Review Fix chats with Ricky Haggett of Hollow Ponds, designer of Loot Rascals, who discusses the game and its origin. Now available on the PlayStation 4 and Steam it’s a rogue-like experience that is extremely difficult, but just as fun.
Review Fix: How was the game born?
Ricky Haggett: The artist and animator David Ferguson (www.swatpaz.net) did some bits and pieces on some previous games of ours. We loved his art, and working with him, so we asked him if he’d like to make an entire game with us, and he agreed. After some initial conversations, we decided it was going to be a ‘silly space’ game.

Around the same time I’d been getting into tabletop games – card and board games – in which it seems like there’s been a huge explosion of creativity in the past decade or so, which had completely passed me by (I’d been deep in making video games). My friend – and fellow Honeyslug founder – Nat Marco sat me down and taught me a load of the games she really loves and I was hooked, and immediately wanted to play with those kinds of mechanics in my next video game.

Loot Rascals is a combination of these two key influences.
Review Fix: What was development like?
Haggett: It went pretty smoothly. We’d previously made Hohokum and Super Exploding Zoo in the same engine (our own in-house one), so we were in our comfort zone technically, and the folks we hired to collaborate with us, including Jon Whiting (http://jonathanwhiting.com) and Brent Kobayashi (http://meowza.org) were super talented and experienced. This time around we used Slack and Asana for the first time, and I wouldn’t try to make a game without them again: good tools for collaborative design and task-listing make such a big different.

I was really scared about releasing the early access Refinery Edition on itch.io, because releasing things before they’re done was outside of my previous experience and comfort zone, but for this game it was essential, and it worked a treat! We had so much amazing feedback from the community, and it was great for morale.
Review Fix: What games did you play as a kid? How did they inspire this one?
Haggett: I’m lucky in having two brothers, and parents who were supportive about us playing lots of video games (and I started making them myself aged 11), so I played a LOT of games as a kid (on SNES, Megadrive, Amiga and PC mainly), and I’ve played EVEN MORE games since, so I can no longer untangle my specific influences very successfully. I will say that one of my favourite games growing up was Toejam and Earl, which was another hard roguelike with a very distinct sense of humour.
Review Fix: The game has a cool art style. How did you decide on going in that direction?
Haggett: For a long time now I’ve been making games in collaboration with artists who have a distinct style – often from outside of the games industry. There are so many amazing folks out there making exciting, unique visual art that I don’t think I’d ever want to make a game that falls squarely into one of the ‘typical’ art styles for video games.
Review Fix: With so much competition on the PS4 and Steam, how hard was it for you guys to make something that stood out?
Haggett: Hopefully Loot Rascals already stands out in terms of the way it looks and sounds, just by the nature of our amazing collaborators. I haven’t talked about the music yet, but Grandmaster Gareth (https://grandmastergareth.bandcamp.com) did an incredible job with the Loot Rascals soundtrack!

But we also worked hard to make something mechanically unique and interesting – and in particular, the networking features – whereby the enemies can loot dead players, and send their cards off into other people’s games, who can then choose whether to return those cards to the original player, or keep them – haven’t been done before.
Review Fix: What are your goals for this game?
Haggett: We wanted to make a rogue-like that is very much skill-based; where as you play, you learn how to survive, rather than leveling up your character to make the game easier. We want the high score tables to be a proper battleground, and we’re excited to see how good people can get at Loot Rascals. There’s even a ‘Streaks’ leaderboard, which rewards players who can beat the daily challenge repeatedly, without ever dying.

We also worked hard for it to be intuitive to play – we worked really hard on streamlining the interface – and for it to be full of secrets, emergent tricks, and audio-visual delights and gags.
Review Fix: Why should someone play it?
Haggett: Because they like hard but fun games.
Review Fix: How do you want the game to be remembered?
Haggett: As that game with the hexagons and the talking Scottish teapot.
Review Fix: What’s next?
Haggett: More video games.
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