DANNY: Bugsnax! Half bug, half snack. Folks
eat them, and then body horror ensues. Yeah. This game is kind of weird,
but 2020's favorite snack 'em up gave us the perfect opportunity to dive
into the world of character creation. Because I mean, look, the small team at Young Horses basically
had the opportunity to create their very own universe of monsters.
Like Monster Hunter but chewier. Like Pokemon but gooier. Surely the dream of every young
kid sitting in the back of class drawing imaginatively weird characters,
only this is a commercial product with animations and voice acting. - Bop, bop, bop! - Sando, sando, sando, sando! - Pineantula! DANNY: So today we're going to
focus on the process of creating a Bugsnak: how the team decided
which ones made the cut, how they named them, designed
them, and crucially, how they made sure these creatures worked
in tandem with the various research and capture devices to make fun, often
emergent gameplay challenges. Okay, suddenly I'm feeling quite hungry. So I guess it's time I left you in the
far more capable hands of Young Horses game designer, John Murphy. - Hi, I'm John Murphy from Young Horses, and I'm going to teach you
how to design a Bugsnak. So Bugsnax is a game about Bugsnax, which are half bug and
half snack creatures. And you play as a journalist
following in the footsteps of a charismatic Bugsnax hunter who's found
these mysterious Bugsnax and has called you to follow her and her followers
to this Island. When you get there, the colony is sort of in ruins, the Bugsnax
hunter Lizbert Megafig is missing, and all of her followers are
sort of scattered around. You have to sort of take on the role
of becoming the new Bugsnax hunter, while also being a journalist and
figuring out what happened here, what are Bugsnax, and sort of bring this
group of characters back together. Usually that involves you having
to capture Bugsnax for them. [MUSIC PLAYING] JOHN: Strabby. STRABBY: Strabby! Strabby strabby strabby strabby! JOHN: The first Bugsnak that you come
across in the game is the Strabby, basically a strawberry with googly eyes
that's sort of turned upside down. It's supposed to be
modeled after an aphid. It's kind of aphid shape, sort of
triangular. It's a very simple Bugsnak. It basically just teaches you
how to use your sort of basic trap and your sort of basic tools
for catching Bugsnax. You start the game with your snak scope,
which is basically a camera that you use to scan and get information
about the various Bugsnax. And it also highlights paths that
a Bugsnak might be walking on. With the Strabby, it's teaching you how to scan a Bugsnak
and see its movement patterns. And then early in the game,
you also get the snak trap. It looks kind of like a wooden
umbrella. It's sort of just like a, an exaggerated version of like a animal
trap thing that you imagine with like, where there's like a box with a stick in it where you
pull the stick out and it falls. Like we started with that as
kind of like the basic idea, but like with a remote control thing. So the Strabby basically just teaches
you how to use those two very simple tools, like see where it's walking,
put a trap in its path, it walks in, you catch it. That's kind of the simplest
case Bugsnak catching mechanic with the simplest Bugsnak design. [MUNCH] [LAUGHING] [MUSIC PLAYING] BUNGER: Bunger! So the Bunger is the first Bugsnak
that you come across that interacts directly with the player instead
of just sort of timidly running away from the player. And
the Bunger is of course a cheeseburger with curly fries
for legs and sort of like doesn't understand its own strength. So it'll, it punts things around
and runs into stuff, but it's not like aggressive
and angry. It's like, it's like a puppy basically just
like that, that sort of attitude. The Bunger is there in the
tutorial of the game to teach you that Bugsnax will approach and
crash into sauces that they like, or just like, you know, you can
lead them around with sauces. So you meet Wambus, who
is a farmer and is Bunger causing chaos at his farm. So he
wants you to wrangle the Bunger. So he gives you the sauce slinger, which is the slingshot that you can
use to sort of shoot sauces around and coat things in sauces to get Bugsnax to go where you want them to go and
do things that you want them to do. The Bunger is there to teach
you, oh, it likes ketchup. You want to get it into this pen. You create a breadcrumb trail of ketchup,
and the Bunger goes into the pen. Later in that same area, you learn
that the Bunger not only can just follow splats of ketchup
on the ground. If you throw ketchup on a bush that
another Bugsnak is hiding in, the Bunger will go and try to play with it
and crash into it and bounce off. And the Bugsnak that's hiding
in the bush will run out, and that gives you an
opportunity to catch it. I mentioned earlier, there
was trying to represent bugs, trying to represent snacks, trying to get all the mechanics we
want in. The naming is a whole other thing, where if we could come up
with like a clever combination of a bug and a snack,
we would do it. There were some names where
we just like, liked them. Bunger was just a name we came up
with early and couldn't give it up. There are a lot of conversations and
arguments about, about bug names, but you know, clearly the Bunger is not the most
egregious example of just like, yeah, we just thought that was funny. That award probably goes to
the Scoopy Banoopy which is, [LAUGHING] which is the banana split. That's like kind of modeled after
a water beetle. Tom Taylorson, the voice of Octodad, voiced the
Bunger and did a wonderful job. BUNGER: Bunger! JOHN: Lollive. LOLLIVE (SINGING): La, la-la la-la, la-la! JOHN: I really like the Lollive, which is a flying olive that has,
you know, like the little pimento sticking out. That
pimento shoots out like a tongue. Some wires I think got
crossed in the design of that, 'cause it's labeled after a fly, but
it has like a tongue, like a frog. And I think that happened because
like you associate frogs with flies. So then this fly ended up
with its frog-like tongue, which doesn't really make
any sense or isn't really, as far as I'm aware of, there aren't any
insects that have a tongue like that, but it was just kind of fun.
