Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 136: Shantae (in her creator's words)

Episode Date: January 29, 2018

As part of our ongoing developer interview series, Shantae creator Matt Bozon recounts the history and challenges involved in designing indie darling Shantae. From the game's Super NES prototype to the recent Half-Genie Hero add-on Friends to the End, that's almost three decades of exploratory belly-dancing!

This week in Retronauts, we are Rhett to Go. Hi, everyone. Welcome to an on-site, on-location episode of Retronauts. I'm Jeremy Parrish. And this week, it's an episode that I've been wanting to do for a long time. A look at the Shantay series. And rather than sitting around with a bunch of bozos in a studio, I've taken the podcast down to Santa Clarita or Valencia.

Where are you guys based? Yeah, Valencia. We're in Valencia, California, but Santa Clarita is kind of the same thing. And I'm talking to introduce yourself. Hey, my name's Matt Bozon. I'm the series director for Shantay. So, yes, I am at the Way Forward Offices, and we're going to talk about Shantay, not just the outsider perspective, but the inside perspective, the lowdown on how this series came to be, and how it kind of came into the world as a sort of retro-facing series. So I feel like from the moment of conception, Shante was immediately eligible for retronauts.

But, you know, now that series is like 15 years old, so of course it's totally eligible at this point. But it feels like a series very heavily informed by classic gaming and, you know, classic concepts. So, yeah, it just seems like a perfect fit for our show. Great. Well, yeah, thank you. Thanks for coming out and taking your time. And thank you guys for listening. That's really cool.

So, yeah, what exactly has your role been with Shantay? You're kind of like Shantay's dad. Yeah. So let's see, boy, so when we created this thing, it was Aaron Beauxon, who's my wife, at the time we were engaged, and we're both animation students out of Cal Arts. So I think the way this all came about was her thinking, hey, you know, what would she want to do for a, like, to create a game character? We were, you know, people were starting to come out of school and pitching TV shows and games and things and following their. they're like the things that interested them and this was something that that she was interested in and so um yeah just one time i remember just seeing her drawing something like what are you know what are you working on you're like oh this is a cool thing i thought this would be something if i was to make a video game this is what the character might do and she have these these little doodles of um this character with this ponytail and i'm like oh that's really really neat um my my involvement with it was um was really helping her More from the game perspective, because I had more of a video game type of background.

She was more, both of us were traditional character animator students. And so I think both of us were kind of, I think we were heading more towards television is where our aim was. What she actually ended up doing. She worked on Futurama the first three seasons. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah. Yeah, so she did that. She did a few other TV shows.

So did she do like animation on the show? Yeah. Yeah. They called it character layout, but it's what most people would just call animation. You're taking a storyboard, and you're blowing it up, listening to the character dialogue, and then you're doing the key poses that eventually would get sent to Rough Draft Korea, and they would do all the in-between. And so Futurama was, you know, the first three seasons, those were right contemporaneous with the first Chante.

Yeah, definitely. So we were working on, she was doing that, we were kind of pitching the show, the show, sorry, the game around. So my involvement really was with the game and developing it as a series. So she created the character. She had a handful of specific ideas. Those kind of shifted a little bit,

like the earlier drawings. Some of them were Chante riding on an elephant or Chantay controlling a monkey or dancing to charm them. And some of them were her transforming into them. And I think at one point, we both sort of stopped and went okay we've got to figure out which one this is

it's either she danced because her thing was she's going to dance and she's going to whip with her hair and it was are we going to which which way does this go and then I think some of the gameplay type stuff which was more of my my influence on it was

well you know if you're playing as this character it's better if you just transform into the character because then you're still in direct control of the thing instead of having it be some anchor and then you run away from it as a monkey and you have to return back to it No, that's not to say that she is not also game savvy. Aaron worked on a lot of our early games way forward for, boy, what was it?

Like, you know, mid-90s till a little bit into the maybe, well, actually, she still does on occasion, but she was an employee here right up until Rough Draft working on Futurama. So we work together on all the Game Boy Color stuff, a little bit on Game Boy Advance, and then she kind of comes back and we work on things kind of, you know, on and off. So it's really cool. But, yeah, my influence on the rest of the character and the series was, okay, I'm going to start building in supporting characters and developing the world. And all those are the things that I'm more interested in is, you know,

figuring out the lore of the world, you know, gameplay stuff, but also just cast of characters and who is she as a character, what she liked. So I think we worked on it together for a couple of years and we pitched it to some places but I mean really if

you only just dive right into the just like keep going Well actually I didn't realize Wayford had been around quite so long I mean you know it wasn't a company whose name popped up a lot for me until Chantay came out

and then I was like who made this this isn't a Capcom game even though it's published by Capcom. Right. So, yeah, how long has Wayford been around? How far long was the company when you got your start here? Got it. Well, let's see.

So the early phases, there was a lot of, let's see, the very, very beginning. Voldy could speak to this a little better. Voldy Way is our president and owner. We are an indie company. We're independently owned by Voldy. he had started the company in what was it oh gosh I hope I don't get it wrong was it 93

what are we on now 2017 this will be out in 2018 yeah it must have been 90 yeah I think we're 27 or 28 years old right now so he was doing he was programming on his own so he was doing it as an individual he was making games on three quarter inch floppy disk or I think even five inch floppy disks at the beginning

He was making games, selling them door to door, I think, if I remember right. And he had some needs at one point for some character design type, or pixel art, really. And so he came to Cal Arts because he had some connections there. He had a friend who was doing voiceover work, would work with animations and students. And so there was some interesting, you know, this is how we all got tied in together. And me and Rob Buchanan, in fact, I should switch that around. The other way around,

Boldie and Rob, Rob was the first way forward employee. Rob introduced me to Boldie, and the three of us worked together for a stretch there for a couple of years, which that ultimately led to that first Super Nintendo game that we did together was Mickey's ultimate challenge.

Okay. So that was the first game. We all worked together. Even though Way Forward had existed solely as Voldy for a few years, this is when he started taking on, hey, I'm going to have employees, we're going to get a place,

place to work. We're actually going to treat this like a business. So that went on for he brought more and more people in, moved here to Valencia. That was so that he could recruit out of Cal Arts and get Cal Arts animation talent, which we still do.

And the first gosh, like leading up to, I'm trying to think how to break this part down, our first several years was all kids educational stuff, CD-ROM games, kind of all that area where the business was at the time. It was just chasing the next job, trying to, trying to survive, keep the company afloat. Yeah, you know, I just talked to Brian Sigurgrison, I can never pronounce

his name right, the guy who runs Image and Form, and they have a very similar story. Like, they did a ton of kids educational stuff before sort of breaking away from that. Yeah, we did, I mean, I can only guess, we probably did 100 kids products because the CD-ROM boom, there was so much of that. I mean, you remember you walk around. a store and you'd go to a Best Buy and there would just be, you know, two or three aisles of nothing but kids' educational games and some

games that were sort of pretending to be educational and probably weren't at all. So we did a lot of stuff like that. And really early on, Valdi, sorry, I'm trying to put a time frame to this, but it would have been mid to late 90s. He sold

a portion of way forward to American Education Publishing and that was we did educational games for them for quite some time until eventually they sort of like that bubble that CD-ROM educational CD-ROM bubble

kind of burst and they sold the company back to Valdi and that's when we started going all right to put a time frame on it for people who are more like living in the game space

that would have been from Super Nintendo kind of winding down we did some Game Boy we did some game gear once that wound down we did the kids educational CD-ROM thing

while, you know, PCs and 3D accelerator cards and things like that were becoming popular, and by the time we came back to gaming with, it would have been, I guess, extreme sports for Game Boy Color and stuff like that, we had sort of skipped the PlayStation 1 N64 era, so we didn't have anything there. I think our last way forward game that was console would have been a Sega CD, what was that called Darkseed? Oh, yeah, yeah, the adaptation of the graphical literature.

yeah that one so that would have been and that was more of a Valdi solo project if I remember correctly what's that like the fifth or six time I've said if I remember correctly everything is memory yeah that's fine it's escaping 20 25 years ago yeah I'm glad we're getting

this down here because I'll have forgotten it in the next few years you can refer back to it Yeah, it's actually, I feel like your move to education software during that era, an impact on the way the company developed because I think of you guys as being really specialized in 2D animation. I know you've done some 3D stuff, but like when I think of Wave Forward, I think of great

sprite art, great bitmap art, and there was no real call for that during the PS1 era. No. I mean, there were some 2D, you know, bitmap PS1 games, like 70 in the night and stuff, but they were the exception, not the rule. There was almost nothing on N64.

