Flying Oak Games’ roguelike platformer ScourgeBringer released on Steam Early Access this February, and today it was officially launched on Nintendo Switch, PC, and Xbox One. This release comes after a two-and-a-half year development cycle that, according to Director Thomas Altenburger, was largely taken up trying to create a unique, action-packed game feel. He and his partner, Florian Hurtaut, hoped to make something well beyond the scope of their previous game NeuroVoider by focusing their efforts on creating an integrated narrative to bolster their mechanics.

Game Rant spoke with Altenburger about ScourgeBringer’s development and community involvement. An Early Access copy of the game was provided to prepare for the interview. Interview has been edited for clarity.

Q: Tell me about your experience leading up to Flying Oak Games, and how you got into game design.

A: Flying Oak Games is a company that was started out of several game jams. We’re about to celebrate our seventh year, and I guess the release of ScourgeBringer is around the same date. Florian and I met at the Global Game Jam 2012. On my end, I was already doing some code work but nothing relevant.

We started to meet again on several occasions, always in game jams, and after a few we noticed we like the same things when it comes to video games. We were playing a lot more indies than AAA, and at the time it was games like Risk of Rain. After meeting several times we became friends, started playing multiplayer games together, eating pizza and such. At some point we looked at each other and it clicked. Why weren’t we making games together?

So I quit my job. This was something planned for a long time, we knew we would be making games together, so we prepared for a leap of faith. We started working on a game called NeuroVoider, which was a twin-stick shooter roguelike, playable up to four players, with lots of explosions and action. We were playing games like Nuclear Throne, a popular twin-stick shooter, so our idea was to make that kind of thing four player co-op and so on.

We had a focus on action games, arcade style with a lot of flow. So game after game we came up to ScourgeBringer.

Q: A lot of your early projects are arcade (Dead End) and party titles (Hoy). Is that because they were done for game jams?

A: Yes, yes. Hoy is actually a game jam game, which has a fun story because it’s a Kinect game, and at some point we had a publishing deal with Microsoft. But then Microsoft kind of decided to forget about the Kinect, and at that time Xbox One was about to release. But the game was finished, it was popular at festivals, and it was great experience for going from concept to project.

Dead End is actually a game that I did with someone else. It was at the very beginning of Flying Oak Games because Florian was finishing his studies. I had something like a couple of months to get something going, so I partnered with another friend and we decided to try and make a game in one single month just to check what it’s like to make a game from start to finish and publish it.

It was kind of a self test to check where we were good or bad. For instance, we did everything ourselves as far as PR and marketing, and that’s why in the future we’ve partnered with people. We found we were more into making games than actually publishing them. That’s why we mostly work with publishers.

Q: I know you’re based in France, what is the game development scene like there? What kind of culture helped inspire you?

A: There’s a real community of game developers in France, at least on the indie scene. The context is a bit special when it comes to video games because there are very few big employers. Probably the only gigantic employer is Ubisoft, and beyond that there is maybe a handful of relevant AAA studios. Finding opportunities is quite rare unless you are willing to go to Ubisoft.

There is a lot of indie studios, actually. We are almost all together bound into one single community. We exchange a lot, we speak together, we share advice and resources, it’s really cool. The French community in indie development is growing into something from a market point of view and a local, political point of view.

Q: How did you and Florian go from NeuroVoider to ScourgeBringer?

A: NeuroVoider is a game that has it’s flaws. We knew when the game came out that there was stuff not up to our expectations, mostly because we didn’t have the time to polish it up. We were too deep in the development to come back on stuff that didn’t work. One thing is the bosses, which for us were quite bland.

One of the main focuses we had in mind before ScourgeBringer was that if we were to make other games, we were going to focus more on boss fights, think ahead, and make it more relevant to design unique bosses and so on.

ScourgeBringer started in a curious way. When we start working on a game and need ideas for a new concept, we usually make two lists: A list of things we would like to try or see in a game, and another of things we don’t want to try - either because it’s from a genre we don’t like, or don’t know enough about. One of those things was making a platforming game, because platforming is something that appears to be very simple at first, but when you go behind the scenes for what makes good game feel and control scheme and physics, there is a lot of hidden tricks. People won’t even know they’re there. We didn’t feel like we had the knowledge, but we were aware those things existed.

