If you read our review of Revenge of the Savage Planet (and you really should have!) you’ll know that we really, really liked it. Its mix of exploration, Metroidvania-like progression, and silly but fun comedy was an instant win for us.
We like it so much in fact, that we sat down for a chat with Alex Hutchinson, Creative Director at Raccoon Logic to dig into the team’s inspirations, challenges, and future aspirations. Read on for all the details.
What prompted the change from first to third person?
As our Animation Director Mike Mennillo says, there’s only so much you can do with a pair of hands. We wanted more comedy in the character, we wanted to add a bunch of fun outfits, and it helped us show the results of the more systemic parts of the game (fire, electricity, filth). Plus it always helps to be able to see your feet when platforming.
How much of a priority was accessibility during development of Revenge of the Savage Planet?
We are a small team of 30 people so we do our best to make it as accessible as possible, but our overwhelming priority was staying in business and finishing the game! Otherwise it would have been inaccessible for everyone.
What kind of challenges came with making it so much bigger than the original?
Sequels in games are fun because you start with the basics you put together for the first game, you usually have a lot of ideas and prototypes you didn’t finish the first time and you’re not usually sick of the concept yet. So we had a bit of a jump start with the basics up and running, but it was still a huge amount of work for 30 people.
I think the biggest challenge came in the sheer variety of things you can do and the ways you can do quests and challenges and the order you can do them in, all of which meant it became a bit of a testing nightmare to make sure people couldn’t break it. Plus shipping on PC and consoles simultaneously, plus the fact that we support online co-op, splitscreen, and co-op, meant our testing load was monstrous.
The audience has been great so far at highlighting the few issues we’ve missed and we’ve ironed most of those out… plus there are some mini gifts and bigger fixes coming in a few weeks and then a month or so after that…
Influences like No Man’s Sky seem obvious, but what were some of the others?
I spent a bunch of years as lead design on Spore so I’ve always had a fondness for the weird and whacky creatures which I guess made it through into this game as well. We tried to harvest the feeling of the movies of the 80s we grew up on like Ghostbusters or Gremlins or Goonies for the right combo of exciting but gross but funny. We dug into old Monstrous Manual from AD&D to try and get away from cliches and remember what made that book so surprising when it came out.
In terms of story I wanted to get back to oldskool science-fiction tropes, when heading into space meant confrontations with weird alien life not eating poop mushrooms with Matt Damon on a desolate rock.
In terms of games we brought a lot of our experience working on Far Cry 4 for me, and a lot of us worked on Assassin’s Creed at one point or another, so we were trying to combo learnings from that with the influences I mentioned and a dash of Metroid.
Revenge of the Savage Planet is wonderful frictionless fun – was this a deliberate choice all along?
It was! We wanted it to be funny obviously, and we wanted players to experiment, and if you crank up the difficulty both of those become difficult. When players fail a lot and find a successful strategy they tend to stick with it and not play around with the systems, and when they die a lot it’s generally frustrating which doesn’t exactly put you in the mood to laugh.
Are there plans to continue developing games in this universe?
Yes! We have a party game idea in the universe that we’re talking to some people about, and we have an idea for a third game that would be amazing. But the basic point is we have plenty of ideas if people like it and buy it! It’s a rough market out there right now, especially with subscription services meaning keeping the lights on without a big back catalog of games is tough. So if you played it on Game Pass and liked it, please consider upgrading to the Cosmic Hoarder Edition! It’s got quests and suits and it’s cheap but it’ll help us keep making games!
How do you feel about incorporating elements like space travel into future instalments?
Anything is possible but I think I’d prefer to add more options for the character to adding a completely external mechanic like space flight. With a small team you really need to focus and the more modes you add, the more you’re spread thin. Our initial vision for the studio, with most of us coming from triple-A devs, was that we obviously couldn’t compete with our old companies in terms of scale, but we could probably compete with one part of those bigger games. So instead of making multiplayer, and coop, and UGC and single player all at once, we would specialize in funny solo and co-op experiences. Hopefully we get to keep building on that expertise and make bigger and bigger games.
The commercials are very funny and creative – how did you come up with so many? And how hard were they to get recorded?
The original reason for the Habitat screen as a means of giving you basically all the narrative content was so that we never stopped the player and forced them to do anything. If you don’t want context for your mission, or to know why things are happening, you can just turn it off. And then when we realized that you’d be coming back to the habitat each time you died, we needed more content than just the basic story stuff, so deranged sci-fi advertisements seemed to be a perfect fit.
Also it turns out ideas are much easier to come up with when you don’t work for a large corporation anymore: if we think it’s funny, we make it and it goes in the game. We don’t need to vet it with anyone anymore. Not all of the ads will be funny to everyone but that’s fine: like I said you can turn off the tv.
In terms of making them, we collaborated with an amazing creative from L.A. called Davy Force. We’d bounce ideas, then select a topic, then one of us would write a script for it, after which he would handle all the casting and editing and VFX and sound. He’s a one stop funny ad machine basically.
Are there any plans for Revenge of the Savage Planet DLC?
We are still responding to feedback and bugs from the launch that our players have found, and we have a few bonus free things we are going to drop over the next 30 – 60 days, then we will see. I am almost certain we’ll add a few modes and other goodies, but in terms of a major DLC we will have to watch how it sells! If people support the game enough we would love to do it.
Revenge of the Savage Planet is out now for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series S|X.
