Radical Rabbit Stew
'Radical Rabbit Stew' Developer Interview
We have a special update for you this week.
Sold Out's Community Manager Sean chats to the Radical Rabbit Stew developers Julian and Fredrik from Pugstorm about making their upcoming game.
Don't forget to Wishlist today!
Radical Rabbit Stew releases 16 July 2020
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Cooking up a Boss!
Today we’re going to show you how one of our supersized bosses was made.
He’s also something exclusive on the menu, an evil guest for dinner we haven’t shown before.
Let me introduce to you: Lord Butter!
(Seems like he’s trying to have YOU for dinner!)
It’s always exciting having a world almost finished in development and being able to put the topping on it with adding a boss. A boss is the final test of the mechanics the player has learned so far, but also a test of the development team where everyone needs to add their little important part to the potpourri and make it feel challenging and rewarding.
Here are the ingredients we used in cooking up Lord Butter:
- We looked at what new elements such as enemies and spoons we had introduced in the levels before the boss and then we thought about how we could cook it all together to make a challenging opponent out of it. For this boss we had introduced a lot of new exploding and fire related elements such as bombs, lava, mortars and exploding rabbits (Bombits), so we knew it was going to be HOT.
- The player had also gotten a new weapon, the hand spoon.
It’s good for grabbing out-of-reach kitchen utensils, and even better for hurling a rabbit across the room.
- After some brainstorming, the core idea ended up being a chaotic fight with explosions everywhere caused by the boss shooting bombs at the player. The player would then have to use the hand spoon in smart ways to both dodge the exploding elements and also to fling them back at the boss.
- With a general idea of what we wanted the player to do in the boss fight, we went on about actually creating a graphic for the boss. We knew at that point that we wanted it to be a big evil-looking baddy and since the clash should take place in the boiling depths of a volcano we went with a demonic oversized bunny. Of course.
- We then put the sprite into the scene that had been prepped up with some ground, walls, and lava (also a bit of salt) to start seeing the context the fight will take place in. With the context more clear, we started designing the overall movement and attack patterns for the boss. The outcome was the boss flying around above the lava while shooting bombs and Bombits that the player had to dodge and hit back at it, trying to not get deep fried in the process.
Gotcha, pal! - Finally, we felt that we wanted the player to utilize their hand spoon more during the fight. To solve this we added laser beams that the boss would shoot out of his eyes while moving across the room, the player would then need to use their new weapon to try and avoid them.
After having figured out the overall recipe of the fight, we went back into it over and over again to iron out the nuances we didn’t like until the fight felt equally rewarding and fair to the player. In the end we got everyone on the team to play the boss, as this gave some final feedback on difficulty and fun value. And this sums up how we usually go about cooking up a boss.
It’s now up to you to defeat Lord Butter and save your chef friends. The first step in doing that is by wishlisting Radical Rabbit Stew on Steam and checking out the game at release in two weeks (oh my)!
We hope you’ll like beating this boss and the others we have in store for you.
Have a nice weekend, maybe spice it up by playing the demo? (And don't forget to Wishlist as well!) 😉
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1232010/Radical_Rabbit_Stew/
Whack-a-rabbit
Last week, Julian gave us some insights into the art-making process of Radical Rabbit Stew. Today, I’ll write a little about making two of the game’s main mechanics: ‘propelling’ and ‘whacking’—two seemingly straightforward mechanics that took a lot of sweat and tears to get right.
As some of you may know, in Radical Rabbit Stew, the main goal is to whack rabbits with different spoons, and send them off diving into metallic pots. When a rabbit is bopped in this fashion, it enters a “propelled (flying) state”, making it tumble off in a direction until it hits another object. If it collides with a pot, it enters it, and is then sent off into space! A stage is completed once all pots have been filled.
These seemingly simple rules make for some interesting and complex interactions that you can explore in the game’s different worlds. (There’s also an in-game editor that you can use to cook up your own delicious and chaotic rabbit stew nightmares!)
To enhance the game further, we sprinkled it with many different objects (e.g., springs, crock pots, etc) that affect and interact with propelled objects in various ways. Most combinations of these interactions had to be considered carefully, and we meticulously tweaked them to give the player a creative experience with tons of emergent gameplay and possibilities to explore!
In the early days of making the game, we fiddled with a few proprietary physics engines to handle collisions (there were no existing rabbit physics™ engines that we could use). This, however, turned out to be a highly unstable (and unfruitful) nightmare. Thus, we instead started from scratch, and made our own system for handling rabbit physics™. This allowed us to have fine-grained control over how collisions behave, which became more-and-more important as the development of the game progressed.
