Risk of Rain | 10 Year Anniversary Documentary

risk of rain started pretty organically we're at College at udub and playing a lot of games at the time and we felt like there wasn't quite enough kind of games we could play together both me and Duncan so we decided to write down our own game and how would we do it this is the uh Holy Grail I guess this was like one night or two nights of hanging out and essentially designing the game that we would play if we could make the game and this turned into R there like the director his ideas for

like the captain and the engineer the Gunner the Navigator I've always tinkered with making games and so it was just a natural extension of like what if we just made a [Music] game risk of rain as a franchise really interesting because it started off as a sort of like 2D sort of sides scrolling game which is like very old school when it came out it's very refreshing we knew that we wanted it to be simple we also really like Platformers and so I think we've always had a soft spot for side scrolling games the thing

that really captured my attention was the color palette which had this soft pal colors these purples and magentas it wasn't this extremely bright and Poppy and colorful things that you usually get when you see pixel art this showed to me that there's a very particular aesthetic choice being made here and it really had a strong impact on the music that I decided to write we found an amazing composer just kind of by luck we went to YouTube and we typed in like best music top 10 video games or something I think there was a lot

of games that have like good background music or music that doesn't like compete with the game play and I think we wanted something that was more forward in the game and I think Chris does like a really great job of that I'm writing music that is very close to the music that I would write on my own if I was writing an album I think the original risker rain resonated so well with people was that it had familiar game design to other games that were popular at the time I like that you have to survive

you don't get a lot of those games that make you feel like you're constantly about to die you are always at risk of rain and death as you play this game there's plenty of games out there that have very thorough tutorials and are very protective of you why you're trying to go through what this game just goes hey figure it out good luck I think players love pure chaos they want to get as many items as possible go as far as they can it just needs to be as frantic as possible I think seeking the

perfect run is the goal of the players ship I know it's my goal I don't want to die anywhere I want to hit all the bosses that I want to hit I want to get the items that I want it's the buildup right it's going from nothing to something crazy and this feeling of power is unmatch and that unpredictability but being able to do it the way that you want I think is the key to the game success I think that risk of rain resonated a lot with people because it's simultaneously very approachable and familiar

but also unique the devs just had this innate feeling for the satisfaction of piling on tons and tons of items practically no limit and just feeling really powerful and also the games give you a bunch of characters with their own unlocks their own secrets to find and crucially it doesn't over complicate or over monetize that stuff easy to pick up but very hard to master was something that we wanted to it worked out pretty well multiplayer has always been really our uh Ace in the Hole for the genre there isn't very many multiplayer Rog likes

risk brain was a great hangout game because it had those kind of nice moments of quiet where we could just be going around exploring looking for items and just chitchat about our lives and then it would have those big intense moments of action when you would activate the teleporter and tons of enemies would come flying in at you we knew we were going to make a sequel to risk of rain eventually we took enough time from risk rang one that we kind of felt re-energized about the game it was like four years between risk one

and Risk 2 before we started to like really work on it we just didn't want to do a super safe sequel we wanted to be exciting we wanted it to be kind of risky haha and that's kind of when like the perspective changed and we jokingly suggested doing it in 3D I was following Duncan and Paul's Tumblr Dev blog they're describing how to turn this 2D game into a 3D one I thought it was really fascinating I was so eager to get my hands on it i' say I was pretty skeptical but in the end

risk of rain 2 really nailed it I would compare it to Super Mario 64 in that yeah it's different in a lot of ways from where the game started in 2D but it still manages to preserve that Essence and give you the same feeling while you're playing it that's most important I think the most important considerations with risk of rain 2 was making sure that we're still pushing boundaries and we're doing something that's interesting to us as well with risk AR 2 we knew we needed like you know some extra people we wanted to focus

on making the game what really impressed us with gearbox was that they gave us the freedom to do exactly the game we were making they were looking for a partner to help them bring it out to the market not only just on PC but also a steam epic and then the consoles eventually gearbox has brought some of the AAA game development Firepower that you might expect from a big company like this while also trying really hard to respect the origins of the franchise of risk of Rin working with gearbox was the right move for sure

just cuz they could get so many eyes on it all at once the codevelopment process always a really tricky one because you're trying to understand like what is yours to work on and what is theirs how do you build trust with the franchise owners in this case hopo to make sure that you're making things that not only make them excited but that you believe will make the the user excited they wanted to make a really great game and they succeeded at that and I think one of the things we can do is sort of continue

that development in their Spirit while at the same time just being able to show the game and bring it to a lot more people when we were kind of doing the whole passing of the torch with the franchise one of the many conversation we had was about lore I was asked to make a glyph language for Lans and Lans get their name from The Lost Continent liia it was a combination of Indian Madagascar and a Australian references as Lore Master what I'm doing is I'm making sure that new content can be seamlessly blended with content

that exists already in the franchise so what people are looking for going forward out of their gaml it still feels like Risk of Rain the core for the style is that we have to keep it simple but also interesting because it's art and we need to make it pretty I love seeing what our devs do they are extremely talented I love it it sounds ridiculous but I get excited I get giddy whenever I see something like Claire who works in art but she's making up when the player experienced the game I wanted to feel like

everything around them is supporting the storytelling I want them to stop and look at the environment like wow this is pretty I know the combat is always intense but that's what I want them to do just stop and look just looking at this new animation that Drew pass on to us if the attack is that he will be able to track the player 360 then he need needs to be in more like a neutral pose maybe so it doesn't look weird if someone is really having a lot of fun making a game I think it

does show in in the final quality you can just tell they had fun making it I think a lot of people associate risk of rain directly with its power fantasy which is totally fair but when I think about risk of rain I associate it better with its challenge system and how you overcome them this game challenges you to mix up your style as you're completing challenges you get new survivors and challenges the way you play all over again and then you stack that with unpredictable map rotation different items that you get from the chest it

