Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 146: The Metroid sisterhood - Scurge Hive and Iconoclasts

Episode Date: April 9, 2018

Nintendo never created a follow-up to 2002's Metroid Fusion, but this week Jeremy interviews the developers who did: Dan Kratt and Graham Scott, who put together DS/GBA cult classic Scurge Hive, and Joakim Sandberg, creator of Iconoclasts.

This week in Retronauts, a not-so-wretched hive of scum and villains. Hi, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Retronauts, another interview-based episode of Retronauts. As usual, I'm Jeremy Parrish. And this week, it's an episode that I've been wanting to put together for like a year or so. And we finally managed to round all the people up to make these, you know, the moving parts necessary to make this project happen. And so I am on the line with, actually, why don't you guys introduce yourselves?

Sure. I'm Graham Scott. I was the one of the design leads on Scurge Hive and other projects at Orbital Media. And my name is Dan Krat, and I was also, I guess, one of the project leads on Scourge Hive. And I guess you guys have spoiled the surprise. Yes, this episode is about the Game Boy Advance and DS, I would say, cult favorite, Scurge Hive, a game that came out really early in the DS's life, very late in the GBA's life.

And, yeah, I think it kind of flew beneath the radar. for a lot of people, but it caught my attention back when I was writing for one-up and being like the lone voice saying, no, the DS is good, I swear. And it was, in a lot of ways, it was kind of like the Metroid dread that never happened because my, my, I think, first encounter with Scurge Hive was at E3, 2005, and before the show began, like the week before the show began, someone from electronic gaming monthly surreptitiously showed me a list of games Nintendo was going to be

showing at E3. And the only one I remember from that list was something called Metroid Dread for D.S. And I was like this is it. This is going to be the D.S. turnaround. This is going to change everyone's opinion about the system and they're going to love it because it's going to be an awesome Metroid game. Not Metroid pinball, not hunters.

This is the real deal. So I went to E3 and the Zift Davis one-up, EGM, et cetera, booth was kind of diagonal from Nintendo's setup. We had a big booth and it had like a rooftop area like a pavilion where we could sit and work. So I would sit out there and, you know, I'd be writing up my stories for E3 while watching Nintendo's big screens and I was watching their B-roll and waiting for them to show Metroid Dread and it never showed up. But there was this other game and I was like, that looks kind of. Metroid-y, there's like a girl and she's jumping and grappling and shooting and fighting infectious things that's kind of, you know, science fictiony. What is that? And it took me a while

to find out because Nintendo had it in their B-roll, but they didn't like put it out on the floor. And eventually I realized, oh, this is it. This is Scurge Hive. This is the game that I'm curious about. And, you know, when I actually sat down to play it, it turned out to be, I think, something very distinct and it's, you know, in its own right, but still kind of scratch that Metroid itch in a sort of different, unexpected way. So it's really kind of stuck with me and has been sort of one of my, I don't know, I've had like a soft spot for it ever since, God, what was that? It came out in like 2005, 2006. Yeah, sounds about right. So that's a, that's a little tiny torch I've been carrying for a decade now, more than a decade.

But anyway, you guys, I don't know, Dan reached out to me a long time ago through email and was just like, hey, you know, I've read your positive impressions of Scurge Hive through the years. And, you know, those days are long past me, but it's cool that you like it. And so I kind of kept his information around. And we got in touch when I started doing Retronauts as more of a full-time venture. And here we are talking about, hopefully, Scurge Hive and the creation of the game and the inspirations and maybe some other stuff too. So thanks guys for, I know one of you had, I think Graham had to take a long drive. Am I correct in thinking that? Not too long, but two, two and a half hours. That's a pretty long drive. I don't know. It is Canada, which I realize is a lot of big open space. So maybe, you know, I grew up in Texas.

So like a three hour drive there, it's like, oh, yeah, that's the next town over. So I kind of get it. But still, like that's a big chunk of your weekend. And I appreciate you taking the time to come in and hang out with Dan and hopefully share your thoughts on this game that some people still love Vonley even if it wasn't, you know, like a huge breakout hit

that changed the video games industry. We really appreciate the opportunity, Jeremy. So I'm Dan, and I kind of showed up late in the life of scourge. I mean, all things considered, the life of scourge was many, many years, I think, actually. So I'm going to let Graham sort of kick it off and sort of tell us how it all came to be, because I didn't join the project for a while. Yeah. So, hi, I'm Graham.

So a bit of history, I guess, jumping back even slightly before the creation of Orbital Media. When I started with the company, we were actually working as PixelPlay Interactive. We're working on an N64 DD game. It was like this big kind of gauntlet. meets a whole bunch of different genres. It was a really interesting project to work on. We worked on it for about two, two and a half years, developed a really strong relationship with Nintendo.

But by the end of the project, it was clear that there were a lot of different factors that were going to cause the DD not to be a thing in North America. And there was this really interesting piece of technology on the horizon and being the Game Boy Advance. So we got to kind of go to a few meetings with Nintendo and see the product before it actually got announced and stuff. And we really got excited about that piece of hardware,

specifically because a lot of us grew up playing Super Nintendo games, and it was kind of like a return to that 16-bit power level and being able to use a lot of the tricks and stuff that we knew from that era. So we started off working on a game called Racing Gears Advance for the Game Boy Advance, which did pretty well. It let us build a lot of the base technology that would kind of drive to all of the later projects that we worked on. Specifically, a really simplistic, I guess, tile editing system. It was like pretty much just copying and pasting eight by eight chunks of artwork and kind of, of piecing them together. But the really cool part about that project was actually the

collision and the physics system that kind of drove the gameplay, which I got to implement in all of the tracks. So we had, I don't know how technical I can go in terms of describing this, but. Yeah, go for it. Yeah. So we essentially, we didn't have pixel accurate collision. We had sub-pixel-acurip collision by defining all of the tracks with vectors and stuff, and we could define different physical properties and create three-dimensional ramps and stuff, which was pretty badass for the Game Boy Advance at the time. And the gameplay was really tight. Nintendo loved it. We loved it. Fans seemed to love it. But as I was working on putting the collision information in all of the maps, I kept thinking about how we could

extend that system to make a different kind of game and that's where the I guess the first kernel of thought toward what Scourge would eventually become kind of came from so I was a huge huge Super Metroid van I love that game and a lot of other games that had a similar kind of I guess Zelda-esque layering of you get this ability and then now you have all of these different exploration options in the environment And that really appealed to me as a player and as a designer. So I started thinking about what we could do in that space. And the original, I guess, prototype for Scourge was actually just a series of HTML webpages that had little mockups.

And it had the entire game world. And it was all 2D, like very traditional Metroidvania style layout. But as I was thinking about, like, would that really be what we wanted to make? And a large part of, a large part of me said, yes, that's exactly what I want to make. There was a nagging kind of voice in the back of my head that kept pulling me back to what we did with the, the isometric collision that we had in racing gears advance. And so one weekend I opened up, I can't even remember what the name of the application was, some kind of like RPG maker software, but I basically made a little prototype of moving a

character around in an isometric space with eight-directional control and allowing the character to actually collide and interact with the walls in eight directions. So up to that point, usually the isometric games that you would see were like Landstocker on the Genesis or equinox on the Super Nintendo where it's kind of the isometric world is four-directional so if you push up on the D-pad your character moves in like the northeast direction or whatever what I wanted to do is essentially have eight-directional movement so if you push up your character moves actually north on the screen and if you push to the northeast and they move in the appropriate direction so that's kind of where things got started I brought in the prototype on the Monday and I showed it

the management team and they got super excited by it and that was kind of the the very very beginning of the project yeah yeah the idea of um doing your initial demo for the game in html is is that's very unusual i don't think i've ever heard of that before yeah it was it was my own personal uh way of documenting it and sharing it with with other people uh it was a lot quicker for me to just be able to draw a sketch in Photoshop, mark it up in whatever web browser application, and just like, here's a door, and you click on the link, and it takes you to another screen. But it added everything from, like, you pick up this power up here, and there are these types of enemies in this room, like, not super detailed on exactly where the enemies and stuff

were, but you could literally walk through the entire game. And thinking back on it now, that game would have been incredibly huge. Huh. Probably about six times the size of Super Metroid at least, just in terms of your size. So out of curiosity, how much of that initial design document ended up becoming Scourge? Like, is Scourges, like, the flow of power-ups and things like that, is it pretty consistent? Or did the game, like, become completely overhauled once you decided, let's go with the isometric perspective? Yeah, it changed completely.

What we found was because the original more traditional Metroid plan was it was based off of 2D platforming as the core kind of mechanic. When you move into isometric, it's a very different type of space that you have to manage and move around and like just the sheer, just the simple act of moving your character in isometric as opposed to like a 2D side scrolling spaces. It's a very, very different. And there's some things that, even in the finished project of skirts, there's some things that looking back on it,

I'm like, oh, I wish we didn't necessarily push for these types of things, like the pipes, for example, comes to mind. And like some of the more challenging jump and like lining up in isometric space. there's certain things that worked really well with the isometric, like just being able to be surrounded by enemies and firing off projectiles in eight different directions and that stuff worked really well. But, yeah, I would say from the original design,

quite a bit changed. Maybe like 5% remained in the Dutch project. So about what year was this that you sort of laid down the initial plan and said, oh, I should make a game, you know, that kind of scratches my super Metroid itch. I would say that was around 2002. Okay. So. Somewhere around there.