Saturn had tons of it, but it didn't come to the US and that system flopped. So yeah like your i feel like your your haven would have been game boy color uh yeah definitely so so that's kind of interesting like i feel like that that that that um you know that that market that you ended up working in for so long um it's kind of like a haven that allowed you to sort of maintain what the company is instead of trying to chase after you know 3d and and go the route of a lot of other american publishers that didn't really survive the PS1 era uh-huh that's definitely true um educational software kept us going a lot

There were a lot of times when, if you look at our gaming history, there are periods of time where you can look at it and go, wow, how were they getting by in this Game Boy Advance era when budgets should have been going up and they were going down? And people were really pushing for, oh, well, it's Game Boy Advance, but, you know, try to find a way to make a polygonal 3D, even though the hardware isn't designed for it because that's what the market wanted. and we were getting by a lot of times because we were at the same time doing something for leapfrog or some other educational thing because of our history. So it was so many times that's come back to help us. I think a lot of people would go, oh, man, they did educational games for 10 years. That must have been awful, but it was really good. It helped us to be mindful of our audience in a way that I don't know if we would have been otherwise.

Because you really design differently when you think about who your player is. You can't just assume that your player is you. You know, it's sometimes it's a kid. Sometimes it's someone who can't read. Sometimes you go into a new game and you go, you know, let's do this game in a way where people wouldn't have to read. Let's do it all based on visual or, you know, pantomime. Let's do it with no dialogue at all. Like Mighty Switchforce, we did that.

We're like, let's just not have words in this game. And that was really because of our history. with educational games. And sometimes it's fun to challenge yourself and make a game where it's like, we're not going to tell anything. It's all got to be experienced. Yeah, the funny thing about your question earlier

in regards to Chanty and the timeline, we were pitching that game right on the cusp of Doom and Doom 2. So PC gaming was moving in that direction. I don't know if you remember, Do you remember the pitfall, do you remember the pitfall of mind adventure? Yeah, that was the, the, the Croyers, they had done, gosh, like Fern Gully and all, you know, those types of films. They were moving into games, and they were doing the 2D animation thing, you know, and I'd say they were probably a year or so ahead of what we were doing. We're like, oh, they're doing their thing.

We're like, well, that's where we were headed, but they got their first. We were inspired by, you know, Doug Tenaple's Earthworm Gym and stuff like that. Like, we want to do this. So we were doing lots of 2D animation and trying to kind of hone our skills on the kids' educational stuff, hoping to bring it to console and PC. But PC and console was migrating away from it as we were starting to push into it. So you get to those, those, you remember those times where it's, you know, I'll use Mega Man as my benchmark. you get to the X series

and you start hitting those games where there were weird gaps in between was it X3 and X4 or something and they started having 3D backgrounds instead of pixel backgrounds you could tell it was it was starting to become atypical to do 2D art or pixel art

it's like well you can't do pixel art you can't do something else so we would just like cling to that we're like no we're going to part of us is going to forge ahead and part of us is going to stick with this traditional stuff and keep driving on it. So that's why way forward sort of split into having sort of a handheld and very core

gamer-centric side. And then this PC and CD-ROM games, we did a lot of things for Hasbro, like, oh, let's do board game adaptations, or things that a lot of other CD-ROM and PC things we're starting to do more of. So we had that. But then our handheld stuff was very much like core gamer stuff. The stuff that you think of now as being more like what an indie game on Steam or something would be,

we were doing things like that. But the Game Boy Advance Nintendo DS, that was kind of our canvas. So, yeah. So you said you were pitching Chante around the time that Doom, Doom 2 came out. That's like 93, 94. Yeah, I think so.

So that game was like bubbling beneath the surface for a long time because we didn't actually make it out until 2002. 2002, yeah. Yeah, I think we were pitching that game around or some version of that game for around eight years, I think. Yeah, thinking back on it, what was it? Yeah, I'm again trying to figure out the time frame here. Yeah, we were pitching that we were engaged, Aaron and I got married in 95, so it must have been sometime in that phase. we were pitching this game

getting shut down a lot because it was now the common things were well it's 2D 2D is on its way out everybody wants 3D can you make a 3D we're like well our vision is this way it was first envisioned as Super Nintendo because we had done Mickey's Ultimate Challenge

now we're all up to speed on how the pixel stuff was done we wanted to do that again and yeah 95 you would have been up against Donkey Kong country which changed really like people said, well, we can't do 3D on Super NES, but we can make it look like 3D.

That's right. That's exactly right. And we were also really pushing the music angle, and there had, you know, back then, there wasn't really, there weren't a lot of beat-based games. I think there was, I think Dance Dance Revolution existed, but I think this was before that became popular. I don't think DDR came along until after that. I think it was later.

Is that right? Yeah. I remember there were things like. Parapo was kind of like the big, wow. you can do music games. Yeah, so early on, we're thinking, oh, we're going to have a platformer and there's going to be dancing and there's going to be rhythm and there's going to be these things we thought were, you know, they're pretty cool. They would have been innovative, I think, at the time, but since the game didn't come out until 2002, yeah, these were, all these things were, oh, and of course the female lead character, these were just all scary things to publishers. And the business, of course, back then was publisher had to believe.

in your vision because they were going to pony up all the cash for it. And it's not just like today where you pay money and that covers development of the game. They were concerned with stuff like the trucks and the warehouse and the insurance and like, what if the warehouse catches fire? What if it's robbed? You've got to have all these

different things that we never think about when you're dealing with physical goods. Yeah, and if you were working with Nintendo, then you had to pony up the costs of production to Nintendo all in advance. I know that was like a big sticking point for a lot of publishers, especially around that time as the Super N.S. started to fade. And so you had companies like Capcom and Acclaim end up with very expensive game ROMs just in bins, you know, unclear. Yep. Yeah. And the price tag for the original Shantay, I think originally was going to have to be $39.99 because once we put it...

When you say original, you mean the Super Nies version, if that had could be, or like the... The Gameboy Color one. Oh, yeah, I guess I should explain that. So we eventually kind of threw in the towel on. the Super Nintendo one, we're like, well, maybe it needs to be a hand-drawn PC side-scroller, and then the Mayan Adventure came out, and we're like, oh, this is the closest thing to what we're trying to do, but even then, those things weren't really catching on, you know, platformers were not, that was not a popular path

anymore, then we kind of let it be dormant and just worked on developing the world and the characters and stuff for a while. Then when we were, we'd really liked working on Game Boy, Black and White Game Boy, so much towards the end there there were some games still coming out years later so we had to have Nintendo we're like hey we haven't worked with Nintendo really for

quite some time like since the Super Nintendo game there was quite a gap between when Super Nintendo was winding down and Game Boy Black and White was still kind of lingering but Game Boy Color hadn't launched yet this would have been pre-okay so this was pre-Pocamon right so that was all end of 98 Pokemon and Game Boy Color

Thank you yeah so at that time we started hitting up Nintendo Oh, hey, we've got a couple employees here who would like to do black and white Game Boy. What do you think? Is there still a market? Because we kind of want to do it just for fun, right? So they started talks with us about, we'll get you development kits so we can get you signed up. And then they're like, so you guys are expressing interest.

We actually have something new coming out. We're going to send you that instead. So they gave us Game Boy Color. So I think because of our interest in the platform when it was not interesting to most people, got us the foot in the door, so the Game Boy Color kits came out. it was very challenging it was all in Japanese so we just

click around on stuff trying to find something that would do anything and after a couple of weeks I remember we got a an 8 by 8 pixel square drawn on the screen like oh my gosh

we did it we figured it up so we're just writing down shorthand for you know third button up from the left seems to be the one that pushes the art into the art bank you know all this time of stuff

so eventually we did get we did get game made. We made extreme sports, which was based on nothing. It was just a ridiculous sports game that was like a, at this point, Pokemon must have come out because it was a Pokemon clone of sorts.

It's like, sports and RPG. We're going to do a weird hybrid. I didn't realize that. I haven't really played extreme sports just like to, beyond just kind of like checking out the basics. It's just ridiculous. It looks like it, it wants so bad to be Pokemon. It's like, oh, walk around, you know, and people swing by, what do you make? And I'm like,

I'm making a sports game with an overworld because I don't get sports. So it's going to be walking around, And, you know, everyone loves Mario Golf, Mario Tennis. Those have those elements, too. Yeah. A lot was like, well, we make RPGs, so let's put our, you know, RPG in our sports games. Yeah, I think there was... So you guys weren't too far outside the reality of that.

No, I think they took it, that concept and maybe found a way to make it mainstream, you know, to where anyone can play at ours. Well, you stick Mario on it. That's the trick. Yeah. Yeah, and ours was a little, a little mean-spirited. Because we're still... Yeah, well, because back, again, it was all about how hard is you. your game because value often

was like, hey, how hard is it? My kid beat this game in a day, so it's a bad value, you know? So it was tons and tons of content in this huge overworld. We finished that game, and then at that time, our CEO, John Beck, he said,

hey, now that you have the tech and you can do all the things that your Chante game was going to do, maybe it's time to bring it back and try it on this. Now, interestingly, all the stuff before then that I was talking about with the Chante stuff was all pre, us working at Way Forward. So this is when we figured out how we were going to structure all this stuff.

Like, hey, we're going to bring in all the stuff that we've done previously with our programmer buddy, Jimmy Huey. He's the guy who programmed the original Chante. Guy's got a fascinating history. He did Mario Brothers for the Commodore 64. He goes way, way back. This guy's a genius. So he came to work a way forward.