We started to prototype stuff based on the list of things we wanted to see in a game, but we ended up being stuck because it felt like we were running in circles, making something similar to our previous games. When we’re stuck, we pick something randomly from the list of things we don’t want to try so we can break our routine and state of mind. We love to work with constraints. Working with reduced colors on ScourgeBringer is one of the constraints we put on ourselves.

So we ended up trying to make a platforming game, and after one or a couple of weeks we felt like it could be a thing. We felt like we had all the expectations in place to make a decent platforming game. We went forward, and a few weeks later ScourgeBringer was a project.

Q: So the game was mostly mechanics-driven rather than having a lot of lore or story right off the bat?

A: Yes. When you make a game there are usually two kinds of approaches. You have things that are lore-based, you create the setup before the gameplay. At Flying Oak Games, we have the opposite approach. We’re more gameplay-driven than story-driven. We first build something we would like to play, focus on the flow of the game. Once it is satisfying, we take a step back, and before calling it a project we try to think about setup and making a story for it.

We try to always be gameplay-focused, and for story we try to integrate it into the gameplay. It’s important to us that if we add story to the game, it needs to integrated. Even things like items need to have a link to the game itself.

Q: How did the story come about for ScourgeBringer’s gameplay? I noticed the setup felt similar to Horizon: Zero Dawn in terms of a tribal vs. technology theme, but it very much became its own thing.

A: We grew up in the 90s, and we like cheesy stuff. When it comes to action games, we want to get players into the game quickly, so we like to bootstrap games with cheesy setups and build something around it. It’s a twofold thing that we bring you rapidly into our game, and once you’re there we try to get you into something deeper.

This is also something we noticed on NeuroVoider, is it’s a game that was way too much into the concept. It had a paper story to it. This is something we assumed would work at first, we believed gameplay could supplement story. But there are a lot of players who simply can’t get into a game unless there’s story to it. So this is another thing we wanted to improve on if we worked on more games, we wanted to have a bigger focus on story and make it all integrated. Even if it isn’t the biggest story ever, it needed to be more integrated and have mysteries and so on.

So we created the basic framework of the story, but we knew we were not writers ourselves. We partnered with a writer, Pia Jacqmart. She’s worked on games like Call of Cthulhu, and she’s working presently on the Blood Bowl franchise. She kept the backbone but rewrote everything to be more smooth, relatable, and interesting. If you beat the game, you get a solid picture of what’s been happening throughout the game. It’s really cool.

It’s a game that’s not super focused on story, but I believe people who want to get some lore will get some, definitely.

Q: There’s a lot of theming to the game’s design. Blood, for instance, is big in the visuals and the mechanics as its currency. Tell me how that came about.

A: This is part of making everything in the game have a deep link with the story of the game. If you look at other games like Enter the Gungeon, the currency is bound to the lore because it’s shells of bullets. There are a lot of games, especially action games or roguelikes, that fall into the trap of having just money because you need money for your features work. What we wanted to do was make everything bound to the story and lore, which is why the money is blood because it has a lot of meaning. Skill points are also a special type of blood from bosses that grant greater powers.

Without entering into specific spoilers, it’s bound to what is expected from you, and what you have to pay to do what you have to do.

Q: Since you mentioned the skill tree, some roguelikes focus on the player becoming more skilled, while others look more at upgrades for the player’s avatar over time. What was your team’s philosophy on designing a roguelike?

A: What we really wanted to avoid is a grindy game. For instance, the example we always talk about is Rogue Legacy. Rogue Legacy is a game you can only beat if you upgrade your castle to the maximum. It’s part of the game that there’s a grind, even if you’re good enough you might not have enough HP. We didn’t want to go into that kind of design, we wanted to design something that follows the player’s progression in knowing the game and earning more skills.

The skill tree, to us, is designed to bring more diversity and options to your play. You get to more complexity as you wish, in a way that doesn’t quite make you stronger. It can make the game simpler because it opens up more options.

It’s like if you think about action games like Devil May Cry, these are games that when you start the only thing you’re going to unlock is new moves. They don’t necessarily make you stronger, but they offer you more options. This is the approach we wanted to try for a roguelike.

Q: Different moves have strengths against certain enemies, and it’s fun how the death screens include hints on certain advantages. How did you design this system?