Yeah. So this was when, like, no one was making those kinds of games. We just kind of had an episode on this, actually, a couple of episodes. I just recently interviewed Matt Bozahn from Way Forward about Chante, which was like the one game in that style that came out in 2002 that wasn't Castlevania. or Metroid like it just it was just kind of like this dead niche that no one really cared about so I don't know like obviously you said you know you liked super Metroid but what made you think you know the time is right for me to do something along these lines honestly it was it was that noticing that same drug we were we were all kind of like oh we'd really like to make this game and

we weren't hearing any any rumblings as we were in early development at least of anything and even remotely similar to it. So it was kind of the same thought process where we'd really like to make this. There doesn't seem to be any heavy competition in the space. And that largely kind of spearheaded us moving forward with it. Now, later on in production,

like when we were, I remember 1E3, when we were presenting us or not presenting it, but showing it off in the Nintendo booth, and I actually met up with a couple of the guys from way forward because they were presenting Chante and there was kind of like an unspoken respect. We were like, oh, I really wanted to see your project. Oh, I really wanted to see your project too.

So it was cool. I think a lot of people kind of saw that there was a place in the market for this type of game and all kind of struck at the same time. But Scourge stands out, because it's not the same style of game in a lot of ways. has that sort of interconnected backtracking power-up-heavy style as Metroid and Castlevania. But, you know, it's isometric. And so that totally changes the dynamic of the gameplay. I guess at this point, we really should, you know, for listeners who probably have not ever played this game before, explain exactly what it is. But Skirt Hive, like I said,

came out on GBA and DS. It started out as a GBA game. And then, I guess, because it was delayed for so long, ended up also getting a DS port. yeah that's that's pretty accurate um it did we kind of were making changes and um the production went on forever and ever uh to the point where it was getting close to the end of the gba life cycle um and then um unfortunately the game kind of had to go uh on the shelf um we can get into that there's kind of like a back history on why and and how uh but anyway it sat on the shelf for about a year and then when we finally kind of ended up finding a publisher, I believe that part of the deal was we had to port it to the DS

in order to get that publishing deal. Oh, interesting. Okay. So, yeah, you play as a female space bounty hunter named Genosa Arma, and she has a computer who talks to her a lot, and she wears like a blue outfit, kind of like Samus's zero suit, but I kind of feel like, you know, the similarities between the characters and there. Again, it's an isometric action game with a lot of multi-level platforming. You mentioned Landstalker earlier, and it does kind of have that feel, although I feel like

it's a lot less punishing than Landstocker. There aren't quite so many, like, I've got to jump into a moving platform, and I sure hope to God that I'm judging the perspective, right, because there's no visual clues. You guys did a good job of avoiding that sort of thing, which was nice. But I think sort of the big, the sort of, I guess, high-level concept here is that Genosa becomes infected with this alien virus or organism or something that's, you know, constantly percolating through her system. And there's like an infection meter in the screen. I don't know where you guys got that inspiration. We can talk about that.

But basically, if it hits 100%, then her health begins to go down. So the game kind of changes the flow. Like you have to be mindful of the save points because the same save points are where Genosa goes to purge the infection from her system and take it, you know, take the infection meter back down to zero. So you kind of like it becomes, I don't know, in my experience sort of like a territory game. Like you're always mindful of where the nearest save station is and you want to go out exploring but you're like, well, if I get it over my head, then I might not be able to make it back to a station in time, and then that's game over. So it kind of gives you the same sense of caution that you get. I feel in like a dungeon crawler RPG, where you have very sharp limitations

and you don't want to get it over your head. So you're always kind of like prodding out a little further to see what you can accomplish and then sort of going back to your safe space. So yeah, like I said, it's a very distinct take on the Metroidvania genre. And despite those superficial, like, oh, I see some Metroid here, it really does have this distinct personality of its own, just, you know, the perspective, the mechanics, and that central concept of the infection meter. So, yeah, like with that sort of established, what did I say I was going to ask you guys about? Oh, yeah, the infection meter. Like, I feel like that's such a central hook to the gameplay.

I'd like to know more about kind of like the thinking there where that idea came from. Yeah, so the infection meter, I can't remember exactly where it came from or like when it came in, I'd say about midway through the actual production of the game. And I think it largely came from a space of we wanted to encourage players to move around and explore but not completely free form explore. And we wanted to have the feeling that Genosa is essentially, like she's completely alone in this situation. And she should never feel like she's entirely safe. So having a constant pressure of some type of negative thing that is always kind of chomping at her back, that's largely where it came from. And I think a lot of it came from at the time. or years earlier playing games, like the early Resident Evil games, for example,

like that feeling that you get when you're like, okay, I found a typewriter. I know that I've, like, this is my little safe spot. And then as you kind of move out from there, you know that there's going to be other typewriter rooms within a short distance to where you are, but you don't necessarily know where it is. So it always kind of keeps you in that headspace of, I'm safe for the moment, but the further I get out, the more it's going to be kind of chomping at me. And I know that I have to get to, it's that whole kind of mindset that we wanted to have in the game. And once we implemented it,

it was like, this is, this is awesome. This is amazing. The constant pressure and that, and especially that creepy feeling of like, this isn't an external threat. This is something that's inside of her, that she has to kind of deal with repeatedly over the course of the game. And then hopefully, I used that as the, like, hey, I got to get cured by the end of this thing. Yeah, that was the whole kind of Hermescent setup. It's interesting that you mentioned Resident Evil. I'm kind of glad you did because that sort of came to mind as I was talking about this, but it's not like anything that's actually in a Resident Evil game,

but it just has that same sort of, like you said, that same sort of vibe, that sort of desperation and that sense of like, I'm never quite safe. And that's something that you definitely don't see a lot in this kind of game. And, you know, the Metroidvania exploratory platformer style of game, some of them are challenging, but they very rarely have urgency to them. And maybe, maybe like the closest that I've seen or can think of is like Metroid Fusion, where, you know, Samus, there is that kind of like biological element to like bio-horror sort of thing where she's been. sort of infected by this parasite but it doesn't affect the gameplay like that it just weakens her but then you have

the ex parasite that's stalking her throughout the game but even that is you know that's scripted it's like you meet the Samus X at certain points in the game and those are very tense moments but they're predetermined and you know once you know the where it's going to appear and what the script is

to get away from it then it's not really that big a deal whereas this is something pervasive and constant and, you know, it really shapes the flow of the game and the overall feel of it. Yeah, picking up on the, on the Resident Evil thing, too, those typewriter rooms had a real sort of distinct sort of music. I don't know if you'd call it music or not, but there was like a real sort of distinct feeling of semi-safe, but a little bit sort of creepy, whatever. Yeah, and I can't remember it offhand, but I do remember really loving the music that we had

in the safe rooms. Yeah, it had a very similar, like, I remember the music in, in the GameCube remake of Resident Evil, it was so good, so peaceful, but you knew that as soon as you left those doors, and now that I think back on it, like, our save rooms did have that same kind of, like, it's just, there's an ambient hum to the room,

and it's just kind of like, okay, catch your breath. You're good as long as you're here. Okay, let's go out. Yeah, so, you know, talking about Resident Evil, you get into the idea of horror, and I guess in a sense this is kind of a horror game but it doesn't really read that way because I think part of it is the color palette you use

there's a lot of you know that sort of like otherworldly neon green and everything is fairly bright even though it's sort of creepy and bio-horror and I think that that kind of like that I feel like that works for the game because it doesn't become like cliche horror it's more like you know

it's otherworldly like I said and it gives it a different vibe than you expect from like a survival horror game. And it kind of tells you like this isn't that kind of game. It's horror, but in a different way. Yeah. I guess we can kind of talk about, because you can speak directly to what color and that stuff. But we can touch on some of the way that we actually built the world. Because I've heard a couple of people say that the, like for a GBA, like for, because it was like,

a GBA and DS game. It's like, when you look at it on the DS, it's like, yeah, yeah, it's a good, it's a good game. But when you look at it on the GBA specifically, it's like it, there's a certain quality to the, to the visuals. And I'm pretty proud actually of what we did in terms of, um, how we actually built the world because the, um, I'm looking at the back of the box and there's like, just looking at the screenshots. The way that we actually built it was we built a framework, um, so that,

there were multiple floor pieces and wall pieces and door pieces and we could essentially just myself and like the level artist could essentially define the spaces like from a game play perspective without worrying about whether this was in the bio core or the industrial area or in the forest or whatnot and we could essentially just kind of paint over the geometry in a smart way and then also have multiple, like, each of the tile pieces had, like, hundreds of variations so that you could literally just kind of flip through them like a catalog. Alternates. Yeah, alternates.