Aaron came to work a way forward. I was already there. And so we're like, okay, we have the team from, I guess it would have been six or seven years ago. Now we're all here in the building, and we're going to start working on this game because now we have the tech in place, and John seemed fairly certain he could find a buyer for it. So we started working on that. And we make a main game during the day we were making a Sabrina games. We did a few of those.

We did some wrestling games, WCW Mayhem, some of these other, you know, if you look back at our old Game Boy Color stuff, we did quite a bit of it, but that was kind of keeping the bills paid. And as long as that was covered, we could then work on the Chanty stuff in whatever time we could eke out. So that game development was about two years long. So that was kind of your Mega Man, too. Like you had to work on the things that paid the bills, but then everyone was kind of secretly. Well, not necessarily secretly, but on the side, you know, not for any publisher working on your long-term passion project.

Yeah. Well, it's funny because secretly, it sort of is almost like secretly. um skipping ahead a bit when when shanty advanced that's the one that never came out there was a point where boldie um moldy asked me hey when is shanty advance going to be done and i said well you told you told us we shouldn't be working on that like we should stop because there was no buyer for it he's like but you he's like you listen to me you were supposed to secretly keep working on it like with the last one i'm like oh shoot i didn't realize um that we're all world speaking in code so yeah there was a lot of that um you know it's it's it's a cool studio and I always liked

the way, you know, having a studio run and owned by an individual, this is a place where, you know, Boldie, even to this day, he's just all about letting people pursue what they're passionate about. You know, it's, it's huge and I think that's, you know, it's not a huge studio.

It's, but it's a really good place for that. It's a good place to kind of incubate and grow. And he's really into people pursuing what they, you know, what they're passionate about. Very much so back then and still today. So. once we put that into production.

It took a long time. It was a couple of years of production. The thing we had difficulty with, though, is as we kind of were getting more educated, I think we shipped something like six to eight Game Boy Color games while working on Chantay. The size of that cart, eventually when we started talking with potential publishers,

we had a, at the time, like 32-mabit cart, which was I guess an obscene amount of memory and it had to have like you could do the battery backup or you could do the E-Prom or you do the really big E-Prom these all drove the cost of goods up

and yeah I mentioned earlier the game would have had to be 40 bucks well no one was biting they're like no way can we possibly do that and we had some really funny offers come through that again to credit you know credit to these guys for not just

jumping at the opportunity and just cashing out. Like, we had opportunities to put other licensed characters in. It's like, just get rid of, get rid of the genie character and put in our character, and we'll pay you, and you're done. And John and Boldie were like, no, no, no, this is, this is our vision. We want to keep it the way it is. So that was really cool.

But, yeah, there were opportunities there to swap her with other characters. Because, you know, there were a lot of magical girl character TV shows at the time. So there were lots of opportunities. and also the perception was well if you turn it into a children's game for girls that can work because it has a female lead character because the prevailing attitude was they're like a male gamer will not buy this game

and we're like well we think they will well statistically is proven that they won't okay well there's so few examples out there that that attitude didn't change for many years as you know so yeah industry has changed a lot Now it doesn't, that really doesn't come up anymore, but it used, we had people come in and say, well, yeah, we'd be happy to publish this, but you've got to have a stage, or a character select, and make sure that there is a male genie character, and that he's the default. As long as he's the default, you can have the female second character. They're like, no, that's not what this is about.

I didn't realize, you know, you do see, like, male character as the default a lot. I didn't realize that's something the publishers come in and say, our numbers say you have to do this. Well, and they don't anymore, but I think back then it was very, very typical. I mean, it was a, it was a, if you were to go to, like, say, a Target store in the mid to late 90s, there was an expectation that it was the boy aisle. You know, it's like, oh, these are all going to be, you know, it's like, if it's a Hot Wheels, slam dunk, no problem. If it's one of these games based on a boys TV show, no problem.

If it's one, it's like, well, we can probably do, you know, you can get a Barbie. game, that's an easy sell, but the content, and as you might know, we've made a lot of Barbie games, so we've done a lot of them. And secretly, if you go back and look at our pixel Barbie games, they're all Castlevania. So that was like our Castlevania onboarding game. Like, go pick up any way forward Barbie game pixel side-scroller, and you'll be like, oh my gosh. Okay, now I need to go check out some of those Barbie games. Yeah, you should. It's not, it's pretty on the cuff, honestly. You'll just look on them go, oh, These are built actually to scale with any Castlevania character.

And it uses the same, like a lot of the same tile set breakdowns and concepts. So, yeah, I took us way off topic. I don't know if you want to try to rescue the conversation. So the game was, you said, in development for a couple of years. By the time it came out, like mid-2002, Game Boy Advance had been out for like a year. That's right. So was, I don't know, like, how did that affect the project?

Was there a point at which you stopped and said maybe we should put the break on this and retool it as GBA? Yeah, there was actually. So we knew that Game Boy Advance was coming. What was that? That was 2000. Yeah, 2000.

We had prototype Game Boy Advance kits in 2000. Now, at that time, Chante was almost done. We actually finished Chanty. Copcom picked it up. We had a really good E3 one year, and they said, hey, we think we can do this. I'm really interested in it. We like it. It seems like it could be a

Capcom type of title. And so they agreed to be the publisher. Actually, not the publisher. I've got to be careful with that. It was not publisher. It was distributor. Which is in the end, that's the reason we were able to still own it, which I'm really grateful to them that

they opted to be the distributor instead of actually taking ownership of the brand and pull on publishing and owning it. So you guys had to bankroll, like the cartridge and production and everything, and then they bankrolled the distribution and warehousing and stuff? No, they actually paid for everything.

But they had some kind of, we had covered at that point, we had paid for all a development. So what they did is they kicked in kind of at the end and said, here, this will take you to completion for the last few months of development, and then they covered all the costs. But because something about the way they were doing business at the time, they couldn't or didn't want to be the publisher, they only wanted to be the distributor.

So we would call it the publisher, because they took on the expenses and they manufactured it. But the surprise to us was, after it was done and delivered, it didn't come out for a year and a half. So we thought, after a while, we're like, what happened? Did they buy it just to put it on a shelf somewhere? Was it ever going to release? Then the Game Boy Advance came out.

No word of, you know, Chante is still nowhere to be seen, right? So the game could have launched, like at the beginning of 2001. Yeah, I think it, yeah, probably, yeah, yeah. Yes, it could have, yeah. Okay. Do you think it would have done better if, like, I don't know how well it sold, but do you think it would have performed differently in the market? It's so hard to tell.

I've heard, I don't really know. I've heard that Capcom at the time had that this wasn't that unusual. Do you know the, what is it? They did Demons Crest, then they did Gargoyle's Quest. No, sorry, Gargoy's Quest first on Game Boy. Right. Then Demons Crest for Superintendents. And Gargoyles Quest 2 for NES.

Okay, I heard two for NES. Hey, someone should look this up and... I think that was 92, 93 maybe. And then Demons Crest was 95 on Super NES. Okay. So what I'd heard was that Demons or the Gargoyles Quest 2 for NES came out later. Now, if that's not true, my example doesn't hold up, but it kind of doesn't matter. It's like you've seen it with other Capcom stuff.

It still support a platform or at the time they would support a platform way after it was gone, right? you'd still have some quality game that would come out when everybody else had moved on. Yeah, Shantay came out with like this kind of last gasp that they did. They released Robopon and Toki Tori by... Yeah. What's the studio? Two Tribes.

Yeah, two tribes. Yeah, two tribes. Yeah, we're friends with them too. Yeah, and then Shanty was part of like that final trilogy, like, here's the last good games for Game Boy Color. Yeah, totally. And I ended up talking with the Two Tribes guys a bunch of times. In fact, during that gap, we found out about their game and then we said hey so what's up did you guys have to wait in a long time for your game to come out they said yeah it took we delivered it and then it just sat and waited for quite some time and then they released it later excuse me our assumption being it was part of some strategy well i think in our case it was because the

when the shanty game came out we had a buddy working at game stop and we were just you know walking we're getting lunch one day and it happened to be launch day but we didn't really even know and and and and and and and and The guy literally, his name was Brooke, hi, Brooke. He literally threw the Chante box out of the GameStop and into the hallway at us as we're walking by. I'm like, whoa, and I catch this thing. I'm like, what is this? Oh, my gosh. It's a Chante game. And he said they shipped it in a box full of Resident Evil for Game Boy Color.

