is to port Pascal to Unreal. Like, that seems crazy. Surely, has that been done before? It seems like it hasn't. If somebody's done that before, I'd love to hear about it. But it just makes me think back to the Blizzard collection where I remember saying, in fact, I think I said it on Retronauts pre-release.

My pipe dream would be that they put the SNES, sorry, the Mega Drive levels into the sort of the SNES controls, into the SNES engine. There's no way they would do that. It's too much work. And then it comes out and what do you know? And of course, then my pipe dream is that Lost Flikings 2 is going to be in it, but it looks like it's not. Oh, now it is. Okay. Right, right, right.

That was a crazy month for me. I know. There were a lot of things that, yeah, that you said or that you wrote about, and it's like, it's funny because you just have this, like, gift of prophecy where you'll say something. It's like, I know that it's actually coming. Yeah. The retronauts kind of, I don't know if it's a curse, but we have a habit of doing a subject and then at the end lamenting that it's finished now or there's not anymore or that there's

not any sort of follow up to this. And then after we sort of log off and go on to, Twitter, it's been announced. Immediately. When it happened, probably like 20 or more times. So I'm hoping that we'll do a guitar in my episode at some point, fingers crossed. Yeah. Yeah.

But, okay, so I've got to ask some questions. I'm reasonably sure you can't answer, but I'm going to ask them anyway. And we can cut them if it's just like the blood. But, okay, the first thing, coming through Making of Kerateka, as fantastic as it is, and it is fantastic, my mind, obviously, when it goes to Prince of Persia, because it's, you know, the thing after it. Now, I'm assuming that that's an unbelievable amount of rep tape, and probably not on the cards, but I've got to ask, like, is there any hope for the making of Prince of Persia?

Because that would be peak. That would be peak. I mean, we would love to do it. Yeah, yeah. Because I think about that, and I think about, like, the idea of getting, like, the Apple II version, getting, like, the SNAS version, even in there. And if a mega CD, I mean, there's so many versions of that game. People look at Carotica and it's like, well, what other game could you possibly do this for? It's like, what other game is as well documented as Carotica was? And the answer is none of them except for Prince of Persia, Persia 2, and then like the Last Express.

And basically it's like, you know, it's just because Jordan kept up that journal the whole entire. entire time and, you know, and has all the, you know, the strong has everything. So it's like, yeah, I mean, you're absolutely right that it represents a greater challenge and it may never happen, but I mean, I can certainly say like we would absolutely love to do that. I think, I guess I'll ask as sort of a pipe dream thing again, is there anything in particular you personally would absolutely love to do with as part of this goldmasters? well okay um yeah sure i mean i'm assuming that shigarum yamoto is listening to the podcast right now so please return my calls um i i've been calling every day and uh you just hang up i i i'd love to talk about doing this with super mario brothers you know what now that you mentioned i think i asked you this last time and you said that i apologize for yeah i mean it's the the the um the the answer has not changed well i mean nintendo's in touch with their history i mean we've got that remake of mario versus donkey Kong coming out.

Like, you know, so here's the thing. GBA 7 out of 10, wherever's stuff. Even if Nintendo does not call me personally, I would hope that, you know, and not just for Nintendo, but for everybody, I would hope that us getting stuff like the Making of Carotica out there and the reception that it's got, people are saying this is great, you know, this is a really great way to present gaming history.

I want to see more of this. We'll inspire people, other developers, other publishers, when they are going back to the well, when they're looking at bringing out, you know, releasing legacy games that they think about maybe doing it in this way and think that, you know, there's actually, we can actually show that there is demand, you know, for something like this.

Well, I mean, there's a new 2D Prince of Persia coming out. Get some eyes on the history, I don't know, just say. Yeah, I mean, I think it's wonderful that, you know, that a new Prince of Persia is coming out. People are very excited about it. I mean, yeah. Do you know if, is Jordan still involved in Prince of Persia or is it just more of a sort of consultancy sort of, or just sort of a, in name only sort of thing? Well, he, I mean, he originally moved to France because he was going to do a Prince of Persia game with Ubisoft that ended up getting canceled.

Oh, right, right. And then he's not working on this version. But, you know, it would essentially be, you know, yeah, I mean, it would be up to Ubisoft, basically, and up to him if they wanted to, like, involve. hey minute. Yeah. Sorry, I'm asking too many Prince of Persia questions. You know, again, it's a natural thing to bring up, and all I can say is, you know, it would be wonderful.

So, again, I'm sure you can't tell me what they are, but do you have more Goldmaster's in development at the moment? Yep. Cool. So it should be, the Goldmaster series number two should be out this year. Oh, hell yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So is there any inclination of when we're going to find what that is?

You know what? I mean, basically, like, the behind the scenes is we're still trying to figure out, like, what is the best, you know, way to announce what it is we're doing, yeah. Right now on Retronauts, give me the scoop. Oh, yeah, exactly.