In the end, we believe that the result of taking this approach is quite amazing, and we are particularly fond of the game’s super cool chain reactions. For these reasons, we are extremely happy that we dared taking this approach to making the game—even though it added quite a few difficult hurdles that we had to overcome.
There’s of course quite a few ingredients (and more technical details) that go into making a rabbit physics™ system like ours, so please let us know if you are interested in knowing more by dropping us a tweet or a message. 😄
With that said, if you want to have a real taste of Radical Rabbit Stew, make sure to Wishlist the game now buy the game when it is released next month.
A new recipe!
Fredrik here from the development team. I’d just love to personally thank every one of you who downloaded and tried the Radical Rabbit Stew demo during the Steam Games Festival, we are really thankful and appreciative of all your support and wonderful comments! :)
With your involvement, we’ve been able to further improve on the game and experience to give you the most fun, challenging and quirky experience possible, and we’re really excited to get the full game into your hands.
As an additional thank you, we have now added two levels to the demo for you to sink your teeth into! We really hope you enjoy these extra challenges and are looking forward to seeing your reactions to it!
Alongside these additional levels, we have also updated the demo with a few bug fixes, gameplay tweaks and more, which you can find outlined below:
• Added full localization for all supported languages! Including Russian, Korean and Chinese.
• Revamped the game's progression system.
• Updated Radical Rabbit Stew's UI to be more accessible.
• Added new save slots with full Steam support.
Again, thank you for trying the demo and we’re looking forward to sharing more updates with you soon!
Fredrik
The Flavours of Art
As the pixel artist creating all the assets for the game, I had to be a jack-of-all-trades and all-seeing eye regarding concept art, environment assets, animation and so on.
Luckily, I have a huge passion for these things. Much of my inspiration is drawn from having grown up in the ‘90s, where pixel art was still going strong in video games. The hilarious bosses from Parodius, the parallax landscapes in Pop´n TwinBee, or lush environments from the likes of Tales of Phantasia, all were incorporated into Radical Rabbit Stew in one or another way.
The limitations of pixel art can be turned into its strengths, as it is cost-effective at presenting good-looking assets in a video game and challenges the artist to even think more in terms of design and colour. Even with a background in illustration, I learned so much over the course of working on Radical Rabbit Stew due to these limitations. Here are some of the first assets I made and some of the latest.
Kind of different, huh?
Creating the environment assets that you can see in each level was the biggest workload of all the graphics in Radical Rabbit Stew, but it was a lot of fun each time.
Once we had decided on a world theme, getting it sketched out was the first part. Even though it is a pixel art game, I wanted to do this step properly.
Below you can see some ideas for the World 1 environment I was sketching, the themes we went for were grasslands and rabbits in space.
Then, I would put these sketches up as a reference on my other screen and begin slowly drawing the assets in pixel form. The trick is to keep the essential feel of the sketch intact - and be aware of the small sizes you're working with - while constantly zooming out and checking if the asset is even readable as a whole. Repeat until satisfied.
The exact process for each asset is a little different every time but in general it breaks down to this:
1. Draw out the general shape
2. Clean up the shape and define surfaces hit by light
3. Add more detail and introduce more colors (also a cast shadow in this example)
4. Spice everything up and add highlights (my favourite!)
There is a lot of back and forth on these steps and the final part is simply making sure that every pixel has its reason for existing.
Working from a sketch to a small asset is one thing, but I also had to do the reverse.
The Mama boss you're fighting in the game is based off of an upscaled normal rabbit.
We had used these rabbit sprites as a placeholder when setting up the boss fight and later on decided that we'd like to have them cleaned up to be in tune with the other pixel art. So that meant I had to pick each sprite we used and make a bigger version of it with 3 x times more detail and an equal amount of character.
What I thought would be a very tedious procedure became very interesting as I could flesh out how the rabbits looked when they're not sitting in a small 16x16 pixel frame.
And then, as we replaced the old sprites with my new ones in the animation, the boss really came together and looked alive. I would show you but I guess you'll have to see for yourself when the game comes out.
Another thing you should be looking forward to are the funny story snippets we present between chapters. In fact, they were my second favourite thing to work on in Radical Rabbit Stew (with the top favourite being the final boss, you'll love that one).
These story snippets, or slides as we call them, deliver the backstory behind Radical Rabbit Stew between gameplay and are presented in an old-school-cinema style. (Also while looking goofy, fitting the humour of the game.)