So that's how they got it into stores. They're like, well, if you're ordering a case of Resident Evil, it's going to come with Shantay's. You have no choice. So I think this is just a really. smart way that they were, you know, I think if it was up to some of these, you know, corporate office or something,

they might not want to just, like, I don't know what this is. Like, would they even bother to buy it? I don't know. But the fact that they buy a case of Resident Evil, right? That, I think those cases came with like six games. Four of them were Resident Evil and two were Shantay, and that's how you do it. That's how they forced the game into stores. That's interesting. I've heard that they did that, you know, to get

Mega Man 8, or maybe Mega Man X4, of the 2D Mega Man games on the PlayStation in the US because Sony was like Sprites, no. And they were like, well Resident Evil, so Sprites, yes. So, Sony was like, all right. I think there's some, using Resident Evil

as like a strong arm tactic is very interesting. Yeah, and I think there's validity in that Mega Man thing, because I remember that E3, they're talking to a guy, a Capcom and I was like, oh my gosh, you've got a Mega Man game here. What happened? Why is it here? I thought,

these things were gone. I'd heard, you know, you'd read stuff and hear stories that it's like, oh, yeah, no more 2D. And it was very much like you said. It was, it's here, but it's almost here defiantly. So, yeah, they have to do some interesting things. Yeah, and I'm glad that made it because, you know, I replayed Mega Man 8 on the Legacy Collection, too,

and I don't think I really appreciated how nicely drawn the game is. The sprites are, like, tiny, but there's just so much happening around it. Yeah, it's really cool. I love it. I know it's not everybody's favorite, but I love it. I love the art style. I love two. Two's my favorite.

I know a bunch of people are shaking their fist right now. I'm like, no, three is the best. Love three. It's like, well, I love two. I love two. And I know it's been, I know it's babyified from the Japanese version, right? I can't know, but I love it. But eight is so cool because the visual style is so neat.

I know it's mean. It's kind of a mean game, but love it. I love looking at it. I love listening to it. Everything about it is just so cool and polished. Yeah, it's okay. At the time was really kind of, I feel like they were championing, championing kind of unusual quirky games, you know, even not necessarily 2D games, but stuff like Canon Spike. Thank you.

I was just going there. Yeah, Canon Spike is one of the, if you go, if you talk to a lot of the way forward directors, you've got these couple of games that all of us have as almost like these milestone moments. And Cannon Spike is one of them. We refer to Canon Spike constantly. Whenever we're pitching new games, people in the media. things don't necessarily know what we're talking about, but one of us will say cannon spike, and then the other few directors will be like, got it, we know exactly what we're doing now. It's like, yeah, yeah, that, I love their gunbird two game. You remember how good

that was? They had some just incredible stuff coming out at the time. Yeah, they were picking up stuff like Mars Matrix and publishing them in the U.S. like, yeah, so Shantae, I feel like kind of rode that, that way. Yeah, definitely. And I guess, I don't know, maybe like when the next generation kind of rolled around, Capcom had to be more conservative. Yeah, something changed. I'm not sure what. I mean, they made their big promise to Capcom 5 for GameCube. And that was brave and bold.

And I think four of those made it out, and almost all of them made it to other. And one number surfaced, right? Dead Phoenix. Is that what it was? That was what it was. Okay. Because before that Copcom 5 announcement, this is kind of like more fun, way forward history trivia. They gave us one of the kits.

So they said, if you're doing Chantay, We're getting you a debt. It was impossible to get those GameCube kits at the time, at least for us, anyway. And they said, we're giving you a kit, make us, Chonte something. And we did some stuff. We have some, well, I don't know if they would even run it anymore. We have some old tech demos of kind of trying to figure out, like fumbling through our 3D at the time, which now, oh, my gosh, we have that opportunity today. Our 3D team is very good, but back then we're just trying to figure it out.

So we never came up with anything truly usable. but I wonder if that was, because later, while we already had our kits and we were working on stuff, we heard these announcements, oh, Capcom's got five games in development, we're like, are we one of the five games? No, they were all Shinji Makami games. Yeah, see, we didn't know. We were just like, I don't know, are they talking about? That must have been like a freak out moment, like, wait a minute. Kind of, because we thought, oh, man, well, and then we weren't sure. Is there some expectation that we're making something because we're kind of just screwing around with this kid and dabbling

with it and we don't have a plan. We're, you know, like, we certainly can't fund a huge game right So we weren't sure. We just knew we had a dev kit and that they set us up with it. And the expectations of what we're going to do with it was a little unclear, but we knew it was like Chante something. And that stuff, you know, we've ended up, we played around with a Chanty, like a 3D one, even DS, like had a 3D Chanté before it had a 2D one. We messed around with it there, a little bit on PlayStation 2, a few different times,

but we never quite felt comfortable with doing a full 3D Chantay. just because it always seemed like it had its roots were in TV. So even though there were pretty large gaps between some of the releases, like there was always some sort of shanty bubbling beneath the surface that never made it its way out. Yeah, that's right. I don't think there's ever been a time that there wasn't a shanty something being worked on. Like, there's always been something.

So, yeah, and you asked about the Game Boy Color one how that did when it came out. I think that's where we were kind of going before. It did not do well. So that game, if I remember right, again, guys, I'm testing my memory here. You'll bear with me. It was, I think we launched a very close to Super Mario Sunshine. It was really close because I remember having the review and going, oh, wow, we did really great. And it was on the page next to Mario Sunshine.

I remember going, oh, my gosh, we're on the page next to Mario Sunshine. How cool. And look, we have a really good, really good score. It looks like if there's two great games he could get, it's like, we're, we're, among the good ones to get this month, right? I remember being really, really excited, but the sales were not good. So Game Boy Advance, like you said,

had already come out. Yes, we did consider shifting it to Game Boy Advance, but we realized it would be a total tear-down. So instead, we did the, hey, if you put it in a Game Boy Advance, we'll detect it and we'll unlock some feature. So that's what we ended up doing. So we did that instead. So that's where there's a tinkerbat dance that you can get

if you play in a Game Boy Advance cartridge, and it just unlocks something different. that was sort of a last-ditch effort to do that. So, yeah, but then after that, it was extremely difficult because from that point, from the time that the game finally came out, and

I think we had proven the quality bar was very high, but we had also sent the message to publishers that it's big and expensive, the games take eight years to make, and you're not going to get your money back. So that wasn't really the best message.

Yeah, that's tough. Yeah, so from that point forward, we were just, we do another one, like we did the advance one, we took it pretty far, and then we got almost a deal at one point, but the money was really low, and it was kind of like, uh, everyone can at least put it behind us, the game can ship, people can play it, but we're not going to make anything, no one's going to make any money, it's going to be another, essentially, it could maybe be a fan favorite, but it'll be a failure, a commercial failure. So we just didn't, so we didn't do it.

And that's funny, because we decided to stop, and then that's when I think Voldy later was like, Did we stop for real? Like, we stopped for real. Yeah, we really did stop. So when the, oh, we had, yeah, we had some 3D tests and things in the middle there. But it wasn't until DSIware got announced us or actually, sorry, it was weware. It was we wear first. Wait, am I confused?

Help me out. Was DSIware or Wii wear? We did both. I think Wiiware happened first. Weware was first. Yeah. Right. And then, yeah, that's right.

And then DSIware was the, oh, good, this is where we could take our DS game. Because, of course, there was a DS game, and we were working on something there. We did some 3D tests of Shantay when we first got our DS kits. Then we did pixel ones later and started bringing over the advanced artwork and stuff, and then realized it didn't quite look right, and we started repixeling over it a third time making the advanced, like kind of almost 32-bit-ish sprites. and then that again the DS game didn't quite ever get far enough to where it was picked up but now we were getting smarter we wouldn't go super far into development unless there was a publisher

attached right so the the amount that we would experiment was a little less so the DS game was never more than just some samples and some running around and some backgrounds and scrolling and stuff so it was when DSI wear got announced that was that was our our big like oh boy we can we can published on our own. This is incredible. So that changed everything for us. I think that's when we got, Chanty got over the hump of fans like it, but it can't sell well.

Now it's fans like it, and it does sell well. So it's good, but we needed the, we had to have that indie publishing scene to make that work. So before we get too far into Risky's Revenge, I kind of want to go back and talk about the original Chanty some more like the design of it.

You know, the timing on it and the platform didn't necessarily do it any favors. But I feel like, you know, if you look at the history of 8-bit games and handheld games, it does kind of feel like the last great 8-bit game in a lot of ways. That was, you know, the Game Boy Color was sort of the last holdout of the 8-bit era running on, you know, a Z80 processor from the 70s all the way into the, you know, this century. So in a lot of ways, I look at Chanty and it does feel. feel like sort of a culmination of a lot of ideas that I had seen in other 8-bit games,

but done in sort of an interesting and fun way. Like, the structure of it, it kind of like struck my mind as, it's like Battle of Olympus or something. But then a few years later, I discovered Monster World Four and was like, oh, I've seen this before. This is Shante. I don't know if that was actually an influence. Like, what did you guys draw on?

It wasn't. It wasn't. And I've reached out to the Monster World Director, Monster World Four. We've talked. And I think he was a backer. And we started talking at one point. And we just started talking about it. I said, hey, there were been so many comparisons.

I said, I had never seen Monster World Four. It's so similar, though. There are so many similarities. You've got a female hero in one who uses her hair to attack. Even down to the way the coins bounce around on the ground. It's, yeah, I mean. It's kind of uncanny. If I heard me talking right now, I would not believe what I'm saying.

I would be like, nope, that guy's lying. But it's totally, totally true. They had nothing to do with each other. But we both, when we were talking about it, it's, well, you know, Disney Aladdin came out the year before. Was that inspired, or the two years before, somewhere around there? That definitely inspired us. Sounds like it inspired him as well. I mean, the previous monster worlds didn't have kind of that Arabian Nights theme to them.