But that whole system really led us to be able to smartly define, like, I still look back at it to this day, and I think I can't think of a better way that I'd want to work with a tile-based system in a game. It was super fun to work with. Dan actually did look when he came onto the project his first task was all of the color cycling and tile swapping and optimization so you can dig into that a little bit yeah I mean I was a scrappy 22 year old and I had just graduated from art school and I knew that I always wanted to make games and there isn't a huge sort of game scene in Calgary here so I would send out emails and no one would respond to me so

So one day I just decided to go to the Orbital Media offices and knock on the door. And then I met with the team. I offered to work for free for a time to get some experience. And then I actually was on Pirate Battle, which was a... One of the other projects. Yeah, it never saw the light of day. But I was working on the world map in Pirate Battle, which was another sort of tile-based thing. but the pyro battle team kind of moved on to the other projects that were happening and I went on to Scourge

and the first yeah the first two jobs as Graham was mentioning one was color cycling and one was tile optimizing yeah so those tile chunks that we would put down we would essentially just kind of not really care about how optimized the number of tiles so every pixel was completely unique and one of Dan's jobs was essentially finding patterns within each of the tile constructs that we had and okay this one looks exactly the same this one it's 95% the same and he would essentially optimize our stuff and get it all running good and then the color cycling was so it was a man this is going to be stretching my memory how this worked but because there's one of those things that we did once I did it once in my career then never again so the the

The GBA had a 256 color palette, and then you could reserve sort of sections of that palette. So let's say there's a 10 color string. So, for example, the scourge looks a little bit like bubbly lava. And there was, let's pretend there's eight colors that are being used in that scourge. But then you could pump other 256 color pallets through that section of colors on the primary 256 color palette to kind of make things look like they're animated. So anything that is moving in the backgrounds was all the color cycling. So water, the scourge or computer screens, that kind of stuff. And there was a ton of that stuff on the on screen.

I think we ended up doing a passing through. I can't think of anywhere where there isn't something animated on the screen at any time. So it keeps things looking vibrant. There's an Easter egg in the very first boss battle on the ship, the cruiser. And it's really hard to see now because we made a last-minute camera adjustment. But after you defeat that boss, if you look at a screen in the top left corner, because you can't see it until the boss is defeated because the camera doesn't let you get there during the battle. There's a computer screen that has my initials on it.

So the classic Easter egg. So, you know, I don't think I've ever actually played the GBA version of this game. You know, I was all in on DS once it launched and was kind of advocating for it. And, you know, there is a more spacious feel to the DS version of the game, I would think, because a lot of the features, like the map and stuff, are placed on the lower screen, you know, kind of like the classic Nintendo use case scenario. Like, you can have a screen showing or a map showing at all times on the second screen. so it's interesting to hear you say that like in some ways like the game shows better on GBA

that's a that's kind of I don't know like a little counterintuitive but it's interesting yeah I don't know if I would say it shows better it's I guess it was the original intended platform and when when you look at the the eventual life space of the Nintendo DS and all the things that people found and were able to do on that console. Because Scourge was so early on that platform, it's less, I don't want to say less impressive, but when you're just looking at only what the GBA can do,

it was a very impressive GBA game, and, you know, it was a port. It was essentially a port, right? And Jeremy, I remember at the time when it launched and the reviews and everything and it was at this time and I'm sure you're going to you're going to remember this time well where it was like but what are they doing with the second screen and it was like well we're doing a map every game does a map because it's amazing that this thing's even seeing the light of day

and we didn't you know have time to go retool the whole thing for that being said there are actually if I remember correct there are other differences like with all of the the cutscenes and the different sequences and stuff, which now I'm having PTS withdrawal, like scripting all of those things. I'm pretty sure that on the DS, the actual, we have larger sprites and larger images for those cutscenes. There was a difference with the, even if it was a small difference on the upper, the active gameplay screen, there was a difference in the amount of pixels that were available there. So it's not that it's a complete

port. It's, yeah. Yeah, I mean, the DS had a larger screen resolution. It was like 256 by 192 versus 240 by 160s. So that's a, you know, not massive, but definitely, you know, you get a little more

elbow room, a little more space to maneuver, which is nice. But yeah, there was this kind of sort of snobbish attitude about putting maps on the second screen on DS games and I never got that I'm like but this is a good quality of life user interface element like if I want to know where I am I look down like two inches and whoa there I can see it I'm right there that's great I don't have to pause and go to a subscreen

or bring up an overlay that's fantastic so like to me that was that was kind of like the ideal use for for the second screen for a game like this I don't want to have to you know draw say magic seals to be able to defeat a boss, that would be terrible. Who would do something like that? But yeah, you know, this game and Racing Gear's Advance, you created an isometric perspective on it. And I don't think you ever really said like why you went with that direction. I mean, Scourge was kind of going back to what you did with Racing Gear's Advance,

but what prompted Racing Gear's advance like that, that isometric style in the first place? Like you see that in a lot of British games, like rare and, you know, before the ultimate play the game kind of kind of did that whole thing and then you had i can't remember the guy's name john something stuff like head over heels like that was really big in the uk and the 80s and then you saw it sort of show up in in some racing games like rc pro am which was by rare and i think r pm racing maybe that that racing game iron man austin steward yes rock and roll racing that's another one um but yeah it was still pretty uncommon and And you didn't see a lot of people outside of the UK making isometric games besides something like Landstalker, which honestly kind of biffed the isometric perspective in a lot of ways.

So, yeah, like, to me, that's really interesting. I didn't realize it at the time, but as I've learned more about video game history and done more research and studying, I found, like, this is a very British thing. So you guys are Canadian. That's not quite Britain. It's a little Britain, a little Canada, or a little France, a little USA. say, it's a whole mix of things. So, yeah, it's just, it's, it's kind of surprising to look back and say, oh, yeah, here is an isometric racing game and platform game from Canada.

Yeah. I know that when we were making Racing Gears Advanced, there were a lot of those games were definite, we used them as kind of what we were shooting for. One of the big things with, with Racing Gear's Advance specifically was, The fact that it wasn't just a racing game, we also had, like, the weapon, like, car combat was a big part of it. So we weren't making Mario Kart, like, we weren't having, like, Mode 7, like, quasi-3D perspective.

So we knew that, like, a straight top-down approach wouldn't really work because we needed to be able to see as far ahead on the track, like, to be able to react turns and stuff. But also to be able to, like, if I'm firing off a homing missile, be able to, like, semi-line-up the shot and all that kind of stuff, be able to react to oil slicks that are coming on around the corner. I think that's where a lot of the decision came from specifically for the isometric camera, because we had a bunch of different prototypes for, like, more traditional top-down type of view. Like, there was another one. There was another game that was out at the same time. Karnov? Karnoge Rally? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And that one had like a, it was like a fake 3D, but it was still like top down. And through our early testing, we found that we needed to be able to see as far ahead as possible to the point of we actually, I believe in the camera system, like depending on how fast you're going, in the direction that you're going, it actually like pulls the camera back so that you can see as much of the screen in that direction as possible. I think we ended up using that in Scourge as well so that you're never just locked in the center of the screen. But if you're moving around,

it always gives you as much real estate looking forward as possible so that you can react accordingly. I think looking back a little bit too, the studio in general just kind of had like try really hard to do something really amazing with everything. It would have been a hell of a lot easier to make a 2D side-scroller than make this quasi-3D isometric game. But it was like everything that we did or tried to do was like shooting for the fences every single time. Yeah, we definitely aimed outside of our...

Yeah, we were young and dumb. It was like just a whole bunch of things. Yeah, plucky upstarts. We could do anything. Just give us enough hours in the day and we'd make it happen. Yeah, but the team sizes were never big enough to sort of execute on these things. They were, you know, not very many of us working on this thing. Yeah.

Yeah, it was a pretty small team overall. For the majority of the project, I'd say there was only like four people. Yeah, four up to maybe six or seven at one. point back down to yeah yeah so pretty tight group yeah so so the isometric perspective in scourge you mentioned you know being able to attack enemies in eight directions as opposed to just you know in uh at diagonals uh but what other impact did that have on the design of the game like genosa's powers and things like her platforming skills grappling that sort of thing like you know once you decided to go that direction um can you talk about kind of the the shake on or

shakedown effect that had the rest of the game's design? I'm sure. So, I mean, the sort of rock, paper, scissors, gameplay mechanic of the sort of, I can't remember it was biological energy and mechanical enemies. Yeah. And the sort of three. Fire, wind, electricity. Yeah, that mechanic was kind of always in there.

We ended up going back and adding those other three mechanics. later on, which was the cryostasis bomb. I can't remember what the slow down time thing was. Yeah, the, whatever that was called. Yeah, and then sticky bombs. And then, sticky bombs. Yeah, and grappling was kind of always a thing. It kind of never went away.

