How They Make the Guac: An Interview With DrinkBox Studios

One of the gems of the indie game development scene is DrinkBox Studios, creators of the Guacamelee franchise, the hit touch-based title Severed, and the Tales From Spaces games. Having discovered Guacamelee a few years back, I fell in love with the mix of intense platforming action, couch co-op mode, and off-the-wall humor. Though platformers are in no shortage these days, there’s nothing else quite like it on the market.

We recently reached out to the studio to get a peek behind the curtain of their design process, find out where the crazy jokes come from, and try to get an idea of what is coming for their next project. Co-founder Ryan MacLean was kind enough to take a break from the grind of development during the COVID era, providing us with some fantastic insight. We hope you enjoy!

SUPERJUMP

Thank you Ryan for taking the time to sit down with us today “virtually”!

Ryan MacLean

Hey no problem, thanks for having me!

SUPERJUMP

Our readers enjoy learning how people got started in the industry and how these studios came to be, so could you share a bit about your path and the founding of the studio?

Ryan MacLean

Sure! I started playing around with programming games in high school. Later, while studying Computer Science in university, I got a part-time job at a tiny game studio in Toronto, making PC strategy/war games. I wasn’t very experienced at the time (and neither were the others on our team) but we had a lot of fun with it. It was my first taste of ‘indie’ development. After graduating from university I moved to a larger game studio called Pseudo Interactive and worked there for about five years as a programmer on console games. While there I met a lot of other developers, including Chris Harvey and Graham Smith, who were also programmers at Pseudo.

When Pseudo shut down in 2008, the three of us decided to try starting a studio of our own, and not long after that, we managed to convince a few of our former team-mates to join us. That’s how DrinkBox got started. From the beginning, we wanted to make our own games, but in the early days, we did some contract work for other studios too, to help fund internal stuff. Over time, the internal projects gained traction and we started doing less and less of the contract work.

SUPERJUMP

Your first two games, Tales From Space: Mutant Blobs Attack and About a Blob, established some elements and themes that would appear in many of your other games. These include a distinctive art style and the inclusion of many humorous touches like posters and labels on items in the game world, to name a few. I’m always curious how developers decide to incorporate certain items and themes in their games, so can you share what some of the influences were that helped create these elements of your design?

Ryan MacLean

The art style and humorous elements in our games come from a lot of different sources — the whole team contributes to these things. That said, I think internally a lot of credit for the visual style of our games has to go to DrinkBox Art Director Stephane Goulet and Concept Lead Augusto Quijano. The two of them have both been at DrinkBox since the About a Blob days (i.e. a long time), and they’ve had a big hand in defining the visual identities of our games. The humorous background posters are definitely a Steph thing. When trying to work out the style for our games the art team typically looks at reference work from other games as well as work by artists in other mediums (e.g. film, graphic novels, comics, etc.). The code team usually has a hand in defining the style for a new game too, as they need to build the technical framework the artists will be working with. Code also usually gets involved in a pretty hands-on way when building effects into our games. The departments really need to work together.

SUPERJUMP

Guacamelee was a product of Sony’s first big effort to support indie developers, called the Pub Fund. Can you share what it was like working within that program, and how it helped turn the game into a reality? Were there things you were able to accomplish with the development that wouldn’t have been possible without Sony’s support?

Ryan MacLean

Yes, that’s right. The Pub Fund was great for us. Our first game, About a Blob, was actually part of the program too — Guacamelee was our second Pub Fund title. Getting approved for Pub Fund felt like a big step in validating what we were trying to do and it was a huge morale boost for us to have Sony’s support. The program didn’t offer up-front funding, so we still had to fund the development of the games ourselves. It did essentially guarantee us a minimum return on the projects, though, plus marketing support from Sony. Having these guarantees was huge — it really helped increase our confidence and allowed us to take more risks on the projects.

SUPERJUMP

The Mexican-inspired setting and cultural touches in both Guacamelee games are pretty unique for the industry. How was the decision made to go with that design aesthetic? Did you already have the team together to portray that correctly or did the studio hire additional talent to bring the vision to life?

Ryan MacLean

The original concept for Guacamelee was pitched internally by Augusto Quijano, who at the time was a young animator at DrinkBox who had come to Canada from Mexico a few years prior (for college). Augusto proposed the idea of creating a new game about luchadores (wrestlers), set in a Mexican-inspired universe. His concepts seemed vibrant and interesting and unlike anything we had played before, so we were excited to try and build a game around them. Augusto was heavily involved in the creation of the story for Guacamelee, and he came up with the concepts for many of the game’s characters, including their backstories — some of which were based on Mexican folklore. We relied on him a lot when designing the visuals, story and world depicted in the game.

SUPERJUMP

Each of the Guacamelee games has so many pop culture references, odes to other games, memes, and other humorous Easter Eggs (Crow T. Robot is my favorite). How was it decided those would be included? Do you have a person on the team that is responsible for originating and coordinating those, or does each artist/programmer/designer get to put in their favorites?

Ryan MacLean

As I mentioned, I think our Art Director Steph has personally integrated quite a few Easter Eggs into posters and other background art in our games over the years. Working references into our games is a team effort, though: everyone is basically free to pitch ideas and we try to work the best ones in. Often references end up integrated into environment art, but other times they’re built into level design or dialogue, depending on the specific idea.

SUPERJUMP

Between the two Guacamelee titles, you changed courses rather dramatically to create Severed, a touch screen control game that is very reminiscent of Fruit Ninja and games like it. What was the impetus to move away from the platformer style games you had always made to create this new title?

Ryan MacLean

When we started development on Severed we had been working on platformers with a humorous tone for quite a while, and we really wanted to try doing something different. We ran an internal game jam, and I believe the initial idea for Severed came out of that, combined with some concept art and animations Augusto had produced separately on his own. Of course, because Severed was so different than our other games it took quite a lot longer for us to complete it than we had originally imagined! But that’s another story :)

SUPERJUMP

The Guacamelee sequel went even further into the world-switching mechanic from the first game. You created the Mexiverse and the various timelines that went along with it, adding a lot of complexity to the story and I would imagine the design process as well. What were some of the challenges involved in creating and implementing the Mexiverse?

Ryan MacLean

I think one of the biggest challenges with the development of Guacamelee 2 was figuring out how to create a sequel that was different from the first game (so that we weren’t just re-treading old ideas), but that also felt familiar and true to the identity of the original. It was a tricky balancing act at times. We were pretty happy with where we ended up in the end, though!

SUPERJUMP

Testing is always something I wonder about with independent studios, especially with a game as complex and difficult as yours. Do you just test internally with your team, or is that something you farm out to get an external perspective on the game? Is testing something that publishers like Sony and Microsoft will help with as well?

Ryan MacLean

We do a fair bit of testing internally. Typically our internal testing team is fairly small at the beginning of a project but ramps up as we get closer to launch. Around major milestones we usually have most of the team play through each game and provide feedback on the experience — we then analyze this feedback to help guide development going forward. We also like to have external playtesters — often including friends and family — try the games and provide feedback starting around Alpha, in order to get some outside perspective. As we get close to the end of a project we’ll also often bring external testers into the studio to watch them play.

SUPERJUMP

Thanks so much for making time to answer these questions for us Ryan! Best wishes to everyone at the studio for continued health, safety, and awesome games!

Ryan MacLean

No problem, thank you for taking the time to talk to me. It was fun 😊.

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