seems to be something that really just resonates with our users risk of Ring 2 honestly kind of feels like a game from a simpler time it really does preserve the essence of the original which came out in 2013 and I think that balance of Simplicity and excess is why it resonates it's such a loved title and the community is really crucial part of the franchise I constantly put myself in the shoes of Gamers because I still game too your feedback is valuable it doesn't fall on De fears we listen to everything gearbox and the teams

that they're working with are not only very talented but also very passionate about the game I think the right thing to do would be to hand it on to someone else and let them take their Reigns and just see what the potential is for the game in the [Music] future [Music] survivors of the Void introduced not just like new maps and new survivors but like new mechanics new enemy types new war players expect fun survivors cool bosses discovering unknown places and probably the music Chris kadulu is really good I love every single thing that he's

done from the beginning up until this point with where at with survivors of the Void I want to introduce new elements to the music but but don't lose the core uh thing that makes risk of rain music risk of rain music when we did survivors of the Void I had this concept that the music will be much darker so I tried to go into that direction we're thinking a lot about what the game is missing with survivors like what's the different play style that we haven't explored or what's been craving by the community and how

can we satisfy them I think my favorite memory is probably the release date of the Void DLC I could not kill the void link I don't know why within the first like 30 minutes to an hour fought the voidling and I was like okay maybe I'll get him on the next one I died maybe I'll get them on the next one uh it took 21 hours kill him so that that was definitely a journey for me a very fun and memorable experience for sure there is an element of familiarity but there's also a lot of

Wonder there's a lot to discover I think risk of rain is made for consoles it feels great I can sit down on the couch I can blow through a run or two in the amount of time that you know me uh a dad usually has to to play games it's important to support all of the platforms because we have users out there already on those things such as switch and Xbox and Playstation obviously PC we have a huge fan base and we need to do right by them by supporting this content on all those platforms

one of the things we are doing with the console release for the survivors of the Void is redoing the entire code base from the ground of the thing that I'm I'm most proud of I think is that we were able to unify those code es and be able to deliver future content to players across all the platforms as soon as we can with an experience that matches the vision that hopu had for the game it makes me proud to be able to serve the fans and the players in a way that ultimately gives them a

better game while the programming team has been focusing on the porting effort for survivors on consoles the development team has been working on DLC 2 or Seekers of the storm for the plot of seekers of the storm what we wanted to accomplish was to give players a Peak at the planet after its Guardian was gone secrets of the storm it is entirely new expansion pack that'll be similar in size to survivors of the Void which to say there's going to be a lot of content it's going to have new survivors a bunch of new maps

also going to have items we want to prove to the fans that we know what risk of ring is we want to improve player experience when they playing the game I've seen seers of the storm content it's really amazing seeing a lot of the stuff that they've been working on this is looking good this is where you make dead ends right where I get lost every time okay you I like you I thank you very much for that yeah risk of R Noy world is a isometric take on the risk of rain franchise anybody that's

a fan of the franchise will find pieces of what they like from Riskin in our uh mobile game you play missions with your squad that you build swap between your survivors within the mission and bring as much destruction as you can it's a new space station right that's the prototype for the temple everything is going to be deployed the bus will come from the ground like it's it's like capture into a crystal but when it's fully activated it's going to be Unleashed and you have to fight the bus and all the monsters awesome it's a

game made for mobile but still we really wanted to make a game that is skill-based that is satisfying just like the previous titles everything is made so that the action is intense without overwhelming the player this is the first time that risk of rain is venturing into Mobile and so I'm expecting some pretty Christmas light pew pew action risk of rain on St worlds is the best of risk of ring with hter swapping fast-paced Action Hero collecting and everything that needs to be there to make a great G RIS rain one was made 10 years

ago now and I think that that we loved the design of that game we loved a lot of aspects of that game but we felt like it was showing its age and we wanted to kind of take that same game and kind of bring it into like 2023 one of the keys to the longevity of risk of rign one and risk of rign 2 as being the modern Community risk of rign returns is a game for the fans right and so it only makes sense to have them spearheading the project we noticed there was a

lot of great people in the modding Community who were continuing to support the game that we weren't I think made natural sense because they just had a much better understanding of the game at this point it's kind of like this nice combination between like the old school version of risk rain and then all the nice stuff from two were kind of put together to make returns so I think players will will like it there's a lot of people out in the world that have just so much Creative Energy for risk of rain stuff that it

doesn't make sense for us to be in the way they understand the universe they understand what makes it so great you could have played 100 hours R rain one and like 100 hours and two and you'll find stuff in returns that you've never seen before the present day of risk of rain is a lot of expansion it's a very rich world that still has a lot of room even just on this one planet to do stuff the future is very bright for risk rain there's definitely a want from the community we want the game to

be fun for many many many years to come I think there's a lot of potential there's so many things that we haven't explored with the franchise there's so many different environment that we wanted to do when I think about the future risk of rain one of the things that makes me the most excited is really just like getting the stuff out there we have a very loyal and very active fan base and I want to make sure that we're doing right by them and I'm pretty excited cuz I think that we're going to we're lucky

enough to have so many Engineers that are also Power Players of this game so they give really good feedback on what the community is really looking for in their experience and how to move forward while keeping the core of the franchise intact thank you to hopoo games for making such a fantastic IP lots of good memories had within it and good luck to gearbox who now has the Reigns over the IP we are excited as a community to see what you guys are cooking up next the risk rain world's pretty expandable um that's kind of

what makes it fun to work on so we don't have any ideas but we can't wait to see where it goes good [Music] luck