Yeah, yeah, I mean. So a lot of people were like, hey, this is interesting. here's an area we could go. That was a 94 game, I think, so you would have been working on the early ideas for Shantay right around the same time. Yeah, and our teachers at Kyle Arts were working on that film in the day, and then they'd come at night and teach our teachers, teach our classes. So there was a lot of that going on.

Okay. We were being taught in animation right after, like, Little Mermaid and Who Framed Roger Rabbit had just come out the summer before. Then we started our schooling, and during school, they made Aladdin, and I think the fourth year people were. like Lion King had just come out and I think they were on whatever they were on. Pocahontas, I think was an ex. Rescue was down under and then, yeah.

Oh, Beating the Beast. Sorry, there you go. Beating the Beast was before Aladdin. Yeah, sorry. So it's mermaid Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin. Somewhere in there, it's like between the, they had the Florida Disney and the California Disney, but our teachers were, you know, people who were the biggest influences on us at the time. So they were pulling from their experience at Disney. Yeah, yeah.

And I think we were all just kind of like being, you know, drip-fed this information. and it doesn't surprise me at all that there are multiple products that are like with genies and things like that in them right after. It totally makes sense. So while it's not really based on it at all, you know, no argument that that was

like in the air we were breathing at the time. Yeah. Yeah, you know, there were a lot of 16-bit games at the time kind of based on those Disney properties and they all had like really gorgeous animation. Like Capcom did Aladdin. virgin did lion king like all those games looked so good um so in

in a kind of weird way like shanty becomes sort of like a sibling to those yeah yeah well in the cousin or something adopted sibling yes yes and the you know it's funny you go back and people who will still talk about which oh which aladdin

did you play did you like the Genesis one or the super Nintendo one or the cap that one yeah and um they're both great I mean the answer is they're both great they're both so good and they're very different The Capcom one is very mechanical. It's all based on... It feels very Japanese,

and the Genesis one feels very sort of British, American, sort of a hybrid. Yeah, and yeah, they're both good. It's funny. I think I've spent more time going back and playing the Capcom one because it's kind of more learned... You can learn it and know it. The other one is a bit more loose, and you kind of, you know...

I find myself not remembering where certain things are and how certain things work. And that was a Shin-Jami comic game also, wasn't it? the, which one? The Aladdin for Capcom by Capcom. Gosh, if it was, I didn't, I didn't know that. Because I know he worked on GoofTroop. So, yeah, so like, I don't know.

It's just kind of weird all these little connections because then he would, you know, do Resident Evil or Resident Evil too. Wow. And our producer here years ago, he's not here anymore. Rob L.V. was the producer on the Virgin's Aladdin, the one on Genesis. So it's always funny when going over to have meetings with him. like, oh, what's that? Oh, there's that big, there's that big award or something on his desk for the Disney,

the, you know, the Genesis Aladdin game, and it's really fun. Just I love seeing how people, a lot of us have worked on stuff for so many years, and sometimes you're working side by side with somebody, you don't realize that you're a fan of something that they did or that had a huge influence on you. I'm not finding that all the time. All kinds of the employees here, even, you know, just get to talk into this. them like what did you do before you were here what were you working on and they'll mention

something like oh my gosh I love that game I love that game that's so cool so yeah it's funny like you said the Aladdin yeah I'm always trying to like find how big and expansive the history of video games is but then I realize it's actually kind of small

it's like a it's a young industry right so yeah when you mentioned the Chante being kind of the end of that era yeah kind of right it's sort of like a bridge I mean pixel games were as dead as they could as they had ever been right and i don't think they've ever been that dead again so that game definitely serves as a bridge from a time when it was like pixels couldn't have been any more uncool at the time it was get away from that and get into this

other era uh era and then now people do it because it's recognized as an actual art style back then it was a what we're trying to move past that right that's not an art style that's a old that represents old technology that nobody wants so yeah it would almost be like today if you're like well I only develop for you know

the first version of iPhone I don't do anything else it's like why are you doing that that's weird just get on the new versions make something like no no no no or enthusiasts who make games for a retro console that no longer exists although I just know what we were doing

at the time I did just buy a brand new game yesterday so did you yeah it's some like kind of like an infinite jump game really like something that someone made like tobu tobo tobo land or something i don't know some but a new release yeah like someone i think in denmark made it and they produced a limited run of 75 games but you can download the rom for free that's so cool yeah like people still do that but but that's not like how you run a successful business that's that's a passion project whereas way forward needs to be you know like profitable Yeah, and I think that does, yeah, you're right.

I mean, that's how it was before. These were kind of like passion projects. That's why we were doing the work we were doing during the day. Like, well, we've got to pay the bills, and then we're also making the Chante game, because it really is more of a hobbyist thing. But then it becomes a, where we want people to play it, how do we get it out? Somebody's got to publish, and eventually it comes down to money. Somebody has to pay this huge bill, this huge cost of manufacturing.

So, but yeah, you're right. the old school the pixel, if you kind of take the pixel stuff from the beginning when it was I think at the very beginning early days of gaming up until when did it stop being the main way that people actually made

stuff and then started becoming a fun retro aesthetic Shantay was still on the first timeline. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't think people really began sort of looking back and saying, oh, you know what, pixels are okay until you know, you had things like

Cave Story come out that kind of made people say, oh, indie games, huh? And then Nintendo launched Wii with virtual console, and all of a sudden, day one, with this brand new console, here was a marketplace for buying old games. And I think that made, like, that really kind of helped push awareness and love of classic games back into sort of the public eye. Yeah, well, I, but, yeah, Chate was way too early for that. Yeah, and I love, I love now that you can get things that have a retro aesthetic, but are, but play well, because, I mean, you know, a lot of the old games, it was hard. If you go back and you go through a huge stack of NES games,

I'm not trying to be nasty with this statement, but there are a lot of games that really, sometimes they graphically look nice, but they were very hard to play, or you're falling through solid surfaces constantly. There's just things about them that, again, it was a young industry, and people were trying to figure it out, and the rules were not established. So, you know, it's like, that looks like a thin platform,

but you hit your head on it and you fall in the pit and you die. Like, people had not, the language had not been, you know, established. So you can find that or you can find games that play great, but don't look so great. It seems that with a lot of indie developers now, they've really figured out, you know, they're building on that language, and a lot of their games look really good, and they play really well, and they have that kind of nostalgic throwback feel. So it's kind of fantastic. You're getting everything.

it all actually can work. Right. But yeah, you were sort of bringing up the tail end of the, before that happened. And, you know, I specifically said sort of like the last great 8-bit game, 8-bit specifically, because when you move to Game Boy Advance to DS, like, those are more powerful platforms. And they have greater capabilities, more flexibility than you had on Game Boy Color or NES or Game Gear or, you know, Master System, whatever. you just you know you have Game Boy Advance had a higher resolution than Game Boy Color

sure you could push more sprites there could be more frames of animation you had extra buttons to control things with you had shoulder buttons right so you know the the move from 8 to I guess that was a 32-bit platform change things like substantially within what you could do within games but Chate had to work within the limits of Game Boy game boy color so you know like what is that, 160 by 144 resolution and two-face buttons and, you know, like however few sprites

could be pushed around the screen at a time and however few sound channels it has. Yeah, yeah, that's right. And, you know, speaking of sound channels, too, it's Jake Kaufman was the composer then. And he, gosh, this was, I didn't, I don't think I really knew him back then. We were we were freelancing our music to Paragon 5. I think was the sound studio and he worked for them at the time and then he ended up coming back

and working on all the games after that so way back then he was doing stuff like stuff that was musical equivalent of some of the cool tricks that Jimmy Huey the programmer was getting out of the tech but you're right it was 8 bit we were doing all kinds of crazy stuff

if there was ever anything that you had asked Jimmy is there any way to put this sprite on the screen he's like well yes but at a huge cost like the old again I'm referencing more Mega Man the old Mega Man sprite where you've got the

two Sprites that were lapping to give the illusion of more colors right like Mega Man is actually two mega's man's there's two of him right and they're running along one right on top of the other to give the illusion that there are more than three colors Shante does the same thing but there's 12 of her so there are 12 Janté is running around

and it's not you know, like the whites of her eyes and highlights on her hair and all this different stuff, the gold on the costume. These are all different spright layers, and they're all layered together. But when he, and he would explain this stuff really well. It's, hey, we've got this limit of 10 sprites.

10 sprites on scanline, right? So that means we would have to build levels and characters being mindful of that kind of stuff because if she's going to be this many sprites, then it's going to come back. at a cost. So we have characters that are, it's like, well, all we can put on screen is an L-shaped

character that's bottom-heavy and thin on top because we will have broken the scant line rule and the sprites will start to disappear, right? So, well, what kind of enemy design can we come up with that's L-shaped? Well, we'll do like a snake that's got a heavy-coiled bottom and the skinny thing on top.