You know, we have some Bugsnax,that pick up things, whether it's
your trap or other Bugsnax, or just random things in the environment. That was one of the early
ideas of a mechanic that a Bugsnak could have that would
allow it to have interesting, surprising interactions with other Bugsnax. The first Bugsnak that had
that mechanic was Crapple, which is a crab apple
that would pick things up, really dig things out of the sand.
And it was fun to have something that picks stuff up. We were trying to create these sort
of intersections of all the different mechanics and like remix these
sort of like modular pieces. So if Crapple is walking on
the ground and picks stuff up, I wanted one that is
flying and picks stuff up. Sandopede. SANDOPEDE: Sandopede, Sandopede,
sando Sandopede! The Sandopede is one of the
more complicated bug designs. It's not just one Bugsnak. It's four that just sort of
follow each other in a line. The logic of getting the Sandopede to
have each segment of the sandwich, it's basically like a big party sub cut
into pieces where each one of them is like kind of like a pretty substantial,
big Bugsnak to begin with. So it just sort of trundles through. It's a, basically a train that will like run
over anything that gets in its way. So getting the logic of Sandopede
to work, if you say, remove or catch one of the pieces in
the middle for everything else to like rearrange and figure itself out, it's actually kind of like a
miniature version of one of boss bugs. The Megamaki, which is like a giant sushi sea
serpent, works very similarly. So that that's like another example
of sort of taking a mechanic, like several Bugsnax that all follow
each other in a train, and taking it and putting it somewhere else. If you throw a sauce on
the Sandopede that the Lollive likes because of like the sort of
pimento cheese sort of idea, or like, you know, olives are on a cheeseboard, we made it so that the Lollive is
attracted to the cheese sauce. So if you throw the
cheese onto the Sandopede, the Lollive will come and just like pick
one of the pieces out of the line. And the the rest of the Sandopede has
to like figure out how to reform itself. Most of the time you take your, your trip shot and you lay it
across the path of the Sandopede. And when the head gets stunned,
all of its followers detect that. And they all sort of go flying
and explode, which is a, that was a very late edition
that I had added to the Megamaki to make knocking it out of the air
feel more exaggerated and exciting. And then sort of just in the
last like month or so before release, I was like, oh, I should
apply that to the Sandopede also, just feels like a little, a fun little explosion with
some nice chaos if you, if you hit the whole thing. Weenyworm. WEENYWORM: Weenyworm. JOHN: So the Weenyworm is kind of
earthworm-like, but it also does, it moves more like a snake. So there
are some situations where it's like, yeah, this, this looks like a bug, but
we've borrowed some sort of like, like Chris was inspired by, you know, other animals for just like interesting
movement patterns or something. We had this problem early on in designing
Bugsnax where we didn't want the player to get too close to them. We wanted the game to be a little bit
more mellow and slower paced and about sort of watching and waiting and
like planning, and less about just like running full speed at them. The Weenyworm early on was kind of tricky
because we didn't want it to like hide in bushes, and we didn't want it
to dig underground, like other, other Bugsnax do that. The Weenyworm is on a
circular path, and it is able to try to avoid the player,
but stay on the path. So it's, it's kind of like the thing
where like, there's like a an obs-- like a table or some obstacle
between two people and one is trying to chase the other. And you're kind of like running around
in circles, always trying to stay opposite. Weenyworm in was controversial
because it's attracted to ketchup. We're in Chicago here, and putting
ketchup on a hot dog is a, is a no-no here. I pushed really
hard to later in the game, have the shy Weenyworm, which is modeled after a Chicago dog,
where unlike the Weenyworm that is attracted to ketchup, I'll let
players find out what happens if they throw ketchup on the shy Weenyworm. [MUSIC PLAYING] Pineantula. Of the hundred factors that we were
trying to take into account when designing these things like, do we like the names
that sound good out loud? Does it, does it read appropriately? And like the
Pineantula was one where it's like, eh, might not visually read right. But
you can hear it say its names. So that, that helps a bit. But the Pineantula is modeled
after a trapdoor spider, and it's one of the only Bugsnax
that digs underground. But you can throw sauce at it because
it doesn't go all the way underground. Its sort of like top is sticking up. And that was designed sort of in
conjunction with the Crapple that I was talking about. It's kind of interesting to think about
the sort of primary interaction or sort of like use of a particular
Bugsnak mechanic. The Crapple is able to dig
things out of the ground. So we wanted something in the sort
of beach themed level where you first encounter the Crapple,
wanted something for, a Bugsnak for it to dig out of the ground. There was an
earlier version where the Pineantula had a burrow that it stayed stationary in,
but that wasn't quite as fun as just having it sort of digging around the
level. Because earlier on Bugsnax were more stationary, and it required
a little bit more of like a, here's a Bugsnak over here.