That's probably something that hung around for a long. Grappling was actually, it changed quite a bit from the initial, so grappling wasn't in the original 2D thing, but early when we were doing isometric prototypes. the character was actually quite a bit different she was we knew that we wanted her to be like fairly agile and um we didn't want her to be like a like a tank moving around we wanted her actually one of the earliest that there's probably no concept art for this around but we used to have a ton of it was genosa used to be a lot more feline like uh very cat-like to the to the point like she had like a long tail and her hair was Um, I think her hair, like her long hair eventually became hair, but it used to be like more of like her tail. Anyways, the, in the original, um, mock up with the isometric stuff, we, we had, uh, the grappling was much more of a, being able to, like, grab onto anything in the environment and then swing it around like a, like a, like a lasso or like, Castlevania style where like, and then being able to like, uh, fling things off into a direction. um but for a number of reasons that it came back and then it got dropped and it came back and then it got dropped and eventually it turned into more of uh just being able to latch onto things and move things around the environment but yeah the um the weapon wheel too um graham um was talking we were talking earlier and you were mentioning secret of mana um yeah just being able to hit a switch and then having the radial like a quick select uh which now that i think back on it like when you're surrounded or by

like three different types of enemies and you have to be able to very quickly like fire off a couple of projectiles switch to the fire cannon hit these guys drop your state like just being able to do that all on the fly that quick select thing and then it was uh it was kind of a modern more modern version of the secret of manate thing and it was more like i think we borrowed a lot from ratchet and clank yeah it was part of the inspiration for that thing too um yeah yeah just that being able to quickly react to things. Because as we kind of layered in gameplay and got closer to the end, we found that the best, the most visceral situations were, like,

it's not like, oh, here's eight of the same enemy, and I just used this one power-up. And especially once we had, like, you hit, like, these got the electrical guys or the mechanical guys with electricity, and then that causes, like, chain lightning to go between all the different enemies. We needed situations where the player had to think on the fly, so then, yeah, once we started combining different groups of enemies, and if you use this weapon against this enemy type, it makes them stronger, it became, that became the core of the main gameplay loop and kind of drove a lot of the decisions. A lot of that sort of culminated in the boss battles, too. There was a lot of switching between weapons really quickly.

Yeah, Dan did a great job on the bosses. Yeah, I was going to say the visual style of this game really stood out at the time. It was one of the, like, when I first saw it, I thought it was a game from Japan. And the reason I say that is because, you know, in the 16-bit era, especially in 32-bit era, you really saw a great sprite art coming from Japanese studios. And not always from Western studios, you had, you know, if you did see beautiful sprite art, it usually was a little over-animated like the stuff Shiny was doing. and, you know, Shiny did beautiful work,

but sometimes the animation would get in the way of the gameplay, and I didn't feel that was really the case here. It has a very, like, vivid, very solid art style. Like, everything feels very three-dimensional, and there's a lot of kind of grotesqueness to it, too. But everything is, like, very, I feel like coherently drawn and cohesive also. Like, it all fits together.

And, you know, you look at Genosis Sprite, and she, like you said, you wanted her to be mobile, but on top of that, she gives the impression of kinetic energy because she has that sort of undulating ponytail and she's always sort of like hunkered over and sort of breathing heavily. It's like she's always ready for action. So that's something that definitely stands out with the game. Yeah. It's so Sean Dunkley was the art director, I think, in the end. And he, just a great guy. I went on to work with him for a number of years after Scourge. But, you know, and Charlie.

Morrow, he did a whole bunch of the sprite work. And then Armand did a lot, Armand Voss. He did a lot of the background work. If not all of it, I don't know. But, yeah, those guys were kind of, well, certainly Charlie and Sean had a lot of sort of anime influence. And they were really into anime. Armand was a prospective police kind of mastermind. Like all those pipes fitting together and all those.

lines is like that's all him he was like OCD level about perspective lines and stuff like yeah actually that now that you mentioned pipes I remember in the the industrial complex the we had there was a parallax layer that we used for like when you're in the industrial complex it looks like there's like pipes that are kind of floating in front of the camera moving at a much closer rate than the stuff that's in the back in the forest, there's like mist and whatnot. But I remember the particular image that had to be created for the pipes was, it was, they spent so long on figuring out exactly, oh, there has to be a break here,

and these have to align here, because if you're scrolling too far horizontally or too fast horizontally, it'll give the weird pattern, and yeah, the policing is a good way to describe. I'm going to be able to be. So it's been, you know, 12 years since I played all the way through this game. Can you talk about, like, how the gameplay changes up toward the end or does it? I honestly can't remember, like, if at some point Genosa gets over the infection and the game changes up, it's, I am being kind of vague here because my memory is bad. Yeah, when I looked at, I think Dan probably has the best recollection. I don't know.

I, so I remember that at the end, you end up going, like, the final boss is like inside of Genosa's head. Yeah, yeah. Essentially, like the scourge virus basically kind of overtakes her and it's, like, it's an internal about that. The last boss sequence is awesome. It was too hard. I know, but there was like, it was like a marathon, which I think that's what makes me love is because, like, if you're going to finish this, like, We're going to make sure that you have every bit of gameplay down pat. Like, you have to use all of the abilities in rapid succession.

It's like, it's kind of like the last boss is kind of like a combination of a bunch of different mechanics from all of the different bosses that you fought up to that point. And, yeah, the final sequence with, she does in the end, get away from the planet's surface. I think we kind of left it pretty vague. Yeah, it's... Yeah, so you... You have the last sort of battle that was sort of like an internal struggle battle, and then there's sort of the classic get out of here sort of cutscene or whatever.

But we were leaving it pretty open to sort of figure out what we were going to do next. Yeah. If there was going to be a sequel or... Yeah. Yeah, so obviously a sequel never happened, but it kind of sounds like this game itself almost didn't happen. You said it had to be shelved for a long time. And I do remember, you know, reading like IGN news stories and stuff back that. where they would be like, yeah,

Orbital's games, they're really cool, but they're not coming out this year. So can you guys talk about that? Was that just like finding a publisher? Was that the issue? You know, looking back, I'll never forget when I said that I was kind of like, I just showed up at Orbital's office one day.

I remember sitting in an office and looking at their racing gears packaging. And it was just beautiful packaging. And it had, like, this flip cover, full art all over the place. The cover was like, it had like a holographic mesh material on it. Yeah, like, they really, like, went crazy on all that stuff. Best of E3 stickers. But it was a really interesting time because this was before sort of the indie game movement.

And in a way, it was like Orbital Media was always trying to be like a big company, even though we were not, right? So, in the case of racing gears, they published, manufactured, you know, QA, built it, everything all internally. And again, it was a small company. So the intent was to do that again, I think, with the next suite of games, which were Scourge and Juka and Pirate Battle. But then I think, you know, that never-ending sort of pursuit of perfection, I can't speak to what happened financially or what have you but long story short we couldn't afford to do it i don't think um yeah so we kind of finished the game um and then it went on the shelf um and you know i think we lost some people at that time um yeah and there was uh i think juca was

finishing was finishing up as well they had a slightly smaller team um mostly because a lot of the tech was being uh used to like we built it for a scourge and then they just kind of repurposed a lot of it for Juka and the monophonic menace. Listening to the Shante episode was really interesting because you know around that time

you know orbital media was like all in on making extremely good sort of handheld games and that was it that was all that we did right and then when when Scourge went on the shelf there was kind of a shift and again I can't speak to the sort of like

you know behind the scenes which company was which and all that stuff but um we ended up starting to make casual games um so downloadable sort of uh pop cap uh big fish real arcade style things and we did that while uh scourge was on the shelf um but the guys over at way forward kind of had a healthier sort of mix it sounds like of of having those passion products or projects and uh you know working on the educational stuff, we never really did that at Orbital, and I think, you know, it would have been all in on the passion project. Everything was all in all the time, right? And then I think that was a detriment. But anyway, I remember working on the casual games, and then one day, and again, it's like we're acting like a giant company and we weren't, but there's like this scuttlebut

of like, oh, maybe it's going to happen. Maybe they're going to release it or whatever. And then I remember a meeting being called and we're all sitting around and it was like all right who did we find a publisher who's a publisher and then it was announced that it was South Peak and I think we were all like who the hell is South Peak yeah that's accurate and then and then the guy's kind of a very small crew I think you were part of it Graham and uh Travis maybe and Sean Reed or something but there was a a small team sort of assembled to get the DSS version out the door while the guys who were working on the casual games were you know finishing those up and leading those up so I think um I don't know if you guys can talk to this but pirate battle

has always been one of the maybe not one of the big uh like what ifs about about the DS but it definitely there was definitely a lot of interest and you know you look around for it online and you can still see its name come up in searches and people be like whatever happened to that game it looked really cool It was like Fire Emblem, but, you know, with pirates, that's awesome. Can you talk about what happened with that? Like, how far along was that game before it was shelved? I think sort of part of the problem that we had at Orbital Media was that there wasn't really like very many people who could lead the charge to get a game done.

So there was a lot of guys kind of like toiling away, toiling away, but not really enough people that would grab the reins and get something sort of across the finish line. Yeah. And I think Pirate Battle struggled a lot with that. And there was just amazing tech again, right? Like we had a gigantic world map. There was like this, it was like a tactical RPG kind of like, again, that was tile map based.

