Following on from our interview with Brand Director of NEOWIZ, Justin Carnahan, we had the chance to sit down with Eunseop Shim, co-founder and CEO, Lizard Smoothie, the developer behind Shape of Dreams. This is, after all, a game we gave a mammoth 9/10 score to in our review, calling it “a sensational Roguelike with a ridiculous amount of depth, and whether you play it alone or with the squad you’ll have a blast.”
As one of the titles we spoke to Justin about, it seemed an idea time to get a feel for how the game has done (after celebrating the milestone of 500,000 downloads) from the developer side of things, but also to find out about the team’s influences, character build thoughts, future content drops, and of course… Hollow Knight: Silksong. So without further ado, let’s get into it.
Now that launch day has finally come and gone, how do you feel about the reception that Shape of Dreams has gotten?
We are still in awe. It has certainly surpassed our expectations by a large amount.
One of my favourite aspects of Shape of Dreams is being able to combine memories and essences to create powerful and unique skills. How did you balance this to ensure the game couldn’t be broken?
To be honest, those systems are meant to break the game. In our opinion, breaking the game is fun, especially in roguelikes like ours. We have multiple ways to break the game ready for players.
That does not mean we do not care about balance at all. In order for those breaking-the-game experiences to be rewarding, there are multiple factors to consider. First, it has to take a reasonable amount of effort to achieve. If something takes minimal effort but is absolutely busted, that wouldn’t be rewarding and would deter people from trying out other builds. Second, it needs variety to keep the player entertained. Repeating something is only fun until some point, so we need to surprise players, reward players with fancy VFX and SFX changes and such.
We are not game design experts, but at least the feedback from the players taught us these factors. For now, they’re telling us that we are going in the right direction.
There’s so much depth to character builds in Shape of Dreams, were you worried this might be overwhelming for some?
I think people should not worry about having to read and understand a huge wall of text every time they try to do something. The game is designed to just work, at least that was our intention! If you think something is busted and actively try to make it work, you can make it work most of the time. You’ll easily find a great amount of synergies even if you are a newbie, but there’s also great depth you can dive into if you want to do so.
Also, the game has a lot of room and margin of error. It is designed to embrace a large spectrum of players, from first-time players and newbies to the absolute veterans and game gods. There are difficulties you can choose, lucid dreams that you can enable to make the game easier or harder, and so on.
Shape of Dreams is a whole lot of fun alone or with friends. How hard was it to balance the game around the number of players?
Our intention was to make the co-op experience on par with the single-player experience so neither spectrum of players would feel left out. We experimented a lot and made the game account for things as the player count increased, such as monster health, damage, gold incomes and many other parameters. The process was heavily based on trial and error, along with user feedback. It took a lot of time, but I think it’s somewhat stable and provides a good experience for all players.
The eight characters of Shape of Dreams all feel different. Which of them do you think turned out the best?
Aurena for sure! It’s the most popular in our Discord’s art channel, and the gameplay design is very unique. She is a battle mage/healer inspired by a healer named Whitemane in Heroes of the Storm. Since our game has a single-player mode, we designed her to not only be able to heal people but also pack a devastating punch against enemies. Her playstyle of constantly sacrificing health to heal allies and damage foes is very fast-paced and heart-pumping, which makes her my favorite traveler.
I love the pressure that the hunters chasing you bring to a run of Shape of Dreams, how did you come up with this idea?
The Hunters are designed to keep the game fast-paced by pressuring players, while also incentivizing strategic decisions when traveling through The Rapids.
We pulled a lot of inspiration from Risk of Rain 2 back in the demo days, and the Hunters were originally put in place as a time-based difficulty spike. If a certain amount of time passes, the Hunters would come out, and the difficulty would rise a bit. We thought the system was proven to work because of Risk of Rain 2, but we didn’t have great positive feedback regarding this system when it was in our game. Turns out our game had much more things to read, and required more thinking. It punished new users and made the game a breeze for veterans. This wasn’t what we intended at all.
That’s why we decided to make it turn-based, inspired by Rebel Fleets in Faster Than Light. The turn-based system keeps the pressure on the players to keep the game fun and fast-paced. Since players have all the time to read and formulate plans, new users and veterans are treated equally. If they wanna go slow, they can go slow. If they want to go fast, they can do that too. We twisted the system a bit so that the Hunters are more of a strategic risk you can take for a reward, than a hard punishment.
Shape of Dreams reminds me of a lot of games I really love, which titles helped inspire it?
We mentioned a lot of games already, but the biggest of all would be Heroes of the Storm and Risk of Rain 2. Those are some of our favourite games we put our heart and life into playing, and the very reason why we started making this game. Lost Ark, Elden Ring, Path of Exile, Hades, and last but not least Faster Than Light are all games we really enjoyed, and inspired the making of Shape of Dreams.
When it was announced that Hollow Knight: Silksong was releasing on April 4th a lot of games delayed release to move out of its shadow. Were there any thoughts to do this with Shape of Dreams?
Our reaction when Hollow Knight: Silksong announced the release date was: This is fine. *The whole studio is on fire*.
Since we already delayed our game from May to September, we were against delaying it again. We didn’t want to let users down again by making them wait for another indeterminate amount of time. I’m glad the game sold well past our expectations, despite being sandwiched between some of the biggest titles of the year.
Shape of Dreams has only just released, but do you have plans on adding more content to it down the line?
We need a little more time for exact dates, but definitely yes! We have a lot of things planned out. We are planning to put our effort mainly on expanding the volume of the game, which would include new items, characters, gameplay-related systems and more. For any important decisions, we plan to listen to players on what they want to have, what they want to fix, etc. We are standing on the shoulders of giants made out of player feedback.
Is Shape of Dreams a game you could see making a sequel to, or do you have plans to move on to something completely different?
We don’t have exact plans yet to share, but Shape of Dreams has already won a very special place in our hearts. I think it can be a good IP we can work on, regardless of genres or development direction. But for now, we plan to keep working on Shape of Dreams to live up to the expectations, the love and the precious feedback the users are sending us.
Thanks to Eunseop Shim for taking the time to answer our questions.
Shape of Dreams is out now for PC.
