“There’s always a loose end, trailing off into the distance”: Inside the mind of a Metroidvania creator and how they spin up mysteries
Do you remember the first time you found something in a video ganme that shouldn’t be there? For the young Animal Well developer, Billy Basso, it was Super Mario Bros 3.”It was such a profound memory to me that I can still picture it to this day,” the developer says, his eyes going a little soft-focus. “I was at my neighbour’s house – they used to babysit me when I was three or four years old – and they had a 13-inch CRT television sitting on their dining-room table, set up to play NES.”On that TV, the neighbour demonstrated a trick. “It’s maybe the third stage, and you have to get on the white block and hold down for a while,” Basso says, “and it drops you down into the background, behind the set dressing of the level.” Waiting there, in this place that breaks the established rules of 2D space, is a treasure chest. And inside, the Warp Whistle, allowing the player to disrupt the natural flow of Mario levels. “It was like this weird breakthrough in my little brain,” Basso says.
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Message in a bottle
(Image credit: Bigmode)Subscribe to Edge
(Image credit: Future)This feature originally appeared in Edge magazine #408. For more in-depth features and interviews on classic games delivered to your door or digital device, subscribe to Edge or buy an issue!The influence of this formative moment can be traced throughout the developer’s entire career.Even during his time making medical training games at Chicago’s Level Ex, Basso couldn’t resist hiding little Easter eggs inside of endoscopy simulators. “There was this one case where you’d remove a nail from someone’s lungs,” he explains. Your equipment included forceps to tug it free, and “an APC gun” for cauterizing the wound; he programmed a shader so that, if the APC was aimed at the nail, an electrical charge would arc to it “like the Force lightning from Star Wars”.Since it wasn’t medically accurate, he was told to remove it, but Basso was pleased with the effect he’d made. “So instead of taking it out, I just disobeyed my producer – and made it so it only happens one out of 100 times.”Those of us who have never trained to perform lung procedures, however, might be more familiar with the project Basso began making out of hours during those Level Ex days. A game over which he had total control, even programming its engine from scratch in C++, it was the perfect chance for him to scratch this decades-long itch.
(Image credit: Bigmode)Animal Well begins as a relatively conventional game in the Metroid vein, albeit one with a brilliantly thick, eerie atmosphere.But as you play, it gradually introduces things that don’t quite seem to fit: items that have no obvious uses, or else have extra utilities you discover by accident and can’t quite fathom a need for; hidden passageways that link the map in unexpected, looping ways; and a giant groundhog that ducks back into its hole whenever you get too close, responding the same way no matter what new tools or abilities you bring to bear.”I always wanted another layer beside what you are doing, in the background, to tease you and give the sense that, ‘Oh, there’s more here’,” Basso explains. “There’s always a loose end, trailing off into the distance.” He talks about the game’s structure in terms of layers, the first of which is the relatively short journey to reach the ‘ending’. After the fireworks have gone off and the credits rolled, you’re ushered into a new area that opens up fresh mysteries, then dropped back into the world. It makes clear that everything to this point was just the tip of the iceberg. What hides underwater, in the remaining layers, is some of the game’s most inventive, virtuosic design – a string of secrets that require reconfiguring your brain, much as their maker’s was once reconfigured by the Warp Whistle.Weekly digests, tales from the communities you love, and more”I still think of it as a puzzle that I’m designing,” Basso says. “It’s just either a harder one or one that has a layer of obfuscation.” But these secrets were harder to design than your average puzzle, he adds. “Each one is a kind of anomaly that’s breaking the rules of the game in some unique way. It doesn’t follow a framework. It was dependent on me having these little sparks of inspiration. So I could only come up with one every three months or something.” Basso’s solution to this problem? Simply to keep making the game for seven years.Further down the well