But then when when attacks were initiated, it went into like a, almost like a flash-based 2D. It was very reminiscent of like advanced wars. Yeah. So like you had like the map screen that you did all your tactical stuff. And then you saw the battles play out in, like, kind of side view. But, like, looking back again, there was, like, those sort of side view, like, attack animation things were so detailed to the point where it was, like, you could see every sword and everything had a unique thing. But there was no vision to bring this thing over the finish line.

Yeah, like, when you looked at the, like, the screenshot and, like, even the early prototypes, like, it was, it was, when you imagine the battles, if you imagine less. advance wars and more like driving force on like the Sega Saturn where it's just like like super detailed animated sprites that are like just going out and it's like yeah that would have been amazing if we managed to finish it but yeah there was so much tech there was stories written that all the pieces were there it really just needed to be you know someone to grab the reins and it needed a champion to pull it across yeah and then I think I again I don't know about all the business stuff behind the scenes scenes, but it was kind of like a first in, first out thing with those games. So I know there

was investors involved and what have you, but we had to sort of finish them in an order, I think. And that's why the pirate battle team sort of got shuffled onto Scourge and Juka, because we had to get those out the door. Yeah. Yeah, you know, when I was when I was prepping for this episode and reading up on Orbital and looking back at some of the games, it really sort of struck me that I feel like you guys just kind of came along too early. Like the kind of games you make or made, I guess, you know, as Orbital and, you know, just the kind of approach you took. I feel like in the current climate, you guys could put a game, you could have, you know,

published on Switch. And you wouldn't have to worry about publishers or anything. You just, like, create a cool game, publish it. And, you know, there's that, like, direct channel from developer to, uh, to audience. and it really lowers the barrier. So in a way, I feel like you just were kind of maybe ahead of the curve in a bad way. Like you were bringing games to market, but the market wasn't really quite able to support that kind of approach yet, you know, because you had the traditional retail model,

the traditional publisher model that just, you know, wasn't necessarily friendly to interesting, intricate niche games. yeah i think you're hit the nail on the head there um but you know we we obviously couldn't know that at the time and there was such a mindset of being a big company and acting like a big company um that you know that indie spirit that came on a few years later um i don't know if that sort of mindset would ever have even gelled at orbital media um but but yeah it is like it was an independent game studio and it should have acted like that. And it, you know, all of those markets that you could have today, you know, would have been super beneficial to us. But, um, there was still very much

a mindset of being a big company. So, um, yeah, looking back at your time with Orbital, like, what are your overall thoughts on it? I mean, are you more proud than frustrated by, you know, the, the things you created, like even though you weren't ever able to do everything you wanted to do? Like, do you feel like the things that you did accomplish, do you did bring to retail, kind of represent your best effort? Yeah, man. I mean, like, it was, it's funny. I did a job interview with someone the other day, and he was telling me the story of how

he worked on this product, you know, versus consulting. And he looks back at it on it as like one of the fondest sort of times of his life, but also one of the hardest times of his life. And I think that, you know, that's kind of how I look back on orbital media. I mean, there was times where we were working. like 24 hour days and you know it would be Saturday Saturday night and you know I'm out with my friends and I'm like I got to get to the office and I go to the office at like 11 o'clock at night and you'd be there sleeping on the couch and it was like those things are incredibly painful not sustainable

you look back and you're like man I can't even believe we did that I would never do that again but so so proud of it like in preparation for this I was watching YouTube videos of boss rush mode and stuff and it's just like i can't believe how much this still stands up and looks great and yeah yeah really really proud of it it is absolutely a miracle that this game saw the light of day yeah yeah i'd echo that having uh having been there i guess from like before the beginning of proper orbital media and uh up until uh the end of it uh it was it was it was It was my first job in the industry, so there was a certain amount of, like, I don't know how this is supposed to be done and what the limits are supposed to be, so I'm just going to keep pushing and when everyone had that kind of that same perspective. And I think that led to us kind of somewhat reaching beyond where we necessarily needed to stop.

But it was by far, because now I'm a part of much bigger teams and working on games with much bigger budgets. But I still look back at my time at Orbital fondly just in terms of it was a super tight-knit group of people that were, even though we were frantic a lot of times and didn't know what was going on a lot of the time. we were by golly we were going to make something fantastic um yeah so i i i can't say enough good things about it even though uh the scar i think the the scars have sufficiently healed that i've gotten to that point i'm thankful for those scars man i think those things kind of made me what i what i am today yeah do you guys know who owns orbital's properties now like if someone got a bug up their ass and was like i really feel like like what the world needs right now is scourge hive too or you know for someone to finally just put

the bow on pirate battle and bring that to switch or beta or something like would that be possible or had those just kind of scattered to the wind i actually don't know the answer that we're talking about this before um you know to the to the war wounds sort of comment it's like there was probably a good five six eight years where i was like i don't want to look at it i don't want to think about it i don't hear about it. And then, you know, not too long ago, I googled South Peak. And I'm like, oh, they're done. So, like, I don't know. I have no idea who owns it where it is, you know, where it stands. Not a clue. Well, that's a shame. But there is something to be said for just having this sort of unique little standalone piece of video game history. It's, it's an interesting

era to me. Like, I was kind of starting out in the press at that point. I'd been in, you know, the games press for a couple of years and still really held you know held a place of affection to my heart for traditional sprite base 2D games um so i really gravitated toward handheld games and when i saw games of really high quality like this or juka come out i was always like oh yeah this is great i you know this is this is the sort of thing that needs to be celebrated and now those things are really common like people make lots of games like that like just in the past few weeks there's been class and Dundara and Celeste and I don't know what else. Just like on Switch alone, and Vita and PlayStation 4, like it's crazy how many people are

making these like old school traditional games. But, you know, 15 years ago, you just didn't see that. It was, it was old hat. It was like no one wanted to take a chance on it. There was no real way for that to be sustainable. So I'm really happy that, you know, these games did exist. Despite the pain that it caused you guys, they made me happy. So it's an interesting little period of history and kind of a unique thing to look back on.

Yeah, man, and Jeremy, thank you so much for sort of carrying the torch for Scourge over the years. You know, being able to sort of go find people playing the game on YouTube and sort of putting a bow on this sort of chapter of my life by, you know, having this podcast with you and Graham. It just feels like a great sort of like way for this to go out. It's a great way to sort of remember this. That's awesome. Yeah, I need to track down the GBA version now because I don't have a way to play DS games and record those,

but I could definitely do some sort of retrospective on the GBA version. And now I really kind of, I got the bug. Yeah, I feel like doing that. So I'm going to have to have to hunt down that, you know, peak GBA creation that you guys put together. Awesome. That'd be great, man. All right, so we'll wrap here.

Thank you guys for this great hour. It's been really interesting. and it's just been nice talking to people, you know, who are partially responsible for creating this game that was so interesting and so unique at the time. Where can everyone find you these days? Are you guys on social media? Can you talk about where you work now? And, you know, just promote yourselves. Feel free. This is your soapbox right here. All right. I'm Graham Scott. You can find me on Twitter at Biomassica. I am currently a lead tech designer at Biowar, so I've been there for the last 11 years, worked on the Mass Effect Trilogy, Dragonaze Inquisition, Mass Effect Andromeda. Yeah, that's me.

And I am Daniel Krat, and you can find me on Twitter at Daniel Krat. And I'm currently a designer product owner at a digital innovation agency called Roller. robots and pencils. And we help clients with frontier tech, like machine learning and AI and conversational interfaces and mobile and all those wild and wonderful things. The future. All right. Awesome. Well, thanks again, guys. It's been great having you on the show. And good luck with your future projects. And I don't know, maybe someday we'll see some sort of spiritual successor to scourge. When we retire. That's the next bioware project. That's what I want to see.

Perfect. Well, thanks again, Jeremy. Your Yard real beating from the constant wear and tear and overcrowding of weeds leading to weak, thin grass. Achieve the lawn of your dreams by starting the Scotts turf builder program. Keep it simple. With four simple

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if you're not satisfied, you'll get your money back. So take control and give your lawn the boost it deserves. Start your Scots Turf Builder program today. This is a Scots yard. It's April again and you know what that means. Tucked in there right between bad April fools jokes and soul-destroying payments to the IRS, you have a chance to come see Retronauts Live in Milwaukee. Bob and I will be at Midwest Gaming Classic again this year, doing our Midwest Gaming Classic thing. MGC takes place at the Wisconsin Center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, April 13th through 15th, and we'll be speaking live at 1 p.m. Saturday the 14th with a presentation

called Atari Got a Raw Deal. Joining us to make a case that Atari was done dirty by the games industry will be Atari historian Kevin Bunch and Marty Goldberg, co-author of Atari Businesses Fun. We'll also be having a social meet-up Saturday night with our friends from Watch Out for Fireballs. And finally, if we can make it happen, we're going to attempt to set what may be a world record by hosting a 16-player baseball-2000 match on Game Boy. I'll bring the games and four-player adapters. You bring a system from the Game Boy family and a link cable. All of this will be going down April 13th through 15th of the Wisconsin Center in Milwaukee. Keep an eye on Retronauts.com and the Retronauts' Twitter and Facebook feeds for more details.

