I’ve been thinking about it Bugsnax so much so that it feels like I myself ate one of the suspicious addicted little animals. It’s been a week since I finished the game, and I still see myself a bunger bunger bunger as I go through my day. To satisfy my hunger for more Bugsnax without using any bugsnax, I decide to email Kevin Zuhn, senior creative director and author of Bugsnax, of my burning questions.
(This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.)
Kotaku: Can you tell me what your vision was for the bugsnax? How did you come up with this idea? How was your design process?
Kevin Zuhn: The initial seed came from an old drawing I made in college, from a waffle mixed with a caterpillar (the Wafflepillar), which I turned into a pitch to collect insects from food. It is combined with [gameplay designer] John Murphy’s pitch over muppets mutating by what they eat, and [CFO, programmer, webmaster] Devon Scott-Tunkin’s pitch over screaming bananas, and at the end of our serving process it became Bugsnax!
When we wanted to make the creatures ourselves, we made a huge list of iconic foods (burger, fries, cake) and iconic bugs (ant, dragonfly, scorpion) and looked for ways to connect them. We wanted to make sure we had a great variety of flavors, temperatures, body shapes, abilities, etc. Has. Sometimes we build a bug bag based on a very strong visual design, sometimes to meet a mechanical need, and sometimes just for the sake of a joke! You could say that our design process was chaos.
G / O Media can get a commission
Kotaku: Have you hired professionals to pronounce the bugsnax? For some reason I have a wonderful fantasy that the bugsnax is voiced by ordinary people who do not vote and who work for your studio, and one day you all just shoved into a box and said, “give me your best impression “and the best selected.
Zuhn: I wish any of us at Young Horses had the talent to pick it up, but the subjects are all talking about the bugsnax! The good people at Brightskull called people like Robbie Daymond [the voice of Sailor Moon’s Tuxedo Mask] and Cristina Valenzuela [Sailor Mars from the same show], and each got six or so bugsnax. In the recording, our voice director, Michael Csurics, would say to them, ‘You’re a hot dog, you’re crawling around like a worm, you can only say your own name, Weenyworm. How does it sound? ”And they will improvise hilarious voices until we find one we like. The lyrics were the funniest thing in the world because the whole page would just say ‘Scoopy Banoopy’. The whole process was that bananas were starting to end, and I loved it.
Kotaku: The grumpuses are also all unique characters. They all have desires and fears and insecurities, which make them noticeably complicated as NPCs go. What was your thought process for them?
Zuhn: We wanted Bugsnax to be an ensemble story, so my first goal was to determine what role each character played in the society of Snaxburg. I started with very broad archetypes: the mayor, the farmer, the archaeologist. After we fixed that, the next question was why each of them wanted bugsnax. What is the hole in their lives that they are trying to fill? I wanted to make sure that each of them has a different answer so that they have different perspectives on what bugsnax is and what is important in life. It helped me outline more details on how they perform!
From there, my favorite part: what do they think of each other? I drew big maps to see who would be friends, partners or enemies and why. How does the problem in their lives affect their relationships, good and bad? With all the questions answered, I was able to build quests and scenes in the game around the characters’ biggest sources of conflict! I really wanted to make sure it all felt grounded and organic, because absolutely everything else about the game is ridiculous.
Kotaku: If you were to do an internal survey to find out who everyone’s favorite bugsnuck would be, which one would it be (and why is it Bunger)? Do you also have a favorite Grumpus?
When I do an internal survey, I get ten different answers! The Young Horses never agree on anything. My personal favorite is actually Preying Picantis, but Bunger has a special shelf in my heart. There’s just something magnetic about Tom Taylorson’s cheeseburger-as-dog performance. As for my favorite grumpus, it’s Chandlo Funkbun (because he’s by far the nicest to write).
(Kotaku: Bunger all day. But I also like the sassy Sweetiefly.) Was there any bugsnax that was cut off from the final product?
Zuhn: Oh, enough! We set up pages with bugsnak concepts, and we had a system to tune our favorites. Everything below the voting threshold has been lowered. The victims include a grilled cheese crab, a bacon fly, a spaghetti meatball snail, and even the original waffles! There are still dozens of unused designs, some of which were even prototypes, but any bug bag that actually received a full 3D model treatment remained until the end.
Kotaku: One bugsnax that confused me was the Paletoss. I did not understand the name until I realized, ‘Duh! It is supposed to be a pallet! Do you have something you can share about how you came up with the names for your snax?
Zuhn: These are palettes that throw you: Paletoss!
Every few months the Young Horses get together for a name storm meeting, where we go to bug talk after bug talk to throw out names until we find one we can agree on. In the best case, we will make a good pun by melting the name of the bug with the snack name (Fryder, Scorpenyo, Buffalocust). If we could not do that, we would try to use their taste or behavior (Paletoss, Sweetiefly). And if all else fails, we’ll just have the words just as cute (Scoopy Banoopy).
The end result of this is that I have an Excel spreadsheet with hundreds of failed names for bugsnax, which is more stupid and desperate than the previous one.
Kotaku: The ‘good’ end of the game therefore implies that Snorpy was always right. Will we confront the Grumpunati in DLC or sequels? (Are there any plans for DLC or a sequel?)
Zuhn: You have to take what Snorpy says with a big grain of salt, because like all the characters in this story, he’s just always half-right. We are still figuring out what exactly we want to do after the release, but we are definitely not done with it Bugsnax train. I know I will not want to hang the plot wire forever!
Kotaku: Did you always mean it Bugsnax to become as dark as this, or was it something that just happened? If you caught bugsnax and fed it to your friends – something they encourage you to do – you’re making a pretty gloomy end.
Zuhn: Absolutely! We knew from the beginning that bugsnax were dangerous parasites, and in their earliest designs not very cute. At one point there was a worse end where the Grumpuses become zombies who are snakes that eat each other and then you. So if anything, the game has become lighter and sillier over time!
I wonder what an end is essentially The Walking Bugsnax would have worked with the game’s sweet sweet theme song “This is Bugsnax!‘Maybe Young Horses would have chosen a more appropriate sound, something like death metal? Imagine a version of ‘It’s Bugsnax!’ done by Baby metal. It actually sounds pretty bad.