(Image credit: Bigmode)”I didn’t do anything sketchy. I just used the functionality that was available to me.”Billy BassoAlong the way, ideas emerged in various ways. Some grew out of unintentional bugs, including one that allowed players to die and respawn in an area they shouldn’t be able to reach – rather than fix it, Basso decided to build a puzzle around it.Others came from studying the component parts he had to work with, finding novel applications for them. “I was thinking of Metal Gear Solid and how that breaks the fourth wall by making you check the game packaging or reading your Memory Card data,” he says. “I wanted to do something like that: ‘How can I use the hardware in surprising ways?’ I think it helped that I had full control over the game engine, so I was able to tap into some of the weirder APIs – using the printer functionality and stuff like that.”Ah, yes. That. Playing Animal Well on PC, at some point you’ll be asked whether you have a working printer connected. Say yes and you might hear, elsewhere in the house, a motor whirring to life and something dropping to the carpet: a piece of paper, complete with origami folding instructions. “People get kind of sketched out by it, because no game has ever done it,” Basso says.”They’re like, ‘Is this hacking my computer or my network?’ Because a lot of time they’ll have their printer on the network. They feel violated, I think. But it’s a standard Windows API that you can call.” It’s just that no one else has thought to use it. “I didn’t do anything sketchy. I just used the functionality that was available to me.”
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(Image credit: Billy Basso)Were there ideas, though, that he did deem too much? “I wanted to add a feature where it displayed your Steam name on screen at all times”, Basso replies. The difference in brightness would be so low that the text wouldn’t be visible to the naked eye.”So every single screenshot or video of the game, you could then take into Photoshop and reveal who posted it. But I thought maybe that was a little bit of a violation of privacy.”There were other ideas, meanwhile, that he just didn’t get around to implementing. “So, the Switch has the Joy-Con sensor,” he says. “It’s just this NFC reader. And actually, in Nintendo’s documentation, they tell you that it’s capable of reading subway cards – so you can take your JR Line ticket or whatever, scan it on the Amiibo sensor and get data from it.”He planned to put a turnstile into the Switch version of the game, passable only by scanning an NFC-chipped card on the Joy-Con. “Time limitations didn’t allow for it, but I’m disappointed I didn’t do that one.”
(Image credit: Bigmode)I don’t ever want you to feel like you checked all the boxes and you completed it Billy BassoStill, it’s not like the game is short of secrets. Indeed, according to haseverythinginanimalwellbeenfoundyet.com – a website made by Basso’s business partner, Dan Adelman, as “a funny joke for the community”, and which consists entirely of the word ‘no’ – there’s at least one loose end still trailing. Not that Basso will tell us much about that. “There is a lot of debate if there’s a fifth layer, sixth layer, whatever,” he says. “And I’m not gonna answer that!”Basso adds that he’s entirely not sure himself what’s left to be found. “I honestly kind of lost track of everything in the game, so I can’t quite say if everything’s been solved or not.” This suggests that whatever might remain is rather smaller than another ‘layer’, or else that the developer has a very good poker face.Either way, he clearly understands that some of the magic of secrets goes away once they can be quantified. “I don’t ever want you to feel like you checked all the boxes and you completed it and could just wrap it up,” Basso says. “I wanted it to linger.”Open up
(Image credit: Bigmode)Among Animal Well’s more consequential secrets, there are also playful little Easter eggs. Hold down the jump button for a few seconds, for example, and your little blob of a player character will transform into a dumpy fox dressed in green, with a sword and shield.You might recognise them as the hero of Andrew Shouldice’s Tunic, a Zelda-influenced adventure game that shares Basso’s love of secrecy. It’s no wonder, given the similarities between these two developer’s origin stories.”I remember being quite young when I put two and two together to find the Warp Zone at the end of 1–2 in Super Mario Bros,” Shouldice tells us. “And that was a profound and somewhat