The best way to do it, I'm for sure. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's not going to happen, is it? Okay. Um, yeah, yeah, I tried. I tried. It's the cancelled Savage Dragon game for the Super Nintendo. No, it's not. There was, there was an attempt. I'll tell you what I want to see what I want to see the most, well, this is, well, this sort of ties in with something I think. you were talking about on Twitter the other day, actually,

the history of gaming is not just good games. It's not just the classics. And I would love to see something like a claim, like Bart versus the goddamn Space Munes, you know? One of the most messiest games ever. And I love it, and it fascinates me. And I would love to know what was going on with that and all that stuff, and those LJN games and those, you know.

So a gold master, because I know that, I think it was in, on the subject of limited run putting up plumbers don't wear ties is this big lavish kind of edition, which is fantastic. But I'd love to see a Goldmasters on something that wasn't so well received, you know, or something with a complex story behind it as to why maybe it turned out the way it did. I mean, I think stuff like Rise of the Robots, you know, one of the most disliked games of all time.

I would buy that day one if that was what the hell was going online in the scenes for that one. But, I mean, what do you think about sort of gaming history as it as pertains to maybe the lesser games, so to speak. Right. Well, I think that the, so if all we're doing is we're looking at, like, what games are, you know, extremely popular and, you know, what, and therefore could sort of carry a release by themselves as the stars of the show, then people are just going to gravitate towards games that were reviewed well at the time, you know, that are, or the franchise is

still really, you know, really well known. But if we're looking at things from the perspective of the interactive documentary, that changes the calculus because then you can bring back bad games. You know, you can bring back games that were poorly reviewed because the experience that you are offering to the player can actually be a good, fulfilling, fun experience because you are offering them the interactive story of how that game got that way in the first place, right? So it's like, that's ultimately the benefit here is that the star of the show is the documentary, is the story. And so it really does, it allows us to bring things back. And even you can see little bits of this with like Atari 50 because like Club Drive for the Atari Jaguar is in there. I mean, that was a game that was very poorly reviewed even at the time and has not aged well, but as an early, very, very early. polygonal, you know, racing game with a first, you know,

the first person perspective, but a behind the car kind of perspective, it's like, it's really interesting to jump in and mess around with it and play it because we're not, it's, with the expectation is not that we're selling you this game and you're going to have a certain kind of fun with it. The expectation is that it's in there, you know, to show the history of Atari. And it's, and it becomes fun to mess around with it and see how shanky it is, you know. when the expectations are set appropriately. I think that goes back to what we've said at the beginning, really.

It brings us full circle very, very conveniently, actually. It makes me look like a genius. When we've had retro compilations, and I'm not calling Making of Carotechre a retro compilation, because that's a small part of it, of the experience. But say, like, I think back to say the Megadrive collections or sort of the Genesis collections that Sega bring out seemingly every generation now, with all the same games every time,

And you get 50 or so games in there with absolutely nothing, nothing in the way of historical context. You can't even look at the box art. So you'll boot something up and you'll play it for a few minutes like you say. And then with no context, you'll die. You'll not think it's fair. You won't really know what you're doing. Right.

And you just drop it. And, of course, to bring it back around, what you've done there with club drive even is by giving it the context of, you know, the problematic sort of system that it was on. everything about it it doesn't matter if you don't want to play it else. It's just it's part of this thing. You're walking

around with your headphones on and you're being told why this thing matters. And then if you want to, you can interact with it. And that's fantastic and I wish that all compilations had that. I mean, with something like the Cowabunga Collection, of course, that's another

pipe dream collection of games there where the addition of sort of annotated art, content You know, trailer commercials even, just puts everything into some kind of perspective. It's not on the same level, but it's clear that that effort is there in everything you're putting out. Yeah, I mean, as you, if you look at, you know, previous collections, as you, I think you've kind of referred to, it's like you can see us, you know, getting closer and closer to the interactive documentary form, you know, doing what we can in the space that were provided in those products. And so, you know, with Blizzard Arcade Collection, it was like, you know, there's, if you, there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a,

Blizzard history section, which has photographs, but then it's not just a bunch of photographs out of order. The photographs are in chronological order as best we could. And then if you read all the captions through the photographs, there's a narrative being told there, right? And it's really trying to, you know, and we're trying to put down, like, not just like chronological bits of trivia, but like trying to have a beginning middle end type narrative, you know, that that kind of shows, you know, who are our main characters, what are their struggles, you know, when do they, when do they fail? When do they succeed? What is the lesson you can take from all of this? You know, so you kind of see that there. With Kaabunga collection, you know, we weren't able to do the sort of narrative history. We were able to reproduce the design documents. And it turns out that there were like, literally thousands of pages of them. And so because we are crazy, we were like, well, we're just going to put all of them in there, aren't we? And we're going to, we're going to, we're going to, going to actually localize all of them. So you have the floating English text or whatever language you want over the documents

themselves so you can just sit there for hours and just read how these games were designed. And it works for turtles because that is an example of something where everything is baked in already. Everybody loves Ninja Turtles. These games were incredibly well received. These games sold millions and millions of copies. Like there were some of the best-selling games of the era. you know, and the franchise itself is more popular now than it ever has been.

