We recently spoke to Josh Sutphin - founder of Kickbomb Entertainment and creator of Legacy of the Elder Star - about the game, its accessibility, and what makes it unique, as well as the growing indie game dev scene in Utah.
Legacy of the Elder Star is a shoot-em-up (AKA “shmup”) in the tradition of Gradius and R-Type, but with one key difference: this game is controlled exclusively with the mouse. 1:1 mouse control provides a level of fluidity and precision rarely seen in the genre, and that’s nowhere more evident than in the Cosmonaut’s unique “star dash” attack: simply click and drag through multiple foes to destroy them all!
Zanne Nilsson: One of the things that sets Legacy of the Elder Star apart is its accessibility. In what ways did you try to make this game accessible to all players?
We’re also planning to include a bunch of increasingly-common accessibility options in-game, like special rendering modes for colorblind players, the ability to turn off screen flashes for epileptic players, a scalar for camera shake intensity for those who are more sensitive to motion sickness, etc.
ZN: What was the inspiration behind Legacy of the Elder Star’s story?
I’ve long been fascinated by the idea of the Big Bang, the event that science currently believes created the universe as we know it. If the Big Bang was an explosion, it begs the question: what exploded? I’m totally embracing speculative pseudo-science when I say that I can’t help but see the Big Bang as the first-ever star going supernova. That “first star in the universe” concept became the titular Elder Star. The “legacy” of the title is the game’s protagonist, the Cosmonaut, a mythic hero spawned from the Elder Star to protect it from the assault of the robotic Infinite Legion.
There was a lot more complicated pseudo-science-y stuff in an earlier draft, but we pared it down a lot because the story was starting to get in the way of the gameplay. At the end of the day, you don’t play a shmup to watch cutscenes and read dialog; you play it to blow shit up.
ZN: Why did you decide to emphasize offense over dodging in the gameplay?
Those games are cool, but they’re incredibly intimidating to genre newcomers and they demand an enormous amount of training before you can start posting competitive scores. I’ve talked to loads of players who like the idea of shmups but feel like they’re nowhere near skilled enough to play these bullet hell games. I really wanted to make a shmup for those players.
At first, the game was about dodging bullets; it just had much easier patterns. It turns out that’s actually pretty boring; there’s a good design reason why bullet hell has trended the way it has. By shifting the gameplay focus away from dodging and more to offense – how quickly and efficiently you can clear enemy squads – I was able to create an experience that takes just as much skill to score well at but far less skill to simply survive. That’s made a game that beginners seem to really enjoy (because they’re not kicked to a “game over” screen every 30 seconds) but which still has enough mechanical depth to keep skilled, competitive players hooked.
ZN: One of the unique aspects of the gameplay is the star dash mechanic. Why did you add this attack in particular?
The star dash came from a desire to do something really iconic our 1:1 mouse-based control scheme. Up to that point there was nothing in the game you couldn’t also do just as well on a keyboard or an arcade stick. The mouse-based control is completely unique to our game and I wanted to make sure it mapped to a unique core gameplay feature as well, rather than just being some weird little gimmick.
ZN: What’s your favorite thing about Legacy of the Elder Star?
But my absolute favorite thing about Legacy of the Elder Star has to be that we’ve made this game with zero “crunch time”. My past experiences in the game dev industry are littered with months-long periods of 70-hour weeks to get projects out the door; ask any game developer and you’ll hear similar stories. Crunch is a cancer on our industry, and one of my core goals when I founded Kickbomb Entertainment was to prove that great games can be made on sustainable, sensible schedules, without crunch. It remains to be seen whether Legacy of the Elder Star will be perceived as a “great game”, but we’ve made something I’m honestly proud of and we’ve done it without killing ourselves in the process, and that feels important.
ZN: You also co-founded the Utah Games Guild a couple of years ago to grow Utah’s indie game development scene. What excites you the most about Utah’s indie game community?
ZN: Is there anything else you’d like our readers to know about Legacy of the Elder Star or the Utah Games Guild?
Legacy of the Elder Star will be available on Steam sometime in the next few months. To find out more, visit the Steam page or the official website.
Also: running the Utah Games Guild has been an enormously educational and inspiring experience for me. Two years ago we thought the Utah community was a quarter of the size it’s turned out to be, and at every event we meet new game devs who are just discovering the community for the first time; this thing is still growing and we have no idea how big it’ll get. If you’re an indie game developer living in an area that doesn’t have an established indie community yet, start one; I bet you’ll be surprised at how many kindred spirits you can find!