terrifying experience.” He reckons he was five years old. “I could read, but I probably didn’t know the words ‘warp’ or ‘zone’ yet. So when it said, ‘Welcome to Warp Zone’, I didn’t know what to do. I froze. I think I just let the timer run down.” He smiles. “Which feels like a poignant formative thing for not just my love of secrets, but also my inability to commit.”There is a crucial difference between the two developers’ stories. “I was alone,” Shouldice says. “I was in the rec-room basement playing this game and coming across this thing.” Without anyone to ease him into this world of secrets, he’d had to piece things together himself: “Hey, sometimes I can get above the level – that’s neat. I can go where the score is. That seems like a sort of transgression somehow. And then, hey, I noticed that it continues past the end of the level. Put all that together, and maybe you get yourself a Warp Zone.”Discovering secrets
(Image credit: Finji)You can’t transgress unless there’s an expectation there to push againstAndrew ShouldiceWe’re reminded of Basso’s puzzle-design approach to secrets, but Shouldice reckons there’s another kind. “The out-of-the-blue, absolutely mysterious, inscrutable kind,” he says.”There’s no rhyme or reason, it just sort of appears and is delightful.” A few examples: missing your intended target with a bomb in The Legend Of Zelda, so it instead blows a hole in the wall. Loading Tunic and noticing a save file that wasn’t there before, with 999 hours on the clock. Discovering The Other hiding inside Immortality’s footage.The defining factors of this kind of secret, according to Shouldice, are that its discovery doesn’t have to be ‘earned’ by the player and that it can potentially happen at any point, before they might be prepared for it. The very best cases recontextualize everything you’ve seen up to that point, sending you back to search for other places this might be hidden. “And maybe you’re going to puzzle out in retrospect why it was there.” But maybe not.Shouldice describes this as “stumbling into something that’s above your pay grade” – and that idea of forbidden knowledge is key to his lasting interest in videogame secrets. “This idea of mystery, of evoking a feeling of the world being larger than your little five-year-old brain can comprehend. Of feeling like a world is ready for you to explore, and it’s full of things that are incomprehensible. Full of words like ‘warp’ and ‘zone’ that you’ve never heard.”
(Image credit: Finji)We can’t help noting that, for all their shared interest in the unknowable, Shouldice and Basso are leaning on something very familiar indeed.Like Spelunky, Fez and Celeste before them – three platformers with plenty of hidden layers of their own – Tunic and Animal Well are both rooted in the language of a very specific, pre-3D era of Nintendo games, the time of Metroid and The Legend Of Zelda. And, of course, the series that gave these developers that first awakening.”I mean, I have a lot of fondness for those games, having played them growing up, and they informed my taste,” Basso says when we point this out. “But I do think they offer a good template to design a game within. And I think making puzzles and secrets is easier when you have a familiar context to contrast them against.” Having a baseline of expectations, he argues, means there’s less need to tutorialize – contributing to the overall sense of mystery – but it also gives these games something to subvert.Shouldice agrees: “If you don’t have those things, and it’s all baits and switches and unexpected things and novel transgressions against the norm, then there’s very little context for the player. You can’t transgress unless there’s an expectation there to push against.” You need the bait in order to have the switch, essentially. A secret passage doesn’t have any real meaning, Shouldice points out, if you haven’t already come up against a lot of perfectly solid, passage-free walls.There’s also the simple practicality of working in 2D (or rather fixed-perspective 3D, in Tunic’s case). “Being a little cynical about it, I want to say that the sort of game that can afford to put in content that is not meant for everybody is probably a smaller, indie experience,” Shouldice says.A game made at triple-A scale, after all, can’t afford to dedicate time and resources to something that a chunk of its audience is likely to miss. Being cynical is clearly not the developer’s natural mode, though, and he backpedals apologetically: “Maybe that’s making presumptions about aesthetic and budget.”