A: This is mostly to add more diversity to each run. Each run is influenced by specific situations. Maybe you’re going to have a run that’s focused on the smash attack where you smash more enemies than usual, or maybe you’re going to make a run that’s focused on upgrading your gun to be more versatile.

Q: Speaking of the gun, it’s got a similar vibe to Hyper Light Drifter in terms of reloading through melee attacks, so I was wondering if that was one of your influences.

A: This is a funny thing, because it’s a question that has come up a lot. Truth is, we’ve never played Hyper Light Drifter at all.

The whole idea behind the system is that we wanted you to build symmetries with weapons. We want you to use more of your weapons, not just sometime use the sword or sometimes use the gun. With some setups you probably can do that, but we wanted to add something to it that would help you get more out of your weapons. You should use each of them to get out of certain situations, or concentrate in certain places.

So it was more about the energy. The peculiar thing is, we’ve never played Hyper Light Drifter. We know we should because every time we mention it people say we should play it.

Q: One big thing I gathered was you guys are focused on creating a flow state through the combo system. The game encourages you to jump between enemy chains, and there are skills that improve your combo.

A: That’s something we wanted to make from the start. We’re really into having a game focused on tight, polished gameplay control. We polish things up maybe too much, I don’t know. But we put a lot of time into figuring out the controls, and on ScourgeBringer we almost worked a year just on the game feel alone before starting to expand. For almost a year, we played it a lot and refined small details.

It’s having these really long, slow-cooking stuff with the gameplay that helped us build something flow-based. It was only when we were satisfied with that that we built out the content.

Q: How long have you been working on the game overall? 

A: Overall, now it’s been about two-and-a-half years. We put a full year into creating an alpha, and once we had that we started putting it out to our first players privately on Discord. Then it moved into Early Access, added more content and so on.

Q: How much of an effect did world events have on the development process toward the end?

A: Luckily we’ve been little-to-no impacted by the world situation. We’ve been able to deliver updates during containment. Here in France we were contained for the first half of 2020. At first we were a bit anxious because we’re working in an office usually, and working from home we expected to be difficult because of children and our family business.

But, in fact, after a couple weeks adjustment we ended up going into cruise control and worked quite well. We managed to deliver two big content updates working exclusively from home, and we wound up shipping the game earlier than expected. It worked quite well for us, I’d say. The only concern we have is all the events to show our game, for instance in Europe we have Gamescom.

Q: In terms of tone, roguelikes aren’t generally a ‘calm’ genre, but it seems you focused on making this game intense, with heavy metal music and so on. What were you hoping to convey with the music and art design?

A: This is mostly through our composer and sound designer Joonas Turner, who worked on the sound design for Nuclear Throne, Downwell, and many other action games. What we do with the people we work with is give them a free hand on projects. What we basically said to him is do your thing, and if you want to put your own vibe into the game do as you please.

This is how we try to work with everybody. It’s always a bit funny because it brings back into the game. It’s not like we ask someone to make something, take what it is, and if it doesn’t fit we don’t use it. When we started to work with Joonas, it started to create ideas, like can we make dynamic music, programmable music and score? We started to work on this, he started to make music, and a lot of it was really punchy. This encouraged us to follow the pace, because at first the game had a pace that was fast but a bit more chill.

We caught up on the pace and told him we dig what you’re doing. So we started to add more into the game around the sound design, more punchy, it all clicked together. We don’t necessarily think about bringing a specific tone to the game. It’s more like we want everyone on the team to bring their own tone, so we can build it together.

Q: How many permutations are there per items from things like the blood altars? How much variation can players come across, and how much is planned?

A: It’s something that we never actually computed. If you just go with the altars it might be something like 30 different blessings, and you can only get five of them per run. There’s quite a lot of combinations I believe, but I don’t have the precise number.

Q: Are there plans to keep expanding after it releases?

A: Oh yeah, we have a lot of ideas to expand the game. We’re looking to see what the feedback will be to the game, because we’ve had players be very involved in development so far, we like working with community feedback. We’re going to be looking out for feedback from the release.

We mostly expect to be working on small adjustments at first, like addressing balance and so on. Once the base is more set, we’re going to think about expanding. Either way, it’s going to be quite busy, I’d guess.

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ScourgeBringer is available now on PC, Switch, and Xbox One. Game Rant was provided a Steam Early Access code alongside this interview.