That was my time to shine as an illustrator and I decided to only use 5 tones of grayscale to keep my focus off the colours and on the characters.
Before going into pixel work I created a quick storyboard of each scene in which the story was condensed in very few images. Below, you can see the intro scene:
It looked pretty rough but gave me enough direction to start working. The intro, especially, was something we fiddled with pretty early in game development, and back then the style of those slides was still very different. My first take was to do a clean sketch of each image in Photoshop like I would with a high resolution artwork and then scale it down to have it fit our game's dimensions while also reducing the colours to 5.
For the first versions of the game that looked fine, but as development progressed and my pixel skills got better, we had to face the fact that we would need to brush up on those graphics. So I recreated the intro slides in proper pixel art as well as adding more slides for the rest of the game. The result was way more time-consuming (6-7 weeks in total), but it looked much better and when we finally placed them in the game we knew it was time well spent. Have a look at this merry scene:
Pretty cool, I think.
There is a whole lot more to making the art for a video game and I would love to keep on rambling, but that should be it for today. I really hope you enjoyed this little insight behind the flavours of pixel art.
If you're hungry for more or want to see those graphics in action make sure to Wishlist Radical Rabbit Stew, and keep your eyes open for the release next month!
Digital Cookbook - OUT NOW FOR ALL!
In this Cookbook you’ll find dishes of all types and sorts which are bound to have something for everyone. These are the recipes the Evil Queen Rabbit and her devilish hopping mad minions don’t want you to know!
We want to see YOUR takes on these great dishes. When you cook one of these fantastic meals, simply take a picture and tweet it out with the hashtag #RadicalRabbitCB
Although that’s enough talking… IT’S TIME TO COOK!
Click on me to begin cooking some great dishes!
Mechanics & Objectives
We wanted to let you know that we are working very hard to bring you Radical Rabbit Stew during these difficult times and we will be giving you updates on the game weekly!
In this post, we wanted to talk a bit about the mechanics and objectives you will encounter while playing Radical Rabbit Stew.
Objectives:
Radical Rabbit Stew will present you with unique, fun puzzles that will require the use of different tools to get through each stage, from using your magic spoon to bouncing rabbits off of springs, to opening up unexplored areas with bombs. The main goal of each puzzle? Send all the Radical Rabbits flying in their stew pot spaceships before you become their lunch!
Mechanics:
- Spoons: Your primary weapon, this will be used to whack those rabbits all over the map! Into springs, into each other or into their spaceships to complete the level. You can even upgrade it to a silver spoon to charge up your attack!
- Grappling Hand: Use this handy tool to get to areas you can’t walk to, and if a rabbit is out of reach the grappling hand will bring it right to you!
- Bombs: blast your way through the map to reach unexplored areas you might need to access to complete the puzzle
- Puzzles: Each puzzle will get more complicated each level and will feature new environments, new problems to solve, new rabbit types and boss fights!
We hope you are all as excited as we are to bring you Radical Rabbit Stew, in case you didn’t know, the demo is available now so you check out the game for yourself ahead of release on the 16th July.
The Kitchen is Closed
We gave you the chance to become immortalised in our digital, intergalactic cookbook by submitting your very own space recipes.
This competition is now closed as of Thursday 14th May and your recipes have been entered. We are very excited to have these featured in the cookbook and try out your creations, which will be available to all for free in June! Keep an eye out for it to go live on our delicious new website at the link below!
radicalrabbitstew.com
We’ll be back to update you with more soon, fellow space chefs!
Available to Wishlist NOW
A Hearty Welcome
For our first official post on Steam we wanted to get you all up to speed with what we are up to leading up to launch. It has been busy on all front as we get closer and closer to release BUT we hope the next few months are just as exciting for you as it is for us.
We currently have a demo on our page if you have missed the opportunity to play the game at various shows over the last year. You should get a great feel for the game with a taster (chef pun) to what the opening stages of the game is like. We welcome all feedback and want to hear from you about your thoughts.
We are new to the Discord game but we welcome you to join our chat. Here you can hear announcements, discuss the game as well as see what other games are coming down the pipeline. There’s even a ‘Show us your pets’ section!
Find us here: https://discord.gg/soldout
If you also have Twitter we recommend following us @SoldOut & @PugstormGames for news as well as competitions. In fact we currently have an opportunity for you to get involved in contributing to our Radical Rabbit Stew cook book. Interested? More details here:
https://twitter.com/soldout/status/1255874861714608131?s=20
And that’s it for now.