(Image credit: Finji)Nostalgia is a factor here too, of course. When those formative memories still burn so bright, it’s only natural that these creators would reach for them as a reference point during the design process.For Basso, secrets were an early peek into the human side of game development: “Especially with older stuff, it was really kind of obfuscated from you. They came from overseas, or no one was credited, so it just felt like this product that came out of a black box.” Discovering an Easter-egg message a developer has left for a loved one breaks that illusion, and even when the secret isn’t so directly personal, there’s also a sense of connection in matching wits across space and time.On the other hand, many of these secrets-dense games aspire to exactly that ‘black box’ quality Basso describes. Tunic explicitly introduces itself as a videogame you are playing, with its in-game manual that straddles the world you’re exploring and the one you’re playing in. (Behind its pages you might catch a glimpse of the paused screen, run through a filter that suggests a curved CRT display in the dark, perhaps of a rec room somewhere.)
(Image credit: Finji)I wanted it to feel like something that was there all alongBilly BassoThis puts additional distance between the player and their avatar, perhaps, but in doing so it potentially casts you as the protagonist of this game. A kind of digital archaeologist, examining this alien object, trying to decode its language and riddles.”I wanted it to feel like something that was there all along,” Basso says of Animal Well. “This ancient artefact – that’s what your copy of the game is like. Or this old book in another language that has all this meaning and knowledge within it – it’s just up to you to find it.”This is a mindset that is easier to access when you’re young, Shouldice reckons, “and a little more receptive to infinite mystery”. The benefit of not understanding how games are made is that you have no real idea of their limits, of what could happen when you start poking the world on the far side of the screen.Perhaps a future generation of developers will grow up with folk tales of Fortnite and Minecraft, but for the current crop, that means a particular era. “The mystique of weird old computers, this physical object full of mysteries,” Shouldice says. “The Nintendo, LX-III computer, the Commodore 64, Amiga, whatever.”UFO sighting
(Image credit: Mossmouth)In order to have exploration, there needs to be stuff to findEric SuhrkeYou might have noticed, among Shouldice’s examples there, one name that doesn’t quite fit: the LX-III, the crowning achievement of UFO Soft – a videogame company that never existed.UFO 50 is presented as a collection of this company’s games from the period 1982–1989 (an NES contemporary, you might note). In truth, though, the games were all made over the course of the past decade by Mossmouth, a team that includes Spelunky devs Derek Yu and Eirik Suhrke.The pair’s previous collaborations had more than their fair share of secrets – Spelunky’s Eggplant, in particular, has become an icon of this entire movement – but UFO 50 takes that further still. Almost every game in the collection hides something, whether it’s a room, a warp zone, or an unexplained mechanic you have to discover for yourself (since every game uses just two buttons, it’s easier to stumble into a secret input here). “UFO 50 is all about exploration,” Suhrke says. “And in order to have exploration, there needs to be stuff to find. So then we just hid stuff on all layers.”The fictional framing of UFO 50 is important because of how it recontextualises these secrets’ existence. Any hidden messages to loved ones you might find don’t come from the dev team but the fictional employees of UFO Soft. Meanwhile, cameos from familiar settings and characters – or even sound effects – suggest a development team rushed off their feet, stitching together a kind of patchwork universe entirely by accident.
(Image credit: Mossmouth)Nowhere is this more evident than in the Terminal, the very heart of UFO 50’s secrets.Opening it to reveal a virtual keyboard and a grid of warped alphanumeric characters, it’s difficult to know where to begin. When we interviewed the UFO 50 team last year for E396’s cover story, this was – tantalisingly – the one thing they were unwilling to discuss. With the game now out in the world, however, they’re ready to talk.”It started out more like a Game Genie,” Yu recalls. And, if you input certain eight-digit cheat codes, you can indeed use the Terminal to unlock assists for some of the collection’s games, as well as variant modes that might make them easier or harder. But there’s another layer beneath all this. “Making it look like an Action Replay was a really good red herring,” Suhrke says, “for hiding the scavenger hunt.”Open the Terminal at the right moment, and that scrambled text will resolve itself into a riddle, the solution to which lies within another game. Follow this hunt to its conclusion and you’ll uncover UFO 50’s biggest secret. There aren’t actually 50 games here. There are 51.
