A.J. ▸ Hello. First, for folks who played at launch and want to get back into the game, can you explain what's been added and what you're most excited about for returning players to experience? v1d30chumz 13-61-168-6

Kyle ▸ These last few months we've been mainly hitting endgame content, adding some more celebratory flair, and of course fixing any bugs or unintentionally overpowered equipment.

By far the biggest addition has been the system. After beating the first few levels, players get access to an endless stream of increasingly-difficult remixed missions with modified stats, brand new enemy waves, and trippy visuals. We added a high score table for folks to show off how far they can go as well as the loadouts they're using to do it, and what we've seen has been astounding to us! Players are getting *hundreds* of missions in. We weren't sure anyone would crack 20 when we released it.

We've also been experimenting with Holiday events, which lets us keep having fun extending the game's Dye (player skin) system for some interesting visuals. We want to feel like a giant party and while these events are almost purely cosmetic, they create a fun atmosphere.

A.J. ▸ Very few Survivors-like games feature 3D visuals and I love what's on display in because it's both flashy yet unambiguous. What sort of aspects did you focus on when it comes to the visual aesthetic as well as ensuring that gameplay remains intuitive when things become frantic?

Kyle ▸ My co-founder and technical artist, Patrick, has a strong sense of how to make things look "approachable." Part of that is aiming for an aesthetic similar to mainstream CGI movies, but an even bigger part is good ol' trial and error.

We made a lot of mistakes here early on. In our first public playtest we realized players weren't able to easily tell what was their attack and what was an enemy. One simple fix was making every enemy projectile red; another was adding significant outlines to player characters. More complicated solutions involved things like rendering players, enemies, and projectiles into a different depth buffer so we can independently brighten them and desaturate the background.

For us this genre is totally about visual chaos, so we were a bit shocked to hear a vocal contingent of players complain there was too much going on visually to keep track of. By adding settings options to turn off some particle/screen effects as well as zoom and contrast settings, I think we've successfully made more playable for those fans without losing the chaos.

A.J. ▸ I find it very cool that you manually aim and fire in . Was this aspect important to the team and in which ways do you find it helps enhance the overall gameplay feel?

Kyle ▸ It's important to mention this game is a prequel to , a 3D co-op roguelike featuring the same character duo of and . We wanted to take the "switching between melee and ranged" gameplay of that game and turn it into this new "bullet heaven" genre that our team couldn't get enough of.

Doing a cool melee thing and then following it up with a burst of ranged damage is *the* thing in , and being able to control where that burst of damage goes was essential for that feeling to translate.

A.J. ▸ Playing online turns an already enjoyable game into one frantic funfest. How did the team integrate online co-op to retain the core gameplay while also offering a sense of comradery to the action?

Kyle ▸ At the start of the project we focussed on making sure that if there were things you could *only* do in a co-op bullet heaven, we should do those things. We tried to give each weapon and class at least one unlockable perk that could affect multiple players, like the flamethrower being able to set your friends' weapons on fire, etc.

The little pvp battle at the end was fun to add and it's a huge joy to watch someone encounter it who isn't expecting it.

When you're making a co-op game the question of "should we add player-vs-player combat" naturally is going to come up and players are going to want to try it. A game like this where everything is entirely balanced around wiping out hordes of weaker enemies and doing chip damage to strong boss enemies frankly translates to PVP very badly, and you'd struggle to build a pvp-focussed mode for it. But adding it as a little fun laugh at the end of a tough mission is a cathartic and fun novelty.

On a technical level it was a big undertaking getting hundreds of enemies working over the network in a game without dedicated servers and a programming team of one; there are more bullet heavens with online co-op now but I still think ours has the most "stuff" going on, which I'm very proud of.

A.J. ▸ Some of the power-ups and bosses really stood out to me like the item that turns the gameplay into Katamari Damacy for a brief moment. Which items, bosses, stages, and such really clicked with the team during development and made you excited for players to experience them?

Kyle ▸ A main design pillar for us for the whole project was "Pinball." We wished other bullet heaven games had more chain reactions and "tactile" attacks and tried to put memorable cause-and-effect relationships into everything we could.

That "roll 'em up" power-up in particular was a kind of tipping point for us. I was trying to think of "what's a damage powerup you could *only* do in a 3D bullet heaven game?" and that idea unlocked the game feel for me. The technology we built to take characters off of the ground plane and then safely put them back on found its way into lots of other equipment as well.

A.J. ▸ I found strategising while choosing which weapon abilities to assign to both and upon level-up to be a rewarding part of gameplay. Have you seen any combos that stood out to you as exceptional and do you have any personal favourite combinations?

Kyle ▸ For me, when you get the along with a or and time it just right so you clump a ton of enemies together just before firing: that's the good stuff.

In terms of loadouts, it's been fascinating to see what the most dedicated players are doing. There's a lot of variety in successful character builds on the leaderboards, as though over half of all weapons and classes are viable for endgame play. That's a great signal to us that things are fairly balanced (or possibly some weapons are just so fun that people don't care about min-maxing).

A.J. ▸ Are there any tie-ins from Shoulders of Giants that folks who played both games might be interested in learning about?

Kyle ▸ On the down low: there's a certain dead tree that shows up in both games and may be central to the overall plot.

A.J. ▸ Finally, the silly question of the day: if you could incorporate a new level based on any retro game, which one would it be?

Kyle ▸ Funny you ask. The pinball power-up in Entropy Survivors was originally only supposed to appear on the Forest levels. Each world was going to have its own arcade-inspired minigame that would change the state of the entire level - in the crystal canyon missions, we had a fully working Pacman-type game that would appear and lock your character onto a grid maze until you collected all the crystals and killed a bunch of red, pink, blue, and orange slimes.

That all sounds really cool and was super fun to program! But it messed with the flow of the game disastrously, and in terms of development you go from making one great game to one good game and five really mediocre tiny games. We kept delaying work and ended up scrapping everything except pinball, which enhanced rather than interrupted the gameplay.