Here's another Bugsnak over here. The player just comes and does a thing, and then those two will come together,
interact. That sort of mechanic of having sauces that Bugsnax
would be drawn to, that you could use to like get them to go places was because early
on when we had Bugsnax, being able to like interact with
each other a lot without the sauces sort of bringing them together, there'd be a lot of action happening
off screen where Bugsnax would be like picking each other up and throwing
each other around and all this stuff. And the player like wouldn't see it
happen, wouldn't know it was happening. So we wanted to prevent that, but we did still want to keep the
affinity that can create chain reactions with a lot of Bugsnax interacting
with each other. So that, yeah, that was a tricky thing
to, to find the balance for, where it felt like the world was alive
and all the Bugsnax for interacting with each other, but without all
that action happening off screen in a way that would either confuse the
player or make the player feel like they missed out on something. [MUSIC PLAYING] Peelbug. PEELBUG: Peelbug! JOHN: Peelbug, that's one of my
favorites. It is a, I don't know, there are so many names for the pill bug
or like the roly poly is what I knew it as here in the Midwest,
growing up, you know, the little guys that roll up in
a ball. And they are citrus. So peel, like, you know,
lemon peel or orange peel. So the first one you come across is the
Orange Peelbug, which is an orange. And it's there to teach you
how to use the buggy ball, which is a little hamster ball with a Strabby named Sprout that one of the
characters in the game has trained, trained to this Bugsnax to
follow your laser pointer. So you've got this little hamster ball
that you can send into little holes and crevices in, in different areas of
the game. And Peelbug runs out. We sort of just took that idea and
hid Peelbugs in other levels, just like variations on the Peelbug. But the interesting differences between them
are more related to the level design. There are Peelbugs hiding in tunnels
that like traverse half a level. So you have to like figure out where, you
might not know when you send the Buggy Ball into the hole
where the Peelbug is hiding. You don't know where
it's going to come out. Put the exit behind a hidden
breakable wall so that you both need to find a certain
like secret room and figure out the layout of the level in
order to catch the Peelbug. So the Peelbugs are kind of,
they're a little bit unique. There aren't that many Bugsnax
that require specific level design around them. [MUSIC PLAYING] Shishkabug. SHISHKABUG: Shishkabug! JOHN: The Shihskabug is another Bugsnak
that was designed really early on, probably one of the Bugsnax that's
gone through the most iteration. The Shishkabug is a shish kabob with, depending on which version of it,
there are a few different versions. The first one is I think it's just
like a piece of meat and a tomato and a mushroom, and it's, it's an ant. So it has like that very, it's well
suited for that very like segmented way that an ant looks for it's
the abdomen, thorax, and the head. Like you almost can't tell how they're
attached because they get so skinny. Yeah, the Shishkabug went through
so many design iterations. At one point in the tutorial, it was, it was stealing Wambus's garden
tools and carrying them into bushes. But where we landed was we
wanted something to teach. Like I mentioned earlier with the Bunger, it's kind of gives you an idea of how all
these things are interconnected that I like, I couldn't talk about the Bunger
without talking about the Shishkabug. And I can't talk about the Shishkabug
without talking about the Bunger. When you come into the level, it basically
runs and hides into, in bushes, and it's there to teach you some Bugsnax
won't come out of hiding or otherwise won't be catchable without
getting another Bugsnak in the mix. [MUSIC PLAYING] Preying Picantis. PREYING PICANTIS: Picantis! JOHN: It's designed after a praying mantis, but it's made out of a collection
of Tex-Mex foods. So there's, for some reason, there's a Cheepoof
in there, which is the, the Cheeto moth, just 'cause it
was a good shape for the body of the mantis. And there's a
couple of tacos and a burrito. So this is one of the Bugsnax in the
game that were originally sort of thought of as like mini bosses. Kind of a big Bugsnak that
you can either catch on its own, or you can do something to it to have
it break apart into several smaller Bugsnax, some of which you
can't get anywhere else other than, breaking it apart. [EXPLOSION] But it was really hard to communicate
how you would break this sort of like aggregate bug of the
Picantis into its pieces. For awhile, we were like, okay,
for these like aggregate big bugs, you maybe stun them. And then if you have something
stun them a second time, while they're already stunned,
maybe that'll break 'em apart. That's the sort of thing where it's like, oh, that makes sense to
me as a designer. But like, it's really hard to actually
communicate that. The Scoopy Banoopy is very similar to the Preying
Picantis that they're sort of mirror opposites where