(Image credit: Mossmouth)I like the idea that you could have your own experience of finding it with just a little nudgeJon Perry”It seems like a very obvious thing to do,” Suhrke says of the 51st game. “It would have felt like something was missing if it wasn’t there.”Yu likens it to finding a cave behind a waterfall, a videogame secret that has achieved such memetic status that players have come to expect it. But while the team agreed on this game’s inclusion from the start of the project, they weren’t sure how players would access it – or how hard it would be to find. “We intended it to be more hidden, for a while,” Suhrke says. He admits to being the member of the team “always pushing to make everything more obscure”.At the opposite end of the spectrum was Jon Perry, a new addition to this team but an old collaborator of Yu’s, who took responsibility for the secret game. Perry wanted to bring down the barrier to entry, so that players wouldn’t simply rely on YouTube to summarise it. “I like the idea that you could have your own experience of finding it,” he says, “with just a little nudge.”As it is, the game leaves various breadcrumbs to lead you towards the scavenger hunt. And it’s even possible to stumble into it by accident, if you happen to visit the Terminal at a certain time. This is how we first encountered it, playing UFO 50 in advance of the game’s launch, before any of this could be spoiled by the Internet.Call it a Warp Whistle moment. It felt like a door to a much bigger world opening, right under our fingers.
(Image credit: Mossmouth)We’re grateful, then, that Perry won the obfuscation argument. “Jon put together a document that told the story, pulling the threads in from years of discussions, and making sure it all aligned,” Suhrke says, explaining why he changed his mind. “When I read that, I realized how potent it was and how meaningful it was to the game. And that’s when I was sold on Jon’s vision.”Because the Terminal isn’t only the primary delivery mechanism for UFO 50’s secrets, but also for its overarching narrative. Even some of its cheat codes contribute to the fiction: take ‘BENS-MODE’, for example, which launches a variant of puzzle platformer Mortol. The ‘Ben’ in question is Benedikt Chun, the UFO Soft alter ego of Yu.According to the in-game description, Chun came up with the initial idea for Mortol before handing it off to Gerry Smolski (aka Jon Perry). The description for Mortol II, meanwhile, says the sequel “hews more closely to Chun’s darker original vision” – and, in its altered rules, to ‘Ben’s mode’. You’re left to draw your own conclusions about the potential rivalry forming between these two designers.It’s you versus the world at that point – and the world will winAndrew ShouldiceThe 51st game, however, is rather more direct. It drops you into a fictionalized version of the UFO Soft offices as developer Greg Milk, putting faces (albeit strange animal ones) to names you might recognise from the other games’ credits. But it doesn’t reveal any answers, instead gesturing towards a murder mystery, or maybe a post-apocalyptic conspiracy. Or maybe both.You’re also encouraged to think about how this game got here, why it might be hidden from view, and who exactly might have put it there. We have to take the opportunity to put these questions to the (non-fictional) developer. But when we ask him, Yu just grins. “That’s maybe something we will leave to the interpretation of the reader.”You can find potential answers online, as the same kinds of communities that dedicated themselves to cracking the codes of Tunic and Animal Well ponder the lore of UFO Soft. “We don’t want to step in and define that,” Perry says. “This is almost another type of secret, right?” And the rarest kind of all: one that can be kept secret.All secrets known
(Image credit: Mossmouth)Perry thinks of it like this: “Every secret comes out eventually, right? Unless we’d had no audience, and released this game to crickets, people were going to find everything. Everyone was going to go through the code – and has gone through the code.”Having taken such care to hide these things, then, how do the developers feel about this method of uncovering secrets? “We have to just contend with the reality that people are going to break it apart,” Yu shrugs, an acceptance that seems to have informed the team’s approach at a code level. “We didn’t work really hard to encrypt it or anything,” Perry says. “And, it turns out, Game Maker’s not secure at all.”Conversely, having opted not to use something off the shelf and to build his own engine instead, Basso was a little readier to implement countermeasures. “Designing within the context of the online community, I knew people were going to immediately try to hook up Cheat Engine to it and datamine it, try to reverse-engineer the source code,” he says.