Or we'd start taking that concept and take it to the nth degree and say, well, here's the character that it's going to be thin, but its attack can only come out of the top 12 pixels of the sprite or the top four pixels of the sprite. So it's going to be something that breathes out some toxic sludge out of the top because that's all we have room for.

So our whole game is like this just Tetris piece where you don't really, I mean, you don't see it while you're playing, but whatever she's doing, if she's walking or crawling or whatever, the levels are constructed in such a way that as you encounter certain objects, the objects are going to be, generally they're going to be formed out of the negative space that she leaves behind. So if she's hair whipping, then we know that we've got plenty of space in the lower 16 pixels of the screen because her hair whip is going to be using up all the

sprites on the top. So in areas where we know we can do that, we'll tend to go, all right, well, don't do more than two bad guys crawling on the floor because they might be doing a duck attack. if you're going to have a guy firing fireballs out, make sure that it's one tile off the ground so that these things keep out of each other's scound line paths. Just crazy stuff like that.

And that's just, I mean, I could talk to, you know, forever on it. But it's so many things like that. And then there were, you know, pallet manipulation for the colors, trying to make it seem like it was day or night or into light or darkness and all kinds of crazy stuff. Yeah, but that's really interesting to me. He would do it. Yeah, he just, he's like,

I got a way. I know a way to do it. It's ridiculous, though. But yeah, you're saying, go ahead. Yeah, no, that's interesting to hear about because that's exactly what I mean by this was an 8-bit game. When you move up to, you know, Game Boy Advance or DS, you don't have so many of those restrictions anymore because the, you know, the systems could handle more sprites, could handle more colors. They didn't, you don't have to, you know, come up with workarounds and tricks. So being, you know, trying to create the best-looking game possible that still plays well, while fitting within the restrictions of the Game Boy Color,

that I don't know that people necessarily appreciate how much design was shaped just by sheer technical limitations of those old systems. Oh, and tons of it, tons of it. In fact, almost all of it, really. If you look at, you know, like something people probably wouldn't know or think of is things like, hey, if we're going to add this, you know, we're walking up, we're walking through a dungeon and we're coming up to a statue. and it's, well, the statue is facing camera, and it's a flip.

Right, you can flip on the X, but I think Game Boy Color, I think you could not flip on the Y. It would count as a new tile, if I remember, right? The Game Boy Advance, you could, or people wrote technology to get around it. But you'd go, well, we want to have this statue, have the highlights on the right side and shadows on the left. Well, that's going to eat up two tiles, like twice as many tiles because you can't flip it. And then we would look, I'm not kidding, we look at the script and go,

Oh, well, are any characters saying anything? Oh, yeah, it says, you found monkey dance. Well, what letters do we not use in that phrase? Well, we don't use the letter Z. It's like, all right, I'm deleting Z and I'm going to make another tile that's going to take the space in the alphabet where the letter Z is because I want my other half of a statue. And then you do, you know,

and when people wonder why it wasn't localized to other languages, that's probably one of the reasons. But you have a very limited number of tiles. It was something like a, I don't remember, a bank of 256. and maybe another bank of 144 or something, and you could bank swap these things. As long as both things weren't on the screen

at the same time, you were okay. So we're doing that kind of crazy stuff constantly. So things like the parallaxes, another interesting one. To me, this is like the coolest thing that Jimmy came up with. He's like, hey, if you animate a brick texture, you know, moving through a tile, just like take the eight frames that it takes up like a Mario block, Just get the pattern animating left to right, and then up and down, and then diagonally, he's like, I can run that animation, and I will check the direction that the character is facing and moving, and I will change the animation frames and make it be playing the animation of the brick moving in a different direction, depending on where you're going.

It'll always go opposite of where the player goes, and it should look like we have two layers of parallax, right? So I'm like, is it really? Is that really going to work? He's like, if you, he's like, if you animate all the tiles, I'll put it in. I'm like, okay, so we're, animate all these tiles, and then, sure enough, like, a couple days later, he had it working, and it's, I'm like, wow, it really looks like, it looks like, it looks like Super Nintendo. It looks like we have two layers of parallels, and then he's like, hey, so if you animate them all again, but in different states of highlight and shadow, I can make it look like you're moving through shadowed environments. I'm like, oh, okay, but it's going to eat up even more of our tiles, how are we going to do it? And he's coming up with ways of bringing tiles in on the fly and doing all this clever stuff. I mean, this, you know, I guess point of all that is, you know,

Jimmy Huey is the reason that that game is as special as it is. He was coming up with all these ways of working around. And it's weird. These days, I can't really say that there is, I've never been on a, in a situation as far back as I can remember, where you sit there and you go, well, is there any way? we can manipulate the way this hardware works to eke out, you know, one tiny bit more of data

because we can make the game that much exponentially better. It doesn't work that way anymore at all. I mean, we're throwing away huge amounts of memory just on, you know, writing a patch that, you know, brings into content or fixes some bug. But, yeah.

But Chonte was a case where every single element counted, it had to count. Yeah, everything. Every single thing. So, it's neat. It's neat working that way. It's fun. It's like a big puzzle. It's fun to work on.

But with those restrictions, you still wanted a pretty expansive game, you know, like a non-linear sort of adventure-style game with an upgrade system and transformations for the heroine. So you have all these elements like, you know, like the best of a big games. You know, you look back at the classics and you've got, you know, Wonder Boy 3 with the transformations and things like that. Did you look to these games for inspiration or what was, I don't know. Like, was it sort of just kind of lurking in the back of your mind? No, it was, it was things. I mean, there were a couple.

We had this, you know, we played Zelda Link to the Past, and that was just mind-blowing. We couldn't get over how cool that game was. And I think a lot of what we were trying to do is we wanted so much to be like that game because it was so, I don't know, there's something very intangible about that game. It's hard to explain. Like, I go for hours on how much I love that game. game. That, plus our

history, the stuff that we liked leading up to that, because again, to put it to the time frame, Super Nintendo was still fairly new when we were pitching all this Chantee stuff. Super Nintendo was new, and 8-bit is what we had kind of gone through high school and our earliest college years. That was normal, right? So the best-looking games of the 8-bit was, well, Mega-Man, no, Mega-Man 2, or Mega-Man 3, these were the ones that you know, we're incredible looking to us.

There were a few other games like Capcom's Little Nemo, some of those other really cool ones. You know, we love Contra. We love the Castlevania as one, two, and three. The Chante game had a lot to do with Castlevania, too. It was like, well, that game was great. And this was when people were starting to kind of figure out like, hey, people didn't really like Zelda 2, and they didn't really like Castlevania 2.

And the joke was, when you get to 3, 3 is always the correct game. Because, you know, you do number 1, and it's great. You do a sequel and you experiment too much and it's weird. Then you do a number three and you've got your formula right spot on just like Super Mario 3, right? So we were looking at those games and thinking, oh, well, what if there was

a, you know, Zelda 2 and Simon's Quest are both really cool games. They're just kind of rough and a little hard to play. So we were looking at those through the lens of Link to the Pastures came out. Is their way to make a

the, gosh, what you call it, the polish of something like linked to the past, but maybe something like the vision of Simon's Quest, and can you combine those and make something a little more light, a little lighter and a little easier to play? Turns out, Chonte, of course, is this really

brutally difficult game? So I don't know, that totally works, but these are the things that inspire. It's difficult for other reasons than Castlevania 2, though. Castlevania 2 is hard just because no one tells you the truth and many of the objectives and the tools for getting forward are very

opaque, like, you know, ducking in front of a cliff while holding a crystal. Like, the game doesn't tell you to do that. There's no way you would figure that out on your own. Whereas, yeah, Shantay, I think, is challenging just because enemies soak up a ton of damage and hit really hard. So it's more of a traditional, like, arcade-style

difficulty. Yeah. It's also, I think, the game's hard because of, you know, the time, again, the time period, you want to make it hard. It needs to be challenging because you're selling it exclusively to the hardest core of gamers at this point but also

inexperience I think one of the first things I threw out later was oh gosh the idea of going to a store

and buying 30 fireballs and then throwing them at a bad guys and then just being out of fireballs is just bad

it's like that's just bad no one wants to go all the way to a store just to buy a stock of 30 more

fireballs just to throw them it puts too much value on them this was not good the save system is weird I mean

I'll be the first to admit I think the safe system is really weird. You go, and they are, they were shoehorned in, late, late in the game, too. It was, you goes, hey, we have a life system, but then also let's adopt sort of like this, you know, super Metroid style checkpoint thing, and it doesn't work super, super great, honestly. It gets the job done, but the rules seem inconsistent, and I try not to build things that way anymore. The All-Novey

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Some features not available in all states. So, yeah, so what were the lessons you took away from Shanty? Obviously, you know, some of the, like, the technical limitations, those didn't matter anymore. But the design elements and just the overall, like, I don't know, the characters seem to have a lot. lot of life to them. They're still, you know, running around and half-dainee hero. Yeah. Yeah.