So it's the perfect, you know, people are going to rip that game off the shelves. You don't have to like convince them to play these games. And so, but again, you know, the more you look at things, the closer and closer you're seeing us get, you know, we always want to, we always want to try something new. What is the new thing we're trying, you know, in this game? Actually, one of the things that I loved in Calabunga Collection was the, you know, we did the interactive strategy guide. Oh, that was so cool, yeah. Thank you.

And that was something that I would love to bring back at some point because I think we really kind of nailed it as far as like this, that was a really cool feature that people enjoyed. So I hope that, you know, maybe there'll be something in the future where we can bring that back. The general turtles vibes from that whole package was just great. I mean, it was, you know, we were blessed with that and with Shedd's revenge around the similar sort of time. It was a wonderful time for turtles. Now, I think that brings me to a point of sort of naturally winding up. So I'm very grateful for you for your time. And thank you.

I'm finding out what the next game in the series is following Making of CarriTech is now my newest goal in my life. This is now my new obsession. And you know what? The only one can find out is when he gets announced. So hurry up and announce it, please. I'm pretty sure I'm not going to be able to get it out of you any other way. So I'll keep my ears to the ground and absolutely fascinating about what this could be because, I mean, Karateka, like a formative game, classic game for sure, wouldn't say it was a household name, though, for this generation especially.

So it's a very interesting one to have started with. And of course, when I heard it, I was like, oh, okay, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. That's it. That's why you know, again, you know, I've been on retronaut since, I think, 2006, you know, and one of the things that I think, you know, especially the early versions, you know, the earliest, you know, retronauts is that it was very sort of a very console-centric and very America-centric, as, you know, that, of course, just sort of grew out of like, you know, who was hosting it at the time. And the thing is, and, you know, what I think people have come to realize is the problem with a lot of those, you know, early, early, early, podcasts and early books about video games, things like that is that the sort of narrative got entrenched that, you know, the story of video games is first there was Atari, right? And then Atari crashed, and then for two years, nothing happened that are of any note whatsoever. And then

Nintendo came riding in on a white horse in 1985 and saved video games. Well, as listeners now have had tediously beaten into them by me. Yes. That isn't the case for us in the UK and Europe. It's not the case anywhere but America, and it's not the case for computers. And so Carotica is one of those stories that doesn't get told very often because it came out in 1984. And like, 1984, but video games were dead. What are you talking about? And it's not true.

And the thing is, if you don't tell these stories, then they get forgotten. And the, you know, history kind of gets written by the winners, even though Carotica, was a it sold very well when it came out and made jordan a whole bunch of money um and uh it was it was extremely influential like it is not in any way um uh you know an under an overstatement rather to say that carotica like inspired a generation of game designers and that's something that we'll get into when we talk to guys like tom hall the co-founder of id software we talked to john tobias the co-creative mortal combat about how influential carotica specifically was on them to get them in and then how influential it was on the products that they would make later.

And so we have to make sure these stories get told because they will get forgotten. And it's like, yeah, you're right. Like, a lot of people hadn't heard of Carotica, and that's bad. Like, they should know about this game. I think that, and I'm not going to get extensively into it, but I think that retro gaming, particularly when it comes to say, the sort of online forums and YouTube is extremely limited in how it's presented.

So, yes, I strongly agree. I mean, the popularity of sort of certain channels and let's plays which exclusively focus on U.S. and Japanese games and openly mock European or UK games whenever they are sort of showcased. Fascinates me to a degree because it's this whole thing of like, well, I mean, I played this one as a kid. I'm pretty sure it wasn't the Stockholm syndrome that made me like it. Because I wouldn't play it if it sucked.

But stuff just gets dismissed out of hand, and it bombs me out. So, yeah, I think what I'm saying is that the next game in the series needs to be a manic minor. So I'd like, yeah, if you can make that happen, you'll have to track down the developer who's a known reckless, so good luck with that. But no, again, thank you very much. I'm really looking forward to the next one and whatever else is coming from Dish's the Clips, because you know I'm an avowed fanboy, and I will gush over everything. You should. You will like the next one. You will absolutely like the next one.

I'm so hyped. We'll not have to wait too long to play it either, so just give us a little bit. Error the acrobat is coming. Okay. But no, thank you again, Chris. I'm sure we'll talk soon again. All right. Yes.

Yeah, thanks, too. Definitely. But thank you for coming on. I'm really grateful. And all the best with whatever you're working on right now. Thank you. Cheers. Thank you.