the one is a desert spicy foods Bugsnak. And the
other is like a frozen treat. The Scoopy Banoopy is a banana
split. And when you break it apart, you get Banoppers, which
are banana grasshoppers, and an ice cream cone, and the
Scoopy and the Cheery. Which is just, the Cheery
is one of my, I like it, but it makes me mad because it, the Cheery is a cherry that
just like has like a spring shaped, like green stem, and it's inverted kind of similar to the Strabby.
And It just like bounces around. It's like a pure mascot. It's like,
a cherry is barely a food, even. Or it's barely a snack, a
single cherry. So yeah, with the Preying Picantis and
the Scoopy Banoopy, the stun them twice to
break them apart didn't work. So what we decided to do was to
make it so the Scoopy Banoopy, he was always this like frosty bug.
They're bugs are like frozen, and you need to melt them. Otherwise they'll
freeze you if you touch them or they'll cause your trap to become brittle
and shatter if you try to catch them. So you need to melt them
before you can catch them. So what we decided to do with
that one was when you melt it, it becomes enraged and is basically
like a time bomb where eventually it will, it will break apart. But you have about 20 seconds to
try to stun it or otherwise make it vulnerable for you to catch it
before it breaks apart. Kind of last minute, we were like,
oh, let's apply that to the Preying Picantis also. The Preying Picantis,
until a couple months ago, wasn't a like fiery bug where you
need to extinguish them. Otherwise it'll set you and your traps
and other bugs and everything else on fire, but at least, you know, it's okay to make a bug a little bit harder
to catch as long as the way that you need to catch it is made more clear. [MUSIC PLAYING] Snaquiri. SNAQUIRI: Snaquiri, Snaquiri, Snaquiri! JOHN: The Snaquiri is weird in that we
wanted something that just like jumps out of the water
in Simmering Springs, which is sort of like a
hot springs beach level. So we wanted something to
like be hiding in these geysers and like in the water and like just
sort of hopping out of the water. And they're basically just meant
to be a use for your lunch pad, which is a launchpad that you can
use to throw stuff into the air. That one was tricky because you want to, I needed to find a way for
the player to see like, oh, this Bugsnak is jumping out of water,
and I need to catch it when it's seen in the air. But the player can just walk up
to where it's jumping out of the water. So I need to find a way for you to not
be able to just cheese it by just putting your trap where it jumps out of the water. There are a lot of Bugsnax that
basically have a force to knock everything away from them when something
happens. So like your trap, it won't work basically, or
your trap will get knocked away. as it's jumping out. They're basically designated as
invasive until they're in a particular state. A good example of that is Chippy, which is a chocolate chip cookie that
just like runs through the whole level very quickly. And it'll just like
dart away if you get anywhere near it. So that idea of basically
having a bug that's invulnerable to being captured unless it
gets put in a certain state. It's pretty isolated until you
knock it off course. And then it'll sort of it borrows a little
bit from some of the other, from the burrowing Bugsnax, actually. So it's like a combination of a
bug that is in the air that you need to throw your trap at
to catch combined with the idea of Bugsnak that burrows underground. [SNAQUIRI BABBLING] [MUSIC PLAYING] Snakpod. SNAKPOD: Snakpod! Every biome in the game
has a variety of Snakpod, like the crispy Snakpod, which
is just a bag of chips. There's another one that's,
you know, a bag of pretzels, or a bag of gummy grumps,
which are kind of like gummy bears, but they're Grumpus shaped. We wanted some more, just easy
like gimmes, you know, where like not every Bugsnak took several
minutes to figure out how to get them. I was kind of inspired for those by the Skulltulas in like
old Zelda games, where the little guys that like make little like rustling
noises and are hidden in corners and behind walls. And we wanted something
that you need to look around for, but once you found them,
you could just pick them up. [MUSIC STINGER] And I also just think that
they're funny because like, they're just totally helpless. They're just bags of chips and
stuff with googly eyes and you just, you just grab them. And when you bring
them and put them in Gramble's ranch back in Snaxburg, they're just so funny
that they're just like, it's just a bag. It's just a bag of chips
sitting on the ground. PINEANTULA: Pineantula,
pi-pi-pi-pi, Pineantula! JOHN: I liked, like obviously with a team our size
and the sort of scope of what we can do, we could not fully do the thing that
Breath of the Wild did where there's like all these different ways that you
can achieve something, you know, the sort of thing where it's like, oh, you need to like set this thing on
fire to open this door or whatever. And there's just like a bunch of
different ways to do it because it's just like a fully systemic system.
