For a while we lived in a world without shmups, and it was a dark and dreary place for the arcade lovers. Thankfully remakes of the genre giants and new indie hits have brought the bullet hell back to the masses, and I can’t get enough of them. If you’re looking for your next arcade treat then look no further, because it’s going to be ZOE Begone!
ZOE Begone! won’t be sat at home with your dad’s favourite arcade hits though, because it couldn’t be more of a different take on the genre if it tried. I’m pretty firmly in love with the game, and you’ll see exactly why in our review coming very soon. Until then we got to hear all about its innovative ideas and where they came from in a wonderful interview with its solo developer Retchy (or Graeme Hawkins, if you prefer), who is clearly loving the shmup renaissance just as much as we are.
ZOE Begone! is such an interesting concept for an arcade shooter. How did you come up with this animator versus player theme?
The idea sort of evolved during the early development of the game and was linked to the art style that I chose to use. The drawn-on-film animations by Norman McLaren of the 1930’s and 40’s were a big inspiration for the visuals, and when I started to think about the setting for the game (I already had the camera pulling back to reveal the film edges) it seemed like a natural progression to bring the animator into view and for them to be seen drawing enemies and later becoming the boss fights.
The visuals of ZOE Begone! are truly unique, did you always want to make a hand-drawn game?
My background is in animation, so it was quite comfortable for me to go down that route – I didn’t really want to do 3D or pixel art or anything new to me visually, because I felt that learning how to programme would be enough of a challenge and it’d probably be nice to be able to fall back on something familiar whenever I got frustrated with the coding side of things. It was also great to have that decision validated later on when my publishing partner PM Studios came on board, as they were fully behind it from the get-go.
It’s not common to see looping shoot ‘em ups releasing nowadays, what made you decide to make ZOE Begone! loop?
My initial experiments for the game when I was prototyping were tied in with these looping animations that the player would activate as they played, so it was necessary to loop the player back around in order to see the animations continuously. The looping arenas continued to make sense as the film reel idea developed later on, so I decided to stick with it.
I can’t think of another game controls quite like ZOE Begone!, was it tough to make a tutorial to introduce this way of moving around?
The controls are quite unusual, but I think they work well once you get used to them. The game is kind of a mix between a run-n-gun and a twin stick shooter, so your thumbs are always busy with moving and shooting, and the shoulder buttons and triggers are used for dashing, pounding and jumping. Matterfall by Housemarque has a similar gameplay style and control scheme, so it’s not completely unique. The tutorial was quite hard to design, it’s been through at least three iterations, but hopefully it gets all the info across.
The frame lock boss fight of the ZOE Begone! demo was absolutely the highlight for me. Did you always intend ZOE Begone! to have bullet hell elements?
I think they just happened naturally as I’m a big fan of those kinds of games and it was fun to introduce some intimidating walls of bullets where I could get away with it!
Buying upgrades isn’t really a typical part of most shmups. How hard was this mechanic to balance?
It was pretty tricky, especially with the weapon upgrades – I wanted to make the player feel more powerful with each gun level, but not so powerful that the challenge of the game would be negated. A lot of the balancing came down to tweaking how the upgrades felt to use almost as much as the actual stats themselves. The special shots (homing, spread etc) have limited ammo too, which can be refilled, so that helped with the balance and reinforced the energy maintenance and movement mechanics at the same time.
While playing ZOE Begone! I was mainly just trying to survive, does the game cater to more hardcore score chasers too?
Yeah there’s some good depth to the scoring mechanics, and online leaderboards to compete on too.
Most of the scoring mechanics are designed to encourage speedy play, so the score multiplier bar (applied to all the points you gain) increases with each enemy kill and will increase quicker if you dash or pound through chains of enemies. It’ll start decreasing if you’re too slow to get to the next enemy though, so the best way to play for score is to keep dashing around to clean up the levels as quickly as possible.
There are also some bonuses applied to your score at the end of each level – unspent Apples are converted to points, a time multiplier reduces over the course of each level, and there’s a bonus based on the percentage of energy items you use.
It always warms my heart to see so many new shmups. What does this classic arcade genre mean to you?
I love the genre and I agree, it’s great to see so many indie shmups getting made these days. I’ve been playing them for as long as I’ve been playing games, since the early 90’s, so I really wanted to try my best to make a good entry into the genre.
What are some of your favourites in the genre? Maybe even ones that helped inspire Zoe Begone.
Defender, Resogun and Fantasy Zone were all inspirations for ZOE Begone! to varying degrees, but I love other non-looping shmups too like Esp Galuda and Mushihimesama by Cave, Layer Section by Taito, Gradius V by Treasure, and some modern classics like Crimzon Clover, and Zero Ranger among many others.
It’s only a couple of weeks until ZOE Begone! releases, are you excited for shmup fans to finally get their hands on it?
Excited and nervous in equal measure, I think! But yeah, I’m really looking forward to seeing people play the full game at last!
Thanks to Graeme Hawkins (AKA Retchy) for his time.
ZOE Begone! is out now for PC, PS5, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch.