And now for the second part of our episode, I'm going to be speaking to the founder of Secret Base, the development team of Double Dragon Guide and Writer the Dragons. Would you like to introduce yourself to the Retronauts listeners? Hi, everyone. I'm Raymond from Secret Base. And I'm the founder of Secret Base. I am the guy that does the design work, the artwork, production staff. All that except the programming. So hopefully I can answer some interesting questions today. That's great. Yeah, I mean, it's nice to have you and have you here. I've played the game for, I think, a couple of weeks-ish now prior to this.

I've been enjoying myself a good deal. And I've got some questions I want to ask about it. But I think the best place to start would be just kind of, I guess the real obvious question is, this is an arc system works, is that right? They're the current, like, owners of Double Dragon. So I'd like to know how this came about or sort of how you got your hands on this in the first place, if you can tell me. Well, this start of the whole thing happens a while back. So in 2014, I released a Bid Am Up.

So this was a parody zombie Bidem Up that I released on Steam, you know. And our system was at the time was looking at maybe publishing indie titles, you know, So they reached out to me and we discussed, but that didn't pan out because I was already working with another publisher and so on. But we had a good chat. A couple of years later, when I'm looking at making another new game, at this point I look at it again and I realize that they have actually acquired the Double Dragon IP, and in fact they just released Double Dragon 4.

So Double Dragon Form took the game in a very classic, the approach was very much an extension of the classic titles on-mass, especially. So I thought that was interesting, and maybe, you know, since they have just done that, maybe they will be interested to try putting the game on the different directions. So I try to get in touch again and pitch my idea for how I will, would handle the IP, but of course it's not like, I give them a call and then like we are on board, right? So it took some convincing, you know, especially for a small developer like myself.

So we shared the game and then I think it took quite a few months or close to a year before they finally gave us the go ahead. So I think that was quite interesting in the sense that they would give indie developer a chance to do something like this. Yeah. So sorry, did you? Did you produce like a sort of a prototype or like a demo or was it just a design document kind of thing? I can't quite remember the sequence now. But there was definitely at some point a high-level document about how the game would work. And then I also made a mock-up video.

So at that point, I already showcased like, you know, the general art direction. And I believe even then the tech team mechanic, that was the, that is. one of the highlight for the game. It's already something that we have put in as early as that, you know. Yeah, yeah. And the previous beat-up, that was Streets of Red, is that, is that right? Yes. Yeah, yeah.

I was looking, doing sort of research prior to this, and I saw, if I pronounced this wrong, I apologize, but Toby's vertical adventure. And I was at this kind of moment of just like, oh, wow, because I haven't thought about that one for a long time because it was one of the, earlier Steam indie games that I played, but I did enjoy that as well, so that was nice. Yeah, a long time ago, long, long time ago. It must have been over a decade, but I remember, I remember because it was,

this almost sounds backhanded, but it's not supposed to. It was almost at a time when a game that looked like a sort of 16-bitish game was still of huge novelty, or it was still very fresh. And I'm not saying it's not still good, because I love pixel games, but there are a lot more of them now than they were then, obviously. So I just thought I'd mention that because it's still a good game,

Doby's Vertical Adventure. So, yeah. Now, I should ask, because the beat-em-up sort of genre or belt scroll or whatever you want to call it, because it's gone through sort of a semi-renaissance that's lasted quite a while now, but it's kind of, you had things like Scott Pelgram

and then Streets of Rage 4 or much like way after that, and even more recently, teenage Ninja Turtles came back so it was how do you feel like Double Dragon kind of sort of fit into that? Did you take any sort of inspiration from any of the more contemporary games or

was it all drawn from from the original series? I wouldn't see put it this way. When I started pitching that's when a lot of the high level ideas were formed right? Yeah. This new wave

of what you call or the Bidam up Renaissance has not yet started. No, no, okay. So I didn't know that River City Girls 1 was coming out. Oh, wow, okay. So that was quite a while back. You know, so it was only as I work along. And in fact, like, a lot of the things already pretty much nailed out

that I start to see all these news and new games coming out. Yeah. So as a fan, you know, like that's great. As a developer, it's very hard for me to shift gear and the inspiration, you know, from that point onwards. So that's that. And about the inspiration for the game, how much do I look at these new games

compared to the classic titles? I believe that was the question, right? Yeah, yeah. Because, I mean, from my perspective, there is stuff here that draws all the way back to, like, the coin-ops, to the arcade game, Double Dragon, but there is an infusion of sort of more modern gaming

and modern sort of, I don't, it's not a term I like using because some people immediately are drawn away from, but the sort of rogue lighty stuff, which I don't think personally is especially roguelighty. It's more just in the tradition of arcade, but this is not, you know, I'm not going to sit here and give you all my opinions here. It's a good thing for me because like, as a recent example, between stages, when you sort of level up your character, when you unlock new perks for the characters, that you then spend your sort of cash on. Was that something that was in place sort of early on, or did that come around

later? I'm just kind of curious. I had the idea pretty early on. It's a matter of how we would go around doing it. But knowing that I want the players to have some upgrades that they can purchase, that's, like I say, very early on, a lot of these designs were already in the pitch that I propose.

