ETAO Podcast, Episode 35.
Kenny Lee is the less-frequently-interviewed half of the two-brother team that founded Cellar Door Games, the studio behind (most famously) Rogue Legacy and (most recently) Full Metal Furies. He’s also a fan of Ganbare Goemon and Mischief Makers and therefore a megaconnoisseur and the greatest game scholar of our age—so people should really interview him more, happy as I am to get the scoop.
We discuss the remarkable design, rocky launch, and hopefully resurgent future of Full Metal Furies, the difficulty of marketing small-but-meaningful bits of game-feel, and the challenge of designing around (or against) players’ compulsive tendencies to keep playing the same way even when they’re not having a lick of fun.
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• Castle Crashers does indeed have a regenerating mana system.
• The specific Teddy Interview that Kenny mentions is here.
• The Fucking Champs started making music in the mid-90s, actually. I’m old.
• So it was actually in a series of Twitter DMs that Richard Terrell informed me I’d been playing Paper Mario: Color Splash wrong. I guess this was the first time I’d discussed it publicly, and that I owe Richard a podcasty mea culpa sometime.
• Mikey’s thing on sequels comes highly recommended.
• The differences between what we sometimes call Spelunky and what we sometimes call Spelunky HD (both of which we sometimes just call Spelunky) are a bit more numerous than I’d realized.
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“All The People Say (Season 2)” by Carpe Demon.
“Full Metal Furies” from the Full Metal Furies OST by A Shell in the Pit.
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Everybody's Talking at Once 