Relic Hunters Legend mashes up online four-player shooters with role-playing games, and it’s got a cheeky colorful style that looks like it would be comfortable on Cartoon Network. Developer Rogue Snail launched its Kickstarter campaign today, and it plans to release on PC, Mac, and Linux in 2018, with possible console debuts later on.
Relic Hunters Legend grew out of its predecessor, Relic Hunters Zero, which was an open-source free-to-play top-down shooter that attracted 1.2 million players. Rogue Snail founder Mark Venturelli said that Relic Hunters Zero emerged from a game jam project called Space Jimmy.
Venturelli was developing his previous game Chroma Squad, a tactical RPG about stuntmen who fight crime, when he decided to attend a 48-hour game jam with his colleague and friend Betu Souza.
“We were right in the middle of [Chroma Squad],” said Venturelli. “It was that period where you start to get to be really tired, nothing seems to be working out, and you get demotivated. We did a game jam, because that’s what you do when you’re tired of making games. You make more games.”
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Once the game jam was over, Space Jimmy evolved into Relic Hunters Zero, a simple top-down shooter that was all about zapping enemies and collecting loot. Venturelli and Souza kept working on it on the weekends. Because they were still wrapping up Chroma Squad, they decided to turn it over to the players, making it a free, open-source game.
“Lots of people were making mods and tweaking it and fixing bugs in the code,” said Venturelli. “We actually supported the game. I was so excited that I kept taking weekends to keep updating the game. We updated it 16 times, made 16 major updates in the last couple of years. It got more than one million players.”
While Relic Hunters Zero was a fairly straightforward shoot ’em-and-loot ’em, Relic Hunters Legend fleshes out the world. The heroes are the Relic Hunters, who start as a group of scavengers in a dystopian sci-fi world ruled by the evil emperor Duke Ducan. When they discover that Ducan somehow stole the past and recreated the world in his image, they decide to try to reclaim the true version of reality and save the universe.
Venturelli is based in Brazil, and he says that local politics inspired a lot of themes in Relic Hunters Legend.
“It’s a story about memories, and what history can actually teach us here in the present,” said Venturelli. “A lot of it is based on things we’ve lived through here in Brazil, especially the last 10 years of the political climate here in Brazil, and the idea that you can erase things and keep people in ignorance.”
The Relic Hunters represent a kind of rebellious critical-thinking, about challenging what’s known about the world and the current hierarchies, and searching for their own truths.
“It’s very young. It fits the aesthetic,” said Venturelli. “But at the same time we want to go deep into not only the philosophical things about what it means to actually remember things and what it means to have a place in the world, to know what your place is, to know what you came from and what you’re supposed to be.”
It’s the first time Venturelli has worked on a sequel, and he says it’s an exciting experience for a game designer. He’s building on a world and mechanics that are already established and that he knows the fan base likes. Throughout the development of Relic Hunters Legend, he intends to maintain the open-source spirit from the prequel; he plans on frequently releasing versions for people to play and he wants to hear what the community thinks.
In addition to having a fully realized story, Relic Hunters Legend will feature different gameplay elements. Players will be able to engage with a fully 3D environment and climb on parts of the landscape.
“You can climb up and drop down and fire at enemies on different levels, something you couldn’t do in Relic Hunters Zero,” said Venturelli. We also wanted to improve the AI and maneuverability and include skills.”
Opening dialogue with the community
Relic Hunters Legend is also losing a big feature — local co-op. It only has online co-op play for up to four players, which Venturelli said was a tough decision to make. He’s a big fan of playing a multiplayer game in the same room as friends, but he said that they had to eschew for design reasons.
One of the reasons is the combat is much more long-range; each of the players can jump around and maneuver around the environment. For local co-op, it would have been tough to keep all the characters on the same screen, and Venturelli says they would have to implement some kind of split screen. Though that may sound simple, Rogue Snail would have to redesign the whole game, and on top of that, it would make for an ungainly interface.
Venturelli draws on his experience with Dungeonland, which was a multiplayer dungeon crawler with a split screen. He developed it at the previous game company he founded, Critical Studio.