Yeah. So to share a little bit about what you mentioned just now, like the roadlight thing, so I agree with you. And this is something that I try to highlight when we talk about the topic, is that for me, like this is a bid them up first and foremost. Yeah. With a tin of roadlight elements that sort of help the replayability. And in fact, the way I approach the roadlight elements is not that I try to make these, the date cell of Double Dragon or anything like that. It was more of like, hey, let's look at the roadlight mechanics.

What are some of the things that can help us? And from very early on, even in my previous game, the parody Bidemab Streets of Rade that I mentioned. So even then, the mechanic I was already looking at, you know, like Bidemab is an arcade game. And when you were at the arcade, actually the number of tokens or credits depending on where you are

that you use to revive like how much money you had that day is pretty much how much continues you have for the game right? So this is a sense of tension playing the game and then like oh I really don't want to die because if I do then I have to play more and so that's a bit of that and then like I was very much looking at

using Root-like to see how I can utilize or push that feeling even more in a way that you're no longer using real money, but in-game currency. But it votes the same emotions, you see. Yeah, what I liked personally, a lot, was when the game was originally sort of trailed, I thought that looks good, but I was worried that it would be like Scott Pilgrim, which is a game I like, don't get me wrong, but I'm not a fan of the thing where you spend money and your character just get to. better. And then when you go back and replay the game, your character is just better. That's, I don't know, I'm not a fan of that. And in this game, it didn't do that. It was, it was that you could spend your money on sort of

tips and advice that you wanted, or new characters to play as. Or you could use it in your, in game, in your run. But it wasn't that you were just making the character permanently stronger. It was still your skill, ultimately, that was getting you through the game, which, which is great, because it means in theory you could come to this game on your first run and you could clear it. I don't expect it would happen but it's not an easy game,

but it could happen. And that to me is all important. So that's something I enjoyed about this game, especially is that it's doing something that does complement the genre with those elements. And the sort of the token system where you can either sort of use,

you know, use your money to continue or turn it in by unlock new things. It's like it's a place, he has choice. You know, it's not a matter of you will not be able to do this unless you unless you lose. You know what I mean?

That's something I like a lot. Another thing I liked was the sort of special meter system and how you're juggling that with your tag team. Could you tell us about that, please? Or how that sort of came about and how that's implemented. What about it? Do you want me to share? Well, I'm just, it's interesting

because I've not seen anything like, specifically like that before and the way that it's tied to your healing and all also to your tagging out, but you can't always do it. There's a nice sort of juggle there. You're very, it's quite rare that you don't have special, but when you don't have it is always when you really need it. It creates a nice kind of bonus.

It creates a nice kind of, what's the word, sort of risk, reward. Because if you miss, if you whiff a special attack, then you can and put yourself in big trouble. But what it sort of encourage you to do, of course, is throw yourself into the fray because of, you know, when you're taking down more than one, an enemy, three or more enemies, you're getting health back, or you're getting money if you have full health at that time. So I'm just curious where that came from, if that was just a

completely, it's something I can recall seeing before. For a start, again, you know, like when I previously worked on Fris of Raid, some of this mechanic, you know, were already in their early stage. So that was great because I get to release a game and I tried a version and then we do playtest, and then when it got released, players give us more feedback. So that was already brewing in the background before this even started. And I do always like what you mention, right, the balancing between the risk and reward. And that is in many different parts of my games. So when it comes to the special, one of the things that get thrown in this time around

it's actually the tech team mechanic. So I think what makes it interesting is also because like, so I was looking at the detecting mechanic and how I should do this, right? And the obvious thing to do is, hey, let's look at tech team fighters. So games like Dragon Ball Fighter Z, Marvel versus Capcom, and there's already a lot of interesting mechanic over there that I know can work in a bit of settings. So we tried doing that.

And then for a long time, the problem was how do we make it work with the special move? You could have made it separate where the tagging is the tagging and the special move is the special move. But I knew pretty early on that I want them to use the same system and you sort of have to balance between it. But it took quite some tries. we actually did quite a few iterations. I think we played quite some time with this mechanic until we finally get one that we feel like that really makes the player decides

or rather have to think about, do I want to use my special move or do I want to keep it so that I can tag and protect myself? Or do I want to use my special move and then tag my body out to continue the combo? And I think that eventually clicks well, that was another thing about how the move actually, when you use the

special move, the frequency of how much you can use the special move. We started the game with a lot of that. So at first you can do it almost endlessly. There is no bar management. We tried that. And then eventually we tried one where you have to, every time you use it, you have to wait for maybe five seconds or or make it really hard for you to earn getting the move back. So we tried various extreme, but eventually we realized that, you know, having the move,