Gosh, yeah. What way the takeaway is? Well, a lot of them, it's funny, a lot of them were technical or maybe more how to serve the player better. Things like, I would just struggle with the concept of, well, we've got this big scrolling environment, but it's a game about pits, and a lot of people will

still go back and play it. I see people on YouTube or Twitch or they're doing streams and sure enough they're climbing up this waterfall area and then they fall and then how would you ever know you just fall in a pit and you're dead and it's the worst because you're dead and the same system the way that it works

with the life system it's that's so cheap I fell in a pit no I wouldn't do that I would have I would restrict I would restrict myself and say if it's a section with pits in it we're not doing vertical camera scroll or in half genie hero

they are doing something more sophisticated where the camera kind of magnetizes to the bottom of the stage so that when you're jumping, the camera is staying locked and the player is actually moving up and down on the screen rather than scrolling the pits off the bottom of the screen because that's just kind of a... I don't know, I mean, it seems like common sense, but we didn't know at the time what the solution was.

Right. Yeah, I could see some experimentation going on, you know, in the sequels. Like, Risky's Revenge, if there's a pit that you can fall into and die, It sends up these little skull images, which, like, it communicates. Yeah, these are deadly, but I don't know that that's necessarily the most elegant way to go about. No, yeah, it was. Yeah, you're right. It was an experiment.

And that game also, if you fall in water, you die, right? That's the one where you die in water, or is right? No, it's not, because you become a mermaid. It's Pirates Curse where you fall and die in water. And as you can kind of tell, well, yeah, they blur together for me a little bit. But in each one, if you over do notice in the new, were games like Pirates Curse and half-geny Hero, they

aren't consistent, but the reason they're not consistent is because I want to make sure that the rules are correct for the games that they are. When you say not consistent, you mean from one game to the next, but they are internally consistent. Right. You'd expect that, hey, if water kills you, then that's a rule. That's a Chante rule. It's like, ah, but it's not

actually a Chante rule. It's whatever the new game is, whatever the game is going to be about, Chanty's going to be in and you're playing as her, but let's not assume that the things that were the right choices for the last game are still the right choices for the new game. So, in other words, if there was a future game,

it might just go right back to that. You fall in water and you die because that's got to be the rules for that game because of the goals of that game. And that might seem weird, but it's got to be, you've got to serve the game. Like, whatever the game is and what it's about, some of the, like,

those things can just hinder the development of a new game. You want to figure it out from scratch. Yeah, and we should maybe talk about a little bit about, you know, what the rules are and what Chanty is exactly, like, you know, not everyone necessarily has played Chanty. Sure, yeah. And, like, how have the rules adapted from game to game? Because each one does seem to have sort of a different premise to the mechanics and the capabilities that Chante can use.

Yeah, each one has, from the first one, we liked the first game and it seemed that people really enjoyed it but there were some barriers and in a lot of cases it was hey this game this is before I started going down a path of I want to really focus on pacing of the games

and make sure they have better pacing before it seemed very very awesome to be able to take a level and go look you can stretch the level out to be 12 screens long look how big the level is that's great everyone's going to want to play this big level because it's so big And then it's, you know what?

No, it's not, because the music's going to start getting repetitive. It's a long walk back if you fall and have to restart. And no, bigger isn't better. It's so much smarter to have, you know, this is when it started going way deeper on my dives in Super Metroid's and games that have really smart ways of looping back your paths to save your time and to remind you. It's like, oh, I just got this item. And where was I going to use that item again? Oh, I'm sure I'll remember. and then you take a step and then the floor collapses

and you're in the room where the item is required and you're like, oh, I'm a genius, I found it. It's like, eh, sure. Well done. Yeah, but that's really smart, good level design. So I've started looking more at that. Sorry, remind me of the question

because I got off on a candle. How have you tried to change each game? Oh, yeah. Because, you know, at the end of Risky's revenge, Chante loses her magic powers. And so the sequel is kind of like, you know, like, it reflects that. It allows to rewrite the rules a bit in a way that's very forgiving.

Yeah, I guess my, I didn't quite get there. Point was that my pacing was not so great. As a director, pacing wasn't so good. So I'm trying to make that better and better. That's why in the middle there you've got little games like Mighty Switch Force 1 and 2 or Mighty Flipchamps. Those are games I directed in the middle. And those were, I want to make a game where someone can sit down,

get the whole experience and hit every beat on the, like have all the cool discovery moments and really build up to something intense in a single sitting. Like let's try this, let's see if we can do this. And these were exercises

for me to, as a, just speaking purely as a director, I mean they serve other purposes of course, but just for trying to get better at the job, I need sometimes a little game where I can sort of like, hey, am I still doing okay before I work another big one. Maybe I better make sure I actually know what I'm doing here before I rope a bunch

of other people into this madness again, right? So, yeah, Pirates' curse was, it was this dancing mechanic is just dragging out. It's becoming, it's too laborious. The first game, it was hard for people. It is not well tutorialized. And I didn't want to do tutorials. And I kind of still don't. Honestly, I want it to be that you can easily figure it out because the situation leads you to it. But there's something really, really

good about just having the moves integrate straight into your move set that I still think Pirates curse is to it solves that the best. Half Jeannie Hero is, well, we're going back to the dancing because Shanta is about dancing. And she has to be about dancing. It's like, Hairwhip is kind of her number one thing. That's what you do

most of the time. And dancing is your second thing. It's what you do, you know, some of the time. And then there's other things like shopping and buying power-ups and casting magic and things, and those are kind of your third tier. Things are going to do less often, or some players won't do it at all, depending on how they customize their character. The hardest part of this is trying not to get stuck in the, hey, she's got a dance. Dancing is the gameplay.

And Pirates Curse, we didn't do that. We switched it around. Dancing is just a thing you could do to suck items into you, but it was not the core gameplay. and it felt weird to make that decision because it seems like that's where a gaming brand and a game are in direct conflict.

And in this case, I feel like the right decision was made, which was to embrace the gameplay and not worry about what the brand was. But she's an answer. It's like, well, not today. She can't be a dancer right now. Well, again, like you change her status

as a genie at the end of the second game. So at that point, like, just inherently, it's saying it's going to be different from this point on. So I feel like there was some use of the narrative there to kind of justify gameplay changes. Yeah.

Yeah, and I don't know if that's something that will always have to do to make those changes, but maybe. Aftini Hero had a much snappier transformation system. You very quickly change, and we overhauled that a few times. It was at one point it was beat-based. There was

a time where it was a big radial menu with Guitar Hero-like things sliding into the middle, but you could, you know, Oh, get a sense of the rhythm, hit the button at the right time. And then maybe you win and maybe you'll lose. But then it becomes a, gosh, all I want to do is climb up this wall. Do I really have to play a mini game with a fail state in it just to turn into this monkey? And then that leads you to a point where you have to make a decision.

Either you're playing that game to become a monkey, and then you're going to stay in the monkey for him for quite some time because the payoff has got to be significant, or she's just a walking Swiss Army knife. you just need the, I just need the monkey to get over this ledge. In that case, it can't be laborious. It's got to be more like a Metroid, well, like a Metroid wall grab or a screw attack or something like, or a spider ball. Any of those examples, like, it's got to be integrated into your movesets so you can just do it.

So, risky boots, the risky boots mode, the Pirate Queens Quest, DLC, I'm sorry, I'm talking about the current day game now. Haphtunee Hero. Yeah, Haphtunee Hero, thank you. that one, it's both you've got the Chante mode which plays a bit more like the classic mode where you actually dance and you transform into stuff but faster and then you have Pirate Queen's Quest

where it plays more like a Metroid where it's all fully integrated so which way is better they're both good but they they're different flavors and I tend to like the more integrated control scheme which is

very much against the way that the game was at the beginning so the beginning game is more like, you know, would they make another ocarina of time today, where you have to pull out an ocarina and type in a bunch of, you know, well-executed musical notes? I don't know, maybe, but they haven't.

Yeah, Brother the Wilde has a fast travel system where you bring up a map and say, I'm going to want to go here and you're there. Like, that's simple as it gets. I think that, you know, they've definitely shied away from the, like, the dietic idea of, like, here's a thing you have to do within the game world in

order to play the game. What was the last one? It was probably the DS when they had something where you had to do anything close to that. The Spirit Tracks where you had to like play the instrument and like blow into the microphone, which maybe that was the breaking point

at which everyone was like, all right, let's not do this again. We've taken it too far. Go the other direction. Yeah. So those, yeah, those are all cool things that made those games special in their own way.

But are the series, do they define a series or they define one game? And I think that's kind of the question with this, right? And I think Chante needs a dancing game. I think there should be one where it's all about the dancing because that's really cool and it's something that's special to her. But it just didn't seem like it should be this one. And yeah, I think that's something that is required for good design

is to say, like, I have all these things I want to do, but here's what's not going to happen because all of these things together are going to. be in conflict. Yeah. So, yeah, we had, you know what? We had a lot of that. I worked with James Montagnan, he's one of the directors here.