See you there. What's it like for you watching games of your son coaching? Agonizing. It's a family affair on Attack Each Day, the Harbaugh's podcast. You know, I didn't know there was actual work here. Recent guests include Rich Eisen, John Harbaugh, Judge Judy, and John Madden. I thought one of the greatest jobs. in coaching in the NFL was Jim's first year with the 49ers.

Exclusively on Podcast One Sportsnet. Get episodes every Tuesday on Podcast One and Apple Podcasts. Great time to be a Wolverine. I have on the line here. Let me make sure I'm saying your name right. Joachim Sandberg? Pretty much. Yoakim.

Software Jay. Oh, yeah, sorry. I wasn't sure. I know it wasn't Joaquin. I remember you saying that, but I just wanted to. I make fun of people who do that. Okay. Okay, well, your online alias is con jack, coniac.

Is that a soft j? Actually, that is the way I say to people when I actually meet them. I say conjack, just so I guess that's where the confusion begins. That could be. All right, but you may know Joachim's work from Noitou Love and also his very recent released game, actually not even out as of the time we're recording this conversation, iconoclasts, which is showing up at the end of January on pretty much every platform

except Switch, which I'm sure you've heard no end of complaints about. Yeah. Also, there's no Xbox yet, but yeah, Switch is what everyone wants. Right. Yeah, I, I, who even knows that Xbox exists anymore? Yeah. I feel like people will, yeah, poor Microsoft. I never thought I'd say those two words together. But yeah. But okay, so it's on Steam and PS4 and Vita. Yes. And I have no doubt that the mini cries you've heard from Switch fans has also given you some food for thought. Oh yeah. Definitely. That would be a wonderful thing to have the game on the Switch. So I think I first kind of became aware of your work. I'd heard of Noitou Love, but I hadn't really taken notice until

your little not quite a game just like a little like um fan even know how you describe it yeah just like a little it was almost like a sketch or like a like a you know the the the equivalent of like a musician putting out like a 30 second fragment of a song called uh what was a legend of princess yeah basically a satire fan game mm-hmm but you know as as someone who actually makes games professionally, it had a little more gravity to it than just like, you know, stuff you see on, you would have seen on new grounds back in the day. So what was, what was the inspiration behind that? And actually, why don't we, why don't we roll it back even further? Can you talk about sort of your background and how you got into game design and what, what has brought you to the

point of creating iconoclasts? Oh, I've been playing video games pretty much as long as I remember. I tell almost everyone that at some point during my like, when I was in kindergarten, I would take a cardboard box and draw my own video games on it, like cut out controllers and stuff. So that's always been on my mind. It took until I was like 12 or 13 to actually getting, getting hold of one of these click team softwares to actually start making my own thing. And it's pretty much all I've been doing. since then what is what is click team software i don't know that i it's stuff like yeah the first one they did was click and play but that's too early for me as well uh the first one i used was the games

factory but the more famous one right now is click team fusion based on multimedia fusion uh no it to love uh one and two is made in that and uh what what is iconoclast made in is that also in in a uh system like that or was that more from the ground up is actually made in one of those programs, but it's called Construct Classic, a derivative of a Multimony Fusion sort of made by people who thought Multimid Fusion was sort of lacking certain things. But then they moved on from the version I used to make their sequel, and it had no backwards compatibility. So it sort of stuck for a while thinking, am I going to make a Windows exclusive game that doesn't run super well? But then, yeah, it sort of worked out.

yeah so so does just using a tool like that cause problems when you start thinking about you know like what other platforms do I want to put this on or um is that something that just kind of sorts itself out in the course of time well you shouldn't depend on it sorting itself out but of course back when I started it was like when you're younger you think risks are a lot more feasible to survive but then it takes a lot of years and you're older and you're wondering, can I actually do anything with this in this program that was technically abandoned? So, yeah, I've been very lucky to actually get in touch with the people who helped me now who have been able to move that game from that basis to something that's more like C++-based.

So you're not making classic games, but you're making games in software that's obsolete, which is kind of retro in its own way. Yeah. I just try to make games the way I can more than wanting to make games that are like old games. Like the mechanics I like, the visual styles I like. If I had like the energy, I would definitely do HD art, but I'm so much my own, I want to do everything myself at least once for a big game. So pixel art was the fastest choice, and that's where I ended up. So yeah, my focus hasn't been to be retro, but it's.

definitely inspired by retro because I think a lot of good gameplay design still comes from that era. Yeah, I know you have some very specific sort of touchstones for iconoclasts, and we'll talk about that later, but I'm curious to know what kind of games you grew up playing. I mean, given kind of the vibe and style of stuff like, you know, Legend of Princess, I feel like I can put my finger on it, but I'd be curious to hear about it in your own words. I bet you will be wrong because everyone else is I actually took a surprising turn I was headed toward

Sega very much because my brother was the one with the consoles at first and he had a Sega Massa system and that's probably the first thing I played I don't even remember my first game was probably Alex Kid and Miracle World but then in around Donkey Kong country times

I got to actually wish for my own console after having rented a Mega Drive a hundred times. I actually got a Super Nintendo instead, and then I never got a Sega system again. So, yeah, my roots are on both sides for a while, at least. But then it's been very much the Nintendo philosophy of game design I've been most inspired by, but with a lot of action inspiration from like Sega arcade stuff. It's interesting that you say, you know, both sides, like, you know, acknowledging the idea of the console war. I'm assuming you grew up in Europe.

So was that concept still there? Like the idea of Nintendo versus Sega? I was never sure if that was like an American construct or if it was something that was broader. I think it was a thing. But I feel like my entire time of growing up, I was always around by kids who weren't that into video games. I was always around sports kids. They had consoles. It was very often a mega drive.

Not always. Some had Super Nintendo. And I just felt like I was making my own choices. And only after I got into my early teens or like 12 years old or something, I started reading the magazines and sort of just seeing how Nintendo coverage was trailing off. It was just Saturn and PlayStation for a while. So that's sort of when I started feeling like Nintendo maybe wasn't that big in Sweden. So the answer is sort of inconclusive.

So you mentioned, And you kind of got into Nintendo around the time of Donkey Kong country, and that since then, the Nintendo approach has been sort of your touchstone. But what exactly do you mean by that? Like, what to you is the Nintendo approach to game design? To me, most of all, Nintendo approach to game design is caring a lot about level design. Every single aspect of a level has to actually have a character to it. There has to be something unique about it, even if the difference is just that,

now a Gumba has wings. That's an entire stage theme. Instead of having, like, if you have 20 features and you're able to feature them in every single stage, you're sort of feeling you're playing the entire game the same way, as opposed to actually making 20 stages for each thing. That's the mentality I've always wanted to have when I actually design a level,

even for a Metroidvania, which are usually just running around corridors to get to certain important rooms, still want every room to have an identity somehow. That's... Yeah, I think you, when you look at the best Metroidvania games, they do have that distinct personality within the areas, like Super Metroid, Symphony, and Night. I don't know that people recognize that consciously, but it's one of those things that

is present, and if you look for it, you see it, but otherwise, you know, it's just sort of a subtle thing that... It's more fun... It kind of works in the background. Yeah. I guess a difference when I mentioned that. is sort of like a more conscious designer in how you play rather than, yeah, symphony of the night is fantastic in terms of atmosphere and visual identity to every room.

It's sort of like getting a good feeling to every section actually having some sort of purpose. But yeah, I'm very much action-driven in that case. You know, when you look at one of those great games, like you can say, you can mention a room by name and people who have played the game will know specifically what you mean like oh you know the room with just for example

well crap no I can't what game nothing comes to mind like so symphony the night you know like you mentioned oh the long library or the outer wall or something like everyone can instantly if they've played the game I feel like they can visualize

you know and know exactly what I'm talking about every time I think of symphony And I think of the, I think it's a top, well, like middle left section that is mostly staircases and a pine forest outside because that, I just love the aesthetic of that area. And that's always what I think about when I think of that game. I feel like that sort of, you know, the trees in the background, like I see that in a lot of the stuff that you've designed. Maybe I'm just making that up.

But it does seem, I don't know, like from what I played of iconoclast, there's some of that. There's also like desert and city and stuff. So, you know, a huge variety of things. But there is that kind of, you know, distinct look to the game. I have a much greater passion for, like, nature, trees and water. That's my favorite. But sometimes an aesthetic calls, a narrative calls for an aesthetic. So I'll bend.

It's good that you're willing to, you know, serve what's important for the game first. So you mentioned that you, you know, got into game development doing sort of like these middleware programs. What was your first objective when you started to create an actual game? Like, were you thinking, like, this is something I'm going to release and for people to play, or were you just start, did you just start the project as, you know, just something to do? I just wanted to see what I was able to do. Sort of, I think I remember my first thing was called something like Freddy the bug, something like the most uncreative thing you can imagine.

I was like 12 or 13 So I didn't really know how to do pixel art yet So I was doing the character out of the box tool in paint And trying to animate that way So it's very much been An evolution of thinking along all the years And starting to understand how games are actually made How they're visually structured

And stuff like that So yeah it's very much been from zero to hear, not really ever take into a tutorial or something like that. So Noitou Love was not your first, like, project. Was it the first game you released? Yes. It was the first finished thing. So what was your motivation and goal with that particular project?