having a move is actually more fun for the players because the action can continue. You don't have to lose your momentum and it actually pushes the players to try harder and experiment different things. Yeah. it's yeah i i found with um what was something i enjoyed was the fact that the the tagging can be used as really sort of effective defense as well in the if you're about to sort of if you're caught in a combo for example you can tag out and break the combo but then it puts you at the cost of not being able to immediately sort of retaliate which i which i quite liked um i found it was it was one

of those games where you can survive a long time even if you aren't yet necessarily good. But it's a matter of getting to the end, obviously. Now, that's a much sort of a much sort of taller order. Now, it did make me wonder with the way that the game sort of adds segments to the stages depending on which order you play them in, how challenging is to test that sort of a system? Because it seems like there's a lot of permutations of different levels there. Yeah, like testing them is always a challenge. So, because you have to, you have to go through different routes and you have to play the different routes. You have to play them with different characters, you know, and these are the things that

is that's going to make the player happy. You know, they're going to enjoy having the different routes. They are going to enjoy going through the different routes with different characters. But for us, from the testing perspective, then that multiplies the amount of works that needs to go into it, right? So luckily, we did quite rigorous testing. I used to teach in a local university, so I at some point I brought. my game back and have

conducted some play testing over there. But that was never enough. We did I think a couple of sessions, but that was not enough and then eventually we have to, with moders on board, towards the end of the project. They

got in a lot more QA to help us with that. But yes, it's true. It's like it was a nightmare to try to do things like this. Which is why I think it looked games, like full-flash roadlights, they often have to put the game in early SS so that they get players to give them feedback and run through the game repeatedly for them.

Yeah, and the difficulty sort of tuning is when it's a roguelike that does require iterative sort of iterative kind of progress, that must be, I guess, less challenging, but because this is one that is skill-based from start to finish, then obviously it needs to be tuned very well, which I thought it was. I mean, when I've done multiple runs, I've tried the different stages in different orders. And by making them sort of longer and more difficult, it's more organic than just kind of shuffling them. You know, I think it's, I think it works well. I mean, I will ask as well, you might have covered this already, but I'm curious if how our system works were particularly hands on with, with this, or whether they let you sort

of get on with it, so to speak. I mean, obviously, you were pitching and going back and forth, but once you were in development, were they sort of checking on it, or were they letting you kind of make the game you wanted to make? Yeah, they were actually very, they are not very hands-on. Like, what's the word I'm looking for? But basically, they let me try. Yeah, yeah.

So they are not very restrictive. The only thing that they are a little bit more careful about is things to do with the law, the IP, you know, to make sure that we're not bringing this game in a direction that they don't want how the brand to look, you know. So obviously that's important, right. I mean, being Double Dragon Guiden, you know, it's another story, a side story. So that should give you some leeway to something do as you please. But that came in later. Right, right, right, right. When we first pitched the game, the idea was that we were either going to make this a sequel, which is Double Dragon 5

or we're going to make this Double Dragon Zero. Oh, I see. Okay. So I think I'll delve into it a little bit since I think this is an interesting topic. Yeah, it is. So we wanted to do either a SQL or a prequel, which to me, as a developer,

that's super interesting, right? Because how many people get the works on a main line title? But at the same time, I knew early on that we want to I want this double dragon to have a bit of everything from the previous games So we want all the characters to come back We want to use some of the music from the previous games

And all that kind of stuff And we just couldn't quite get it to come together You know because the law would always be fighting against us You know like some of the characters are a little bit too similar their motivation is like they share the same motivation or some timeline character would supposedly already have died, why would they be here now? So we couldn't quite align that, but the conclusion was that,

in fact, it was proposed by our system work that instead of making this Double Dragon Zero or Double Dragon Five, which makes things very rigid for us, why don't we do it as Double Dragon Guidance? And then that sort of like release us from the law a little bit and we can play around with it a lot more. So that was very nice.

Yeah. So do you have any, this is a frivolous sort of question, but did you have any particular favorite sort of characters you wanted to get in there as playable? Because it's quite a large roster. I don't really want to spoil all of it because some of them are locked. But, I mean, obviously, they're Marion being front-loaded because she's mostly known from the previous games for getting punched in the stomach or killed. And now she's out there doing stuff, which is, you know, great. This is what we wanted. But do you have any other particular? your favourite characters that you wanted to get in there? Our favourite characters that I want to get in, but I couldn't. That too I'm curious about, but more just what you have in there, you enjoy playing as I do you think as the particularly interesting kind of move set, because