(Image credit: Mossmouth)”It was something I thought about for years, and there are things in the game that were anticipating that. I tried various tricks. The codebase is set up in such a way where there aren’t strings identifying the assets, so a lot of it is still just machine code that you have to parse through. It’s harder than most games, I think, to reverse-engineer.” He pauses, then laughs. “That hasn’t stopped people from doing it.”Basso has a clear respect for the hustle. “It’s fun to acknowledge those people, because it’s still hard work, and they’re really dedicated. I have a lot of respect for that. It’s not an antagonistic relationship. It’s more like camaraderie.”Shouldice, meanwhile, is a little more conflicted. “If there’s a secret that’s hidden in the executable, and people are going to datamine to find it… I mean, that kind of sucks,” he says. “But it doesn’t suck that they’re able to do it. It sucks if someone does it and then shares it with the world.”There’s not much you can do about that last bit, it being a case of human behaviour, but Shouldice did make it harder to crack Tunic’s code, using Unity IL2CPP encryption. That hasn’t stopped the game’s randomiser community, he points out happily. Ultimately, if it becomes a battle of decoding, “It’s you versus the world at that point – and the world will win.”
It’s just like flipping through the pages of a Choose Your Own Adventure story. As long as the page exists, someone’s going to find itAndrew ShouldiceThere are other options for maintaining secrecy and surprises, however, including the one the developer saved for Tunic’s very final secret.It’s the culmination of ‘Golden Path’, a meta-puzzle that covers the breadth of the game world and every page of its manual. Shouldice sets the scene for us: “You teleport to a mysterious glyph tower that’s surrounded by floating, three-dimensional versions of the runic characters in the game.”But try to translate them with the usual cipher and you’ll realise they’re “garbage”, as Shouldice puts it. Until, that is, you start tapping out a pattern on the D-pad, each new direction causing the glyphs to shift shape.The full sequence is a hundred inputs long. “And then,” Shouldice says, “nothing happens.” This is vital to his anti-datamining strategy. “The game does not check for success. There’s no line of code anywhere that says, ‘Be looking for this particular sequence, and when that’s done, unlock something’. Because, if you did that, then they could just look at the code. It’s just like flipping through the pages of a Choose Your Own Adventure story. No matter what you do, as long as the page exists, someone’s going to find it.”
(Image credit: Finji)Instead, the code tells the glyphs how to transform in response to each individual direction. “It’s not quite hardcore cryptography, but I chose a starting sequence such that, if you put in the correct sequence of buttons, the garbage that you’re left with is the answer to the puzzle.”Vitally, the player is left to check their own working here, revealing a web address – the source code of which Shouldice can control. “If people can datamine any asset out of the game,” he concludes, “make sure you don’t have the solution to your final puzzle be an asset in the game in any way.”In a way, that’s exactly what Mossmouth has done with UFO 50’s meta-narrative. “People are gonna uncover every secret in the traditional sense of the word, given the way technology and distribution works,” Perry says. “This is the one secret we can keep.” Because the answers don’t exist anywhere in the code, but in the players’ heads? “Right. It exists between these data points that we’ve given people. There’s all this space between them for interpretation.”Of course, the UFO 50 team know the answers, but it seems unlikely we’ll be getting it out of them any time soon. Yu grins again. “We’ll take it to our graves.”Tunic, Animal Well, and UFO 50 are just three examples of the best Metroidvania games out there
Publicado: 2025-12-23 16:00:00
fonte: www.gamesradar.com