To win a competition. Oh, yeah? There was a competition with the theme of evolution, and Noy To Love backwards is evolution. And I won that competition, and I got a newer version of multimedia fusion to make my next game. The entire motivation was greed, as it was. But it actually made me finish something. So that's actually worth it.

There's something to be said for that. Nootu Love has been on my, like, I need to play this list for many years. And I admit I still haven't gotten around to it because when you, what's that? First one isn't worth it. You don't think so? I mean, the weird thing about being in the games press is that if you're not actually writing about a game, it's very hard to find time to play it.

So it's one of those things that, yeah, it's on my to-do list, but it hasn't actually happened yet. But I was wondering if you could kind of talk about, maybe not the first game, if you feel like it's a little beyond the pale. I'm just going to be my own worst critic. but yeah i'd be curious to hear kind of you know you talk about the game like how that project evolved and what the objective not not beyond you know beyond winning the contest like what was your what was your creative goal your artistic goal with the game uh i just wanted to basically learn

my goal was to like lower my ambition to actually finish something because it had a deadline it had a theme to work from instead of trying to come up with my own thing that maybe sprouts too many branches and my creative idea was just to make something fun and funny based on very basic mechanics

I started out making it look like an NES game then added some more visuals just because I thought NES games are simple I can do that I can finish this but then I realized I'm actually enjoying this and making it really fast I can improve the visuals somewhat

and it was very much a learning experience first of all in how I worked and I'm so much flow of mind in order to actually explain what my creative goals are what I like and it just

happens as I make things even iconoclass is made as you play it like I made the beginning of the game first and the end of the game last So it's always a I basically realized how I work, how I work best and how I can actually finish things with that game.

And it was just based on the theme of evolution. You can be a boy. You can be an, what's it called? A man with a huge brain, something like that. Or you can be a monkey. You can also be a bird, which is a joke in the game. That's not evolution. And just taking those, what can I do puzzle-wise with these core ideas?

And that's set off what a column class is doing, not have as few ideas as possible, but as dynamic as they can be, instead of having 30 different things that do one thing each two times. So those are the things that basically set in motion how I was actually going to enjoy making games and how I would finish games. That's interesting to hear you say, because right now I'm working on, on reviewing the game Lost Sphere. I don't know if anything about that, but it's a role-playing game designed in the style of Chrono Trigger,

but it's not as good as Chrono Trigger, and that's because Chrono Trigger is such, you know, fundamentally a simple game. Like you have this team of characters, and each of them has, I think, eight skills apiece, and that's pretty much it. But it's all about finding ways to combine those abilities. Whereas this new game, like,

you have so many things you can do and so many systems, and there's no room for any of these things to breathe. And I'm like, why does it just keep giving me these things? Why not just find, you know, the, what's interesting about the first few mechanics, you know, whittle it down? I feel like there is sometimes a danger of sort of kitchen sink game design. Like people look back, and especially when you create a game in a sort of pixel art style, you know, that looks kind of retro.

Like, oh, well, this game, you know, it's not old. so it needs to reflect modern game design. It needs to have more complexity, but does it really? So it's interesting to hear you say that iconoclasts is specifically designed around that sort of simplicity. Context sensitivity is a word I very much enjoy. And also there is also the whole modern sensibility of people are so accustomed to being rewarded with something all the time. So a lot of games add in features to reward you for every, like for instance, a boss battle. You have to get something. So there's sort of a clash of you need to come up

with something that has a lot of things, but they also have to have sort of a use. And sometimes it gets in the way of game design to actually want to have so many things just in order to please people. I've definitely gotten a comment here and there that from like younger gamers, they beat a boss in something I made and just wonder, where's the reward? instead of actually just the gameplay itself being the reward overcoming the challenge. So that's also a bit interesting. Meanwhile, you do have, you know, to bring up the specter that hovers over every video game conversation these days, I think, something like Dark Souls where the reward is the success.

Like, oh, I beat this really, really difficult boss and I didn't necessarily get anything from it, but I put this really difficult boss. How do you, I mean, maybe you don't know, but like in your opinion, how do you, how do you, make that work as motivation? Like, how do you get across to players that, no, I'm not going to give you, you know, a sticker every time you do something in the game, like sometimes just advancing that is the reward? What I can hope for is that people, well, first of all, just enjoy the way I design a boss.

That's a simple starting point. But also, hopefully I create a narrative that actually makes people, feel catharsis or just feeling good about defeating a certain person or certain thing, getting past a point just in order to see more of the narrative they hopefully enjoy. And that's been what I've been telling myself anyway, that hopefully the narrative is good enough that people feel it's rewarding to actually see what happens next and that they overcame something rather than just did it for the reward.

Yeah, that's something that I've been surprised about. with iconoclasts is that the story is pretty expansive like it seems like there's a pretty well-developed world in here that you don't necessarily you know like go into great detail about it's just kind of you know you're dropped in medius rests and kind of

have to pick things up and it's also kind of dark oppressive so yeah what's what's up with that that's just me and my that's just my mind that's the story I like and I what I wanted to do with the game

is to set up a cliche sort of in the beginning that hopefully goes into its own character development more dark more more hopeless in a way but the point is that the main character tries to actually with her a young mind that's not yet solid with adult responsibility is trying to help these people regardless even though in some ways they're sort of trying to get her to their level or bring her down it's uh It's just the characters are based on a lot of anxieties I've felt myself. That's interesting. Yeah, it is definitely something I noticed that when you start out the game,

it seems like, oh, you're the good, helpful character. But then pretty quickly you discover that's not necessarily something that you're going to be rewarded for, which I think is a pretty bold approach to take with a game like this, you know, kind of undermining people's expectations and sort of what you rely on in video game narratives. Yeah, I've tried to use the less expected thing to actually

hopefully make, I've said hopefully a hundred times today, but to make people consider this situation more like why did this happen instead of what I expected and hopefully encourage considering why the characters are doing what they're

doing and what maybe is a conflict within their lives to maybe yeah in terms of characters not in terms of Robin but yeah sort of I'm not too eloquent about the point but I want the characters to shine and actually make you think that maybe

the cliches aren't always true Thank you. So you've mentioned a couple of times that you have gone with sort of a retro art style, you know, with Noitou Love, you started out kind of targeting NES, and that you work in bitmap art because it's just, you know, it's something that is less resource intensive for a small developer like yourself, which I find interesting because for a long time I had always heard about how complex and expensive and difficult bitmap art is.

You know, like in terms of something like the King of Fighters games, people are like, oh, those games are so expensive to create, you know, or Capcom couldn't create a new Morgan Sprite for 20 years because sprites are so expensive to create. So I'm kind of curious. Like, how do you reconcile your perspective with, you know, this kind of conventional wisdom about the bigger companies? Hopefully my messaging has been more of that it is the easiest thing for me to do.

instead of saying it's easy to do in general which it isn't of course you had to actually master any craft there's an understanding to do in pixel art where you're supposed to put a pixel what's most efficient what's actually readable and yeah it's definitely more difficult in certain aspects but in terms of myself I've been trying to make games

based on what I remember for my childhood and I just got better at pixel art than the big drawn art, that would take me much longer for me to do. But somebody like a modern studio would easily hire artists who draw an animate character much more than actually a pixel artist these days. It's just the easiest choice for me. Do you worry that going with pixel art style,

you know, bitmap art is limiting, like in terms of not even just what you can do, but in terms of the audience, like what does it, you know, the way it, it sort of calibrates people's expectations about the game. Yeah, there's definitely expectations and some people just plain don't like pixel art. And there's connotations with what a game like that is supposed to play as that I also sometimes worry about. Like, if I actually do do these things with the story that are actually sort of different, maybe people aren't too happy about like they were suckered into something that felt more old.