everyone I've tried has felt very different, which is nice. Yeah, well, for the characters, I think I managed to get all the characters that I thought was important to be in the game, you know, for a while I almost couldn't because of the timeline and everything. end, I think like all the characters, you know, that people can immediately associate with is already in there. There are some popular characters that I already see a lot of people in the comment section asking about them, you know, like we obviously couldn't get every single character in, right? Especially given how different we made the characters, a lot of work

will put into them. So there are still some characters that I hope that I can eventually bring in I wouldn't say any names because I feel like that is something that maybe in the DLC is something that's a good approach. Yeah, but there is quite a few that in fact we did some artwork or we already brainstorm

on how they are supposed to work. We just couldn't quite fit into the timeline. Right, okay, that's interesting. I mean, I think that if the people who play this game, I don't think they should be in any way let down by the character selection. There's plenty of playable characters there, but anything more that gets added

obviously would be a great great to have. As far as double dragon-adjacent characters go, the one that springs to mind that I want, I know is impossible, and it makes me sad

and that would still be Skolmageddon, but that's the double-dragon Neo thing, and I think that's a river city thing, because they've kind of crossed over Kunyokun and Double-Dragon in that respect, but I guess it remains to be seen. It remains to be seen. I did enjoy sort of the sense of humor in this game,

like the sort of the elevator music, in the first stage and such. Is that something that you wanted to get in there? Yes, a little bit, but I wouldn't want, and I guess we never really wanted to push it too far into the sense where it becomes a parody of the franchise itself. Yeah, and that sort of has happened with Neon, in a sense, because as much as I enjoyed Neon, it was maybe slightly less well-received overall.

and I think there was an aspect of that that I saw but yeah so I think like that's one of the direction that they tried right and also because they tried that it's sort of like I wouldn't go too far into that so this time around we like I always enjoy having humor

in my games but this time around I have it still because that's just in my DNA but at the same time I try to skill it back a little bit so that the general tone of the game can remain the way it is and also my programming partner that worked with me.

He also released other games in the past like the Rocket Bird series. I think you might have played it before at some point. She also has a good sense of humor and actually the elevator music that you were talking about was his idea. He was, he did it and he showed me and I was having a good laugh about it.

Yeah, I mean, it's a very brief scene. It's not that I wanted to characterize as a, you know, a paradigm, like you say, but I just thought it was a funny, sort of acute sort of sequence to have in there. I thought it was, it's interesting how I think the different stages

and their sort of different feel sort of come together, because the first stage, or at least the, I say the first stage, I don't know why I said that, because you can play it in any order, but the building stage

where you can sort of explore sort of the side rooms and eventually make your way up to the top. That was interesting. But it's less of a sort of exploration game a more sort of linear sort of belt scroller. So I wonder if that was something that you intended from the off because, or was there ever a point when it was more sort of free roaming at all? Well, yes.

Actually, so we experiment with this as well. So early on, we look at, so one of the things that we look at Double Dragon, one of the things that we did was look at Double Dragon and analyze what is different about Double Dragon compared to some of the other beat-em-up, right? And especially for Double Dragon, I think the terrain was actually something that is above and beyond compared to games like, I mean, I love those games, Final Fight, Streets of Rage.

Yeah, yeah. But those features more linear level with a giant piece of artwork as the background and you walk from left to right fighting enemies. Yeah. Double Dragon have you jumping up and down, especially on the NASS. Yeah, platforming, climbing ladders and things, yeah.

But we were looking at that and we were looking at this game and see what we can do about it. So we, at first, we, so our environment system is pretty robust. In fact, we could have done even more, which we tried early on. But after some experimentation, while one thing was the scale of the game to include exploration on top of the idea that we already have, that is quite a bit. Second thing is a player might get lost. Yeah. So it's sort of, because it's so explorative, they sort of don't know where to go next. And you then get into this problem where, hey, I buy a bit of them up because I want to

distress, I want to fight people and have fun. But then now I'm all of a sudden in this building that I cannot get out of. So in the end, we sort of streamlined the experience a little bit so that the player always know where to go. In fact, one of the things that we did, the level that you mentioned, the one with the big building. I'm not sure if you've realized, but that entire building is actually

one continuous environment that you can keep going. Right, yeah, it does create that sort of, the fact that the different screens are sort of delineated doesn't detract from that. It does feel very cohesive, I think. But it's interesting

because what it gave me is, because I did that level first, the first time I tried the game, I was thinking, oh, River City. This is a River City-style double-dragon thing, but then, no, what it ends up feeling like to me is almost a sort of homage to that, but not that.

It's very much Double Dragon, which is nice because River City already exists. They have blurred the lines a little bit, but it is a separate thing. I will ask then which of the older Double Dragon games, did you want to sort of get in here? Because it really is a more diverse series than it seems like with all with the different NES games, not to mention the arcade games, there's even a crossover with Battletoads in there.

I don't suppose there's any chance of the Battletoads turning up at some point, is there? Hmm. I mean, that is really a question for Microsoft and Rare, right? Yeah, okay. I would love to work with them. Hopefully, after the game is out, you know, like, if it does well, that may be something that we can open a topic and discuss with them.