I've worked together in a bunch of stuff. Going back for the last, I want to say, three Chante games we worked together. He was Love Designer, and then recently he's more assistant directing, and sometimes he directs a lot of his own games, too. Just awesome, talented guy. His, um, he worked with me a lot on the friends to the end. DLC for again for half Jeannie Hero

and depending on when this is out either that DLC has launched or is about to launch but that one you're playing us the three friends and the three friends we tried at the beginning we're building them all out as their own individual characters and they were incredibly fun but

all three of them could just you could just play the whole game with any of the three and there was no interdependency between them and while they felt really great to play us on their own It was fun playing as Roddy Tops, but you would never want to play as Bolo or Sky, which are the other two friend characters that you could swap to. You just wouldn't because you'd just play as Rottie Tops.

It was fun. Or if you preferred Bolo, you'd just play as Bolo. And there was, again, a point in development when we went, all right, if Bolo had his own game, what would the controls be? Oh, they'd be the controls we already have, right? Okay, if Rottie Tops had her own game, what would her controls be? And we started realizing, oh, the pattern here is these characters are all playing their own individual game, but our goal for the project was that you would play as all three of them

and that they would like part of the theme of the story but also what you're doing is the player is learning to work as a team and utilize the three characters. And so it is a game where you play as the three characters and that's what it became. But I remember working this stuff out with James and for a while there were kind of being our heads against a wall trying to figure it out because sometimes those answers seem so obvious.

But this time it just, it wasn't. and it wasn't clicking, and we kind of had to get on the other side of that, remind ourselves the goal was play as the three characters. But there was a point where we almost just decided, you know, maybe we should just make it that you play us three, it's just three different characters, and they're not connected. But I think that just led to a, you know what,

we'll never reach the potential that each character has if we're beholden to the game that's already been built that we're crafting ad-on content into, they would deserve their own game if we're going to do that type of gameplay. So that's where we went with it. Yeah, it's like, I don't know, these are some of the challenges of game design.

It's nice when you're working on a game that, you know, thanks to some, I'd say, now ridiculously patient backers, we've been able to stop and make decisions like that and make the necessary changes where, you know, most other games you can't really. Yeah. It has to ship exactly on the day it's, supposed to ship. So people have been very kind and patient with us with that.

Yeah, I know people get touchy when a game gets delayed, but I think ultimately, you know, when they look back a few years later, they'll be happy, you know, they're always happy to have had a better game experience than a faster game experience. Yeah, yeah, well, I think then. I don't know. I'm grateful, I'm grateful for that because this has certainly been a long production. This one, that Kickstarter was 2013. Sounds about right So yes It's been a very long time

And these DLC packs have been taking What's it been We worked on all three of them All three of the stretch goals Of the ones for add-on content Well the one of the first one We actually built into the main game So that was shipped with the regular game

I mean you really can't tell It's just right in there There's more levels than we originally were going to do But these other ones The Pirate Queen's Quest The Friends at the end in the costume mode. The three of them together took us the entire calendar year,

like all of 2017 to complete that. So when the final DLC comes out and the ultimate edition that you're working on has shipped, then is that it for Half Jeannie Hero? I think so. Yeah, I'd like, I think at that point, it'll be, I think at that point everyone will be ready for something else.

I love this content and think it's really, really cool And there's some of the, there's so much fun to be found in these. But there's going to be a point in time where, and I think we're already, we're mostly already there. It's, you've heard the music, you've seen these visuals, you've seen these animations. And you've replayed them at, you know, over and over. I don't know if every, I don't know if every player is going to play every one of these modes. I don't know if they'll get them and go, oh, well, you know, I played the, I played the Ninja mode, but I never really got around to the other ones.

so I'm not sure maybe they'll rediscover them later but yeah it'll be time for something fresh I think after that do you personally plan to take a break away from Shantay for a while or you know even after having been immersed in

Half Jeannie Hero for so long are you still like let's see what's next I could use one the Pirates Curse overlap development with Half Jeannie Hero so I haven't I've been on a steady diet of Shantay for something like

six years now and I think for me if it takes on the qualities of a new project then then it's totally fine if it's if it's not if it's too samey then I would rather take a break so there's something where I could really go oh man here's something really new and innovative and different it'll be fine if it's Chonte that's fine and I've got tons more I'd like to do with it and I know Aaron does too. Although our vision for it is very different. Mine is very game-centric. She's very interested in stuff like

TV or getting it into something where where kind of anybody can enjoy it. So we'll see if after this, Shanty has become a lot more popular in the last five years, thanks to this campaign and everything and backers and all the noise people have made. It's been awesome. So

it would be really cool. It'd be cool to be able to do something like a show or you know, we've started kind of dabbling a little bit with figures and merchandising things. So, yeah, so where is the Shantai Amibo? That's what Dauldin and do that wants to know. Right. I want one, I want one too.

So, yeah, about that, I mean, there's no reason to not talk about it, really. We've tried to figure out how to do that. Got a couple of friends who have given us some tips as to how we might go about it. And it comes down to, it takes a long time, and it seems to be very expensive. And then once it's there, there's the kind of almost like the starting question is, well, what does it do and what does it unlock? And I don't feel strongly about having it just unlock something that doesn't seem right. The fact that you've got a piece of, you got a toy that's a piece of technology that can read them, that can, like, read them right. It seems like it should be able to do something really cool and not just unlock a thing.

Nothing against things that unlock. I mean, that's cool. I have lots of amoeboes. and I do use them very often to unlock content. I think it's cool. But there's something to compare them. The Zelda ones where you put it on the near field communication or whatever, sorry, whatever that thing is called,

and it drops a chest full of fish or something. It's like, oh, cool, I got fish. I got arrows. I got something neat I can use. That's fun, but I'm so much more interested in the Smash Brothers style where it's the idea being that it's somehow learning or adapting moves. and it can become sort of a fighter in its own right is really cool.

I like that concept, and I sure would be neat to have something where you're adding value into your amoe over time, the more you use it, something like that. So it's not lack of interest. I'm really interested in making an amoe, but it's kind of got to go, well, it shouldn't just be, oh, it unlocks an unlocks a color swap in Chante or something. It's like, well, what does it do? What can it do to really be a valuable component of the game?

So I'd still really like to do one, though. So people aren't like, oh, man, he doesn't want to do an amoebo. No, I totally want to do an amoebo. I just want to do the right one. I want to do more than have a figure with a chip inside. I want to do something that actually does something really neat. Well, I think, you know, looking back at the history of the series, it's definitely been an endeavor that has required patience

and striking when the time is right. So I'm sure that that philosophy will continue to percolate through the games and whatever pops up around them. Thanks for saying that. But now I'm like, oh, man, it's going to be in, like, the real Chante way, though, would be way until Amoebo is dead for two years and then come out with them. I'd be like, look, we did it. Maybe you could do like Chante cereal with an NFC amoe chip in the box.

Are you going to get the cereal? I don't know. I'm going to get the cereal. I'll do whatever they say. Go get the cereal, go get it, just eat it, who cares? Get your cereal. Yeah, I'm totally buying that cereal. I don't know if I'm going to eat it, eat the cereal,

but I'm certainly going to cradle the box and then probably put it on your switch. Yeah, I've put it on a shelf until I'm like, oh, it's disgusting now. What am I going to do with this? I'm on to the box for 10 years. All right, so maybe no shanty cereal. I don't know. Sure. Tinkerbat marshmallows.

Yes. They sound delicious. All right. I think that's a... We've been going for an hour and a half now, so I don't want to take up any more of your time. Oh, that's all right. I'll keep blabbing.

You've seen it. It's what happened. This has been great. Really thoughtful and interesting answers about the history and just the design and tech of the games. So that's great. Thanks, Matt. Yeah, thank you.

Thanks for having me. And I will look forward to seeing whatever happens next with Shanta, even if it is another eight years. Yeah, thank you. Hopefully it won't be that long. but whatever it is, when inspiration strikes, that's when we'll move. So, yeah, look forward to it, whatever it is. And I hope everybody gets to really enjoy the current version, Havini Hero, and the DLC.

And I always want to say how grateful I am to the backers who funded this because I said it before, but I'll just keep saying it, we were not going to make this game. We were not going to make it. This was out of our league. We did not have the budget for this. So thank you all for making it happen and funding it. Wonderful.

You're wonderful people. All right. Thanks a lot. The All New Toyota RAV4 asks, what if your ride was refined? and rugged at the same time. Introducing a car that's got style and substance to spare. The all-new RAV-4 Limited, featuring a sophisticated, muscular new exterior and available options like a premium JBL audio system

and panoramic roof. The all-new RAV-Ford Limited. Toyota, let's go places. JBL and Clarifier register trademarks of Harmon International Industries Incorporated. The Mueller report. I'm Ed Donahue with an AP News Minute. President Trump was asked at the White House

his special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation report should be released next week when he will be out of town. I guess from what I understand, that will be totally up to the Attorney General. Maine Susan Collins says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving a President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall, becoming the first Republican senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire was among the mourners attending his funeral. Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officers started shooting at a robbery suspect last week. Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral. It's a tremendous way to bear knowing that your choices will directly affect the lives of others.

The cops like Brian don't shy away from it. It's the very foundation of who they are and what they do. The robbery suspect in a man, police say acted as his lookout have been charged with murder. I'm Ed Donahue.