That's a worry of mine. But yeah, it definitely changes expectations. But I think it's been efficient for me and I've been enjoying the challenge and actually making character express themselves. That's something I took as a challenge, making the cutscenes animate on their own instead of portraits popping in, which would be a lot less work. but I wanted to actually take the medium of pixel art and have it be expressive in these tiny characters

with always no space for faces. Yeah, you don't see that a lot, but the games that have done it to good effect, like really, they have a lot of punch. Like Final Fantasy Tactics, to me, is sort of the gold standard for that. There's so much of the narrative that plays out with those little,

you know, the little isometric pixel characters, but they do all kinds of things like Neal and, you know, emote and shake their head and disgust and so on and so forth you don't see that very often so that was something that definitely stood out to me with iconoclast there's there's a lot of really great detail and a lot of um i feel like a lot of frames of animation for oh yeah uh for the bitmap art that which you know that's that's that's very time intensive you're just like a one person studio yeah yeah i've speaking of learning from experience i've learned that i this took way too long to make. And most of it is due to, well, bosses are always going to be there. They're always

going to take time because I make them as complicated as I sort of can. But also, yeah, cutscene scripting, cutscene animation. That is a good chunk of the time of making this game. I mean, when you look at certain sections of this game, do you have flashes to, you know, certain times of your life and like, oh, well, that was six months of my existence right there? Yeah, there's a chase sequence late in the game in sort of a mountain area. That must have taken me a month, just that, and it's a chase sequence. It's not really, like when you come from the perspective of loving gameplay and you make something like a cutscene or a chase sequence, that's sort of not actually fighting anything,

you start thinking like, hmm, could I have made something different with this time? but I'm happy with what I did, but you get these sort of conflicts in your mind that you spent so much time on this one tiny thing and something like a level, which is more of what people actually play, maybe takes a day. So I said I was going to circle back around

to some of the inspirations you've drawn on for iconoclasts. And, you know, when we spoke at Bit Summit and I demoed this game last year, you mentioned that you really were heavily influenced by Monster World 4 and Metroid Fusion, which is interesting to me because neither of those

is sort of like the most beloved games in those franchises but they do have a certain unique quality to them I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what it is about those games

that draws you into them and what you've tried to draw from them into your own work So my big obsession with making games is game feel, game flow and I think Metroid Fusion is the best Metroid

in terms of how it feels and how it plays I mean, zero mission based itself on that, but Metroid Fusion was first. I just love the way it introduced the ideas that were missing. I also love the idea of hanging from ledges and climbing into a tiny hole just to become ball right away. Like, I basically copied that in my engine, but you don't become a ball. You just crawl. Robin can crawl.

Nice. You know, Metroid Fusion is one of the less, I think, beloved entries in the Metroid series. I don't think very many people think it's bad but it does come under a lot of fire you know for having such a an intrusive narrative it really should let you skip that but yeah

it's interesting that you you know despite the fact that it does draw you know or bring the action to a halt every few minutes so the computer can talk to you you still like the flow of the game yeah my entire love

of that game is first of all I think it's the Metroid with the most bosses because the whole concept of the game is that you meet these ex-parasites and every one of them in order to get every single ability has a battle to it. Almost. So yeah, it has the most bosses, which is just my Neanderthal mind.

Oh, I'm going to love this more because it has more bosses. But, yeah, I think just a tiny thing. It was the first Metroid to do the when you jump up in the air from a standing position, you don't flip in Metroid. But it has if you press jump again in mid-air in Metroid Fusion, you start to flip

so you can actually do the space jump from a starting jump. Stuff like that, I just I love enough to actually prefer a game over another because it's just such attention to flow and ease of use and great mechanics. And they always

kept that after that, even even in other M, which is basically Metroid Fusion controls in eight directions. Yeah, that's interesting. I think, you know, Super Metroid is usually held up as sort of the gold standard of Metroid. And I think when people do that, they're thinking more in terms of the overall game structure,

and they're talking about the narrative, like the two things that really have so much impact. And Fusion changes those things up a lot. So did you look to Fusion's structure, you know, like with the sections and the fact that it's much more of a, like, sort of a guided experience that sort of pushes you from area to area, or are you looking to other things, other qualities beyond that? I do enjoy the fact that it's a guided experience because what I love isn't necessarily

that I'm exploring in a metro game. It's more the getting from just enjoying the control of the game and fighting things, which Metro Fusion has the most of, in my opinion. and Super Metro of course is a very important game and it does things first it does things better especially in narrative because it doesn't need words

to actually tell the story which is always impressive but yeah I'm not the biggest fan of getting lost in games I think that carries over into iconic quests So, beyond Metroid Fusion, there's also Monster World 4. Was your influence there more visual?

I mean, definitely your game looks a lot like Monster World 4, but I'm curious if you took other elements, like other inspirations from that game. Well, most of all, the huge difference for Metroid is that almost every square inch of iconoclast has either an enemy to get past or a door to open, technically. something akin to opening a door to get through to the next room.

And that's very much in spirit of Monster World Four's dungeons, which every... It was like a side-scrolling Zelda in terms of solving puzzles. The puzzles in Monster World Four are very, very simplistic and very, very repetitive. But I really like that concept and use that as a basis, but most of all, it is the aesthetics, the charm of the main characters, expressiveness without words and uh i think the translation is really good the fan translation uh i even took the word procure for picking up things it's mostly visual i even made a project

called mean up the pirates before this for several years that i abandoned because i don't value my life i guess but uh it also took it took visual inspiration from uh most row for for even more i even copied the sort of a very unique hand design of those sprites were separate thumb and index finger, but the rest of the fingers are like one fat finger. Stetics like that I even copied. It's kind of funny that that game has inspired a game that I spent eight years on

because only half the game is good. When you get to the Ice Pyramid, you don't want to play anymore. Oh, yeah. I've never played all the way through Monster World Four, actually. I did once. I played the first few stages, and I'm like, oh, this is really great.

and then I never get around to finishing it. So I guess the message is don't. Yeah, it is one of my favorite games for the first half, which is probably pretty weird for somebody who just spent so long making a game that he keeps saying it's inspired by it. But once you get to the Ice Palace and have to do the same thing that took an hour first time

and then takes two more hours with just collecting statues, you don't want to play that game anymore. but you have appreciated the aesthetics at least. Well, you know, one of the benefits of creating a game inspired by the works that have gone before is you have the luxury of sort of saying, like, here's what worked in that game and what I like about it,

and here's what I don't think worked and what I didn't care for so much. So I don't think it's that strange to look at a game that you admire in some respects and say, yeah, I'm going to copy the good parts and maybe the other parts, not so much. Yeah. So had you, did you play,

Monster World 4 and Metroid Fusion did you play those games when they were new or did they come along? Like did you discover them in later years more recently? Metro Fusion was definitely as it came out because I as soon as I could buy that game I played it and I played it in one sitting on the old GBA

that's how much I like that game. Just the SAX being actually terrified of something on a tiny dark screen was really impressive to me at that time and I sat for like seven hours under a spotlight and I beat that game

and I've beaten that game maybe a hundred times by now Monster 4 I've beaten ones because of the ice pyramid yes this was basically my game to see what kind of story I could tell

and in the end I think I said what I wanted to say despite what whatever however it turned out so far people have always loved the narrative

so that's a good thing that's a good start or at least liked it I don't know maybe they're lying to me so when you once you've you know

got Icona classes after you're played and you know maybe bring it to switch or whatever like what comes after that will you continue making games in the style

or are you looking for new horizons now I am looking to make a sort of passion project thing I've had as an idea which is much more personal and much more expressive

of these themes that iconoclast sort of brushes past very like just issues of the world right now I kind of want to make a comment on so almost I would almost call the idea I have a visual novel which is complete 180 from what I've been doing but I also have an idea for an action game I also want to do so next time I'm going to separate these elements the story and the action just to at least get

one of them done much faster. Have you considered going back to revisit Legend of Princess, not necessarily that game itself, since it's a little kind of obvious what the inspiration is, but, you know, the feel of the game and the speed of it, I feel like it's a different, more, you know, sort of melee action-focused game than what you've come up with in Iconiclasts. Well, it was made up to be Zelda mixed with an arcade game. It wasn't inspired by Zelda, too which a lot of people think because it's side-scrolling it was just Zelda as an arcade platformer and taking the aspects of Zelda having different

items and solving things well the level changes based on what item items you pick rather that's probably something that would be really fun to actually return to but i always intended for that to be one level just because i don't want to make a whole fan game but I also told myself back then if I was ever going to make that a full thing it would have to be officially sanctioned because I have so many other ideas I want to do call it legends of Zelda and just make a bunch of references

okay well I don't want to take up any more of your time because I know you're busy trying to launch this game but I have enjoyed what I've played of it so far and I'm looking forward to digging into you know I think right now I'm in the desert area so I'm not that far into it. According to the percentage, cleared, it's like minuscule. Yeah.

You said it's dark and you're just in the desert area. I take it it gets worse. Yeah. With how you brought it up, I thought you were much farther, actually. No, I mean, just kind of looking at the, you know, even the things that are sort of set up at the beginning, there's definitely sort of oppressiveness about the storyline even before I get really into the meat and potatoes of it.

Yeah, I wanted the game to be structured in a way that the characters take center stage. There is a world that's set up that sort of reflects the characters or at least locks them in a situation in life they're not happy with. But it's all about focusing on those characters and how they evolve and how maybe their stubbornness gets to them. Well, I'm looking forward to playing more of it. And since I am writing about this one, I will actually get to play through it. So that's good.

That's how I, you know, my job is basically an excuse to play video games now. Like I make my own excuses. So this is on my list of things to play. So good luck with the launch. Thank you very much for your time. If you want to, you know, give a shout out to where people can find you online and where they can find the game. This would be your opportunity. Okay.

Thank you, first of all. I am on Twitter I am Conjack That's K-O-N-J-A-K That's where I rant all the time

Right now is just Well this is going to be late So never mind Also I have Conjack.org Spell the same way And basically from there You can find anything I do

All right Well good luck with your launch And yeah Thanks again for your time The Starlight Lounge. Presents an evening with the Progressive Box. The Old Moon, yeah. That's Hugo, tickling the ivories.

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discounts not available in all states or situations. The Mueller report. I'm Ed Donahue with an AP News Minute. President Trump was asked at the White House if 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 officer 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. Thank you.