Like, I would love to make it happen. Yeah, yeah. But going back to your question, I think you were talking about the previous games. If I'm not wrong, you were trying to ask if, like, which were some of my inspiration or something? Yeah, that's right, yeah, of the original games. Like, which elements did you want to bring forward the most and iterate on? Comparatively, I think I took a little bit more from the NASS games than the arcade games. A big part of that was because, well, Double Dragon actually was one of the few beat them out

that when they bring it over to the home console, they actually redesign so much of the game to make sure that it works well from a home experience. So that was looking at a difference, it allows me to pick into the original development teams, mind about what they see that might attract the players and all that. So there was a, so some thoughts put into that, to make sure that this is, because this is a game that you will play at home, right? So, and also because of my personal preference about, uh, uh, as a gamer back then. Yeah, yeah. So, but aside from that, you know, like the, the home console actually have a lot of very interesting stuff. Oh, sorry, the Nass version actually have a lot of very interesting stuff.

For example, how Double Dragon Tree especially had some ideas where you can actually, you actually have characters that join you halfway through. You know, Double Dragon 2 had a lot of platforming section and things like that. So we look at a lot of those, each one of them and try to say like, hey, can we take at least something from each one? And also, although we didn't take any direct reference from, but we try to also, also, study the things like the cartoon, the movies, and there was a fighting game that is based on the movie, which I really enjoy. I mean, the fighting was pretty well done there, and I played that game quite a bit back in the days. So I also try to look for those for inspiration.

You know, the movies, although a lot of people say that it's so bad that it's good, but I think there is really some genuine good ideas in there. Double dragon, the original double dragon, if I recall correctly, was inspired by the Warriors. I feel like the movie feels a little bit like the Warriors for kids. Yeah. So one of the thing that I eventually try to work on is to bring in that element of gang and gang identity from the Warriors.

You know, so that is also eventually what you mentioned, you know, like how we try to separate the different gangs and give them some different identity so that when you visit different location, you have a different experience. Yeah, I love the interstitial screen when you beat a boss or a gang boss that you then see the other gangs get stronger, like the visuals change. I think that's a cool sort of an idea. I don't have a huge amount of left to ask. I will say, the game's launching, when is the game launching again, please? The game launches on 27 July. And that's on, like, lots of different systems. That's on PC, PS5, PS4, etc.

I think, yes, it will be on all the major console and Steam as well. Yeah. I've been playing, just to say that people know, I've been playing it on Switch and on Steam, and for me they seem to have parity like they seem to be exactly as good so nothing to worry about their for Switch players

I've had lots of fun with it so I'm looking forward to when it launches so I can gush about it slightly more freely thank you very much for coming on and talking about the game with me and hopefully the launch goes really well so that we can have battle toads

and other reasons but not just that. Well, yes, thanks a lot for having me today. Like, it was a lot of fun hearing what you have to say about the game after playing it. You know, like we made this game over the COVID period. So it wasn't until much later, a lot of things were already, you know, sit and done that we can start to share with people. And at this point is where we really start to share the game with more players and reviewers. and, you know, everybody, right?

So it's really nice to hear what people think about the game, especially after having their hands on the game. So thanks a lot. Thanks a lot for all this. No problem at all. Thanks very much. Thank you. It's our show. Yes, the voice you've been hearing this whole time. You're now hearing again.

Stuart Jip, that's me. I swear I'm not trying to get myself over here. I keep saying my own name like it matters, but what I'm really here to do is to wrap things up in the customary manner in a calm and collected way. If you like Retronauts, you'd like to support the show. First of all, thank you. Second of all, for a mere $5, you can get not only two extra bonus episodes a month that are completely exclusive, but you'll also. get all the regular weekly episodes a week early. So, you know, you're going to be just a super switched on cool guy who knows exactly what's going on with Rattronauts as soon as it comes up on the PLEB feed,

which, you know, the free feed, I call it the PLEB feed because, you know, plebs. They'll just, they'll be like, oh my God, did you hear that episode about Karateka and Double Dragon Guiden? And you'll be looking at your sort of manicured fingernails and you'll be like, yeah, last week, you know, kind of moved on kind of over that now. But, um, not,

only that, you'll get Diamond Fight's tremendous this week in retro columns not just in written form but also in speaking form because they like to make podcasts out of them, mini-podcasts and they're very good, very very well produced, you'll love them, you'll also be able to go on the Discord

and say swear words to me and there's nothing I can do about it, you can call me a bald twat and I can't do anything about it, nor can I really disagree with you. So, yeah, thanks very much for listening and we'll no doubt speak again soon on Retronauts about Retro Games. Thank you. I'm not good at ending podcasts. Bye.

I'm going to be able to be. I don't know. Oh, and a lot of them.