“In Dungeonland you had to design all the screens to allow for four players to interact with it,” said Venturelli. “That made the UI much harder and much less clear to the player. You had a lot less space. You had to cramp a lot of things. Things that you could do in one screen for one player you had to do with multiple screens going up and down. It affects the entire game.”
He knows that some of his players will be upset about the lack of local co-op, but he says that he’s confident it’s the right move. In fact, he says that it’s important for developers to try to open up to players, to take the time to explain things. He’s been talking to players ever since his Chroma Squad Kickstarter campaign in 2013, and though he says it’s a really scary experience to be honest with them, it’s ultimately been very positive.
As an example of a situation, Venturelli points to how a lot of people accused them of running a scam when they released Relic Hunters Zero for free.
“We started defusing this with lots of conversation and lots of being open and talking to people,” said Venturelli. “I feel like, overall, gaming communities—it’s not that they’re hostile. But they have been trained by our industry to be skeptical. There’s always a new type of scam on Steam. Not really game developers, but faux game developers coming up with new scams every day on marketplaces like Steam. Sometimes you have big publishers doing things that gamers don’t like. They’re always feeling like they’re being taken advantage of somehow, so their natural stance is to be skeptical. You have to have some patience to defuse that.”
When Rogue Snail can put in features that their players want in the game, they do. For instance, they’re designing the controls from the ground up so that they’ll work well with controllers when Rogue Hunters Legend is released for consoles. They’re also making sure the PC controls are customizable.
“Our PC version—probably a lot of that is going to bleed into console versions as well, but our PC version has everything PC players love,” said Venturelli. “We have fully customizable controls. We have lots of options. Everything we feel like people would want to tweak, they can. We have 4K resolution support, super wide screen support, like 21 by 9. We have unlocked frame rates. You can have 150 or 200 if you want.”
A new kind of studio
When Venturelli founded Critical Studio, it was a very traditional setup with traditional processes that he and his team imitated from studios they’d seen in U.S. They soon found that it wasn’t a good fit for them, and they ended up shuttering. After traveling around Brazil and meeting other developers, Venturelli decided to create Rogue Snail, which is more of a loose network of developers and creatives who could jump in and out of projects and all work remotely.
“The core of Rogue Snail is that it’s a remote company,” said Venturelli. “That’s the gist of it. We get the talent we need for each project and create an infrastructure so you feel like you’re in a studio, but you don’t need to leave your home. We have really talented developers in Brazil, but they’re all spread out.”
This helps with the cost of living and enables people to set up their home bases away from crowded cities with infrastructural problems. It also helps prevent crunch time, which Venturelli is adamantly against. The problem with working in a physical space is that there’s a lot of “chair management,” Venturelli says, where managers assume productivity based on how long people are sitting at their desks. But that’s not the case when a team works remotely.
“You just see the work, the results,” said Venturelli. “It’s much easier to see through the illusion of productivity that crunch sometimes gives you. As people start crunching they become less productive. After a week or so, if they’re working 18 hours a day, they’re probably going to be no more productive than they were working six or seven, because they start to burn out and do bad quality or slow work.”
Rogue Snail is also taking an unusual approach to Relic Hunters Legend. Like fellow Brazilian developers Fableware Narrative Design and Firecast Studios, Venturelli says they’re planning on building out the Relic Hunters IP in other mediums. There will be a comic book, and they’re working with a local animation studio Copa Studio to create short five-minute animations to shop around to TV networks.
“We’re really pushing the Relic Hunters universe as an IP,” said Venturelli. “It’s the first time we’re doing that. Usually we contain our games in the games. This time we’re building a larger universe. The comics fit into that, as well as the animation series we’re doing. The comics tell the story of before the game.”
They’re also planning some fun marketing campaigns and Easter eggs around Relic Hunters Legend’s Kickstarter campaign.
“We really like secrets and small details,” said Venturelli. “We’re doing a lot of little [alternate reality game] things in Relic Hunters. The first trailer we released already has two or three secrets in it that we hope people — maybe a year from now, when the game is out, people will come back and watch the release trailer and think, aha, I found something.”
These little secrets flesh out the Relic Hunters’ world, but it does more than that as well: It’s something for the fans who pay attention, much like the rest of Rogue Snail’s approach to the development process.