I wanted to kind of think about the different traps where
there's a loose association. Like there's like maybe one obvious way
to catch a Bugsnak. It's like, oh yeah, you've got the Chippy cookie running
really fast through the level. So the trip shot where you lay a trick wire in front of it to stun it
that's like the obvious way to do it. But you could also take your lunch
pad and launch that bug into the air. You can launch it at another Bugsnak
that then like crashes into it and stuns it. I wanted the, the link between solution to catching Bugsnak
and Bugsnak to be pretty loose and for there to be multiple ways
to catch most of the Bugsnax. Some of us like really wanted to
have a wide variety of foods. Like we didn't want to have way too
many sweets or way too many salty snacks or have like, there be
like 30 different sandwiches. I went to school for biology originally, so I
have a lot of opinions about insects and other arthropods and invertebrates
that I wanted to see in there. So it's like, I wanted to make sure that there's
like a millipede and a centipede, 'cause those are very different.
Want some spiders, but not too many spiders. Definitely wanted an ant in there. And then there were also some
situations where we just like, okay, we need every level to have a couple
of flying Bugsnax. So like, or we, or we want something aggressive in
this level, or something that shoots projectiles at you, or something
that moves really quickly. And then sometimes that sort
of like game mechanic first, we'd start there. You're like,
okay, well what food could that be? And then what bug could that be?
Sometimes it's like, we want this bug, what food could look like that?
Chris did a really good job of having the designs of the Bugsnax, the visual designs of them
communicate pretty well what they might do.
Bugsnax that are bigger seem a little bit more threatening
and usually are more aggressive. For example, the Spuddy, the
baked potato, like has like big horns and has like, you know, you can
tell that it's not friendly. 'Cause it has like angry looking
eyes. The googly eyes look angrier on some of those, like you mentioned,
snails. Like the Cinnasnail, which is a cinnamon roll. It'll run from you, but it
runs so slowly that it doesn't matter. So I think in a lot of cases, we did an okay job of communicating
the way a Bugsnak would behave with just the visual
design of the Bugsnak. But of course, we also had to playtest to figure
out what people did and didn't expect. The problem of
needing to like teach what each Bugsnak is going to do, since
they're all pretty different, right? It's not like, oh, here's like another
guy who's going to shoot at me, but is bigger or something.
I hope that it ends up helping that we took all these ideas of like
this Bugsnak is on fire, this Bugsnak can fly, this Bugsnak
burrows under the ground. And there's maybe 12 things like that.
And we like recombine them in different iterations so that
there's a large variety of bugs. There's a hundred Bugsnax
they can get out of that. But maybe because they're like, oh, I've seen that part of this
Bugsnak on, on that one and this other aspect of
this new Bugsnak on another Bugsnak that I've seen
before, so that everyone isn't totally bewilderingly new and confusing. Thanks so much for watching. Bugsnax
is available on PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4 and the Epic Game Store.
And I hope you play it and like it. [MUSIC PLAYING] [CLICK] [BEEP] WEENYWORM: Weenyworm! [BUGSNAX BABBLING]
My 5 year old absolutely loved watching me play this game, I also genuinely enjoyed playing it. We’d play for a half hour before her bed time every night as a reward for a successful day. I honestly only gave it a shot because it was a free PS5 game with PS+ but I’ll happily pay for a sequel. I wish there was some merch out there for the kid that I could buy.
Bunger bunger bunger bunger bunger bunger
Overall I liked this video. Bugsnax is one of my favorite games so far on my PS5.