Feature: "I Avoided Almost All The Existing Tropes" - Peeling Back The Layers Of Animal Well

Who the heck spends seven years making a video game about animals — literally, just animals?

The game in question, Metroidvania,” “pixel-art,” “retro-inspired” — it might quickly slide out of your brain, given how it sounds indistinguishable from most rank-and-file indie games.

But the thing that’s elevated this Game of the Year contender far beyond those vanilla descriptors and squarely into It’s-kinda-hard-to-talk-about-what-makes-this-so-great territory is, well… kinda hard to talk about. Depending on how you play it, this 2D-pixel-art-Metroidvania game can play like an exquisitely crafted video game, or it can unfold into a labyrinthian social experiment about the way people typically interact with games.

With that philosophy (and dilemma) in mind, Nintendo Life caught up with the game’s solo creator, Billy Basso, to tease out the mysteries of Animal Well. In an attempt at keeping the game’s many mysteries intact, similarly to the game, we’ve structured this interview into three layers, so you, the reader, get to decide just how deep down the well you wish to go...

Layer 1

Nintendo Life (Alan Lopez): Before we start, just recapping that I’ve prompted both you and the readers that I’m going to structure the interview in layers, much like your game, to allow people to read as deep down as they want to learn about the game. So we’re going to start at the surface. Are you ready?

Billy Basso: Yep, I’m ready.

Okay. Why animals?

Why animals…? I don’t know. I just like them. I think everybody likes them. I don’t know. They’re fun to draw?

[Laughter]

There’s so many animals on the planet, and we’re just one of them. Most games are focused on people. But I feel like there's a lot of interesting animals in the world. They’re a giant source of inspiration for me. You can go watch any nature documentary or go observe something out in the world and [animals] are probably going to act in a way that's kind of funny or interesting.

I want to dig into this question a little more than that. The reason I wrote the question was not to act stupid. If you look around the [PAX] showroom floor, or really just [look at] any video game in general, everything feels like an attempt to drill down into genre. To make a game that’s just about animals feels so simplistic as to almost be parody. If your game were not so dense, it would feel like a joke, but instead it feels profound in its simplicity. That’s why I was curious… you just made a game about animals. [laughter]

When I look for inspiration, I kind of go back to basics. I try not to be influenced by all the built-up tropes and stereotypes that people have. Yeah, there's lots of animals in games, but they're so far removed from the source material. They're either cartoony or chibi or they barely resemble them. A teddy bear has almost nothing to do with a grizzly bear that you would observe in nature. Animals are anthropomorphised to the point where they're just humans in costumes, and that's their role in the world to us.

I wanted the game to [show] animals in a way where they feel almost like aliens, to show that they have their own ways of life and behaviours and that they fit into the ecosystem differently. And [to show] they're totally different from us, but also in some ways, similar. I wanted to actually pay attention to that. Even though [Animal Well] has a basic name, it’s a big part of the game.

That’s an earnest answer, I love that.

I've interviewed very few all-in-one solo developers. And that's probably because, one, they're rare, and two, most video games don't make it at this scale, let alone ones by solo developers. What would you say to somebody who right now is working totally alone trying to make a game [at the scale of] the game you’ve just made?

I would say that working solo has a lot of advantages, actually. I think overall it's a much more efficient way to work in of the amount of money and effort that goes into the game, versus what results in playable stuff. There's no communication overhead with other of the team; you don't have to argue for your idea; your iteration loop is just all in your head so you can work much faster. I think in a way it's the purest form of development. Sure, you're a single-threaded process and you can take a long time, but in a way, it's the safest way to work in of money and budget for a project.

But was there an element of game design that almost stopped you because you were developing it alone?

I think maybe early on I did worry about just losing interest or getting distracted, which is, I think, pretty common in maybe the first six months [of a game’s development], where you have a new project that's really fun in the beginning, but you don't really know for sure if you're going to stick with it or it's just going to run its course or if you'll get bored; the fun kind of dries up as you explore the ideas.

But after a while, I kind of stopped worrying about that, and it was just more a matter of how long it would take. It was my daily habit to work on this game and over time it became more and more a part of my life and identity. It became difficult to imagine just giving it up. It would be really a huge blow to all this time I've invested in my life.

It was always really important to just find the fun. If I still enjoyed the day-to-day process, then in theory I could work on it forever because it's just a hobby. And I mean, I know I'll always play video games because they're just fun to [play]. I'm never going to get tired of that or I'm never wondering when will that end or any hobby that you like. So if I could always relate to it as a hobby and not as labour that I have to get to the end of, then it almost didn't really matter how long it took.

Now it's your career.

It's true. And there are a lot of parts of it that maybe aren't that fun that you have to do to actually ship it and sell it to people. And towards the end, all those things pile up and it does become work to actually wrap it up.

Well, that leads me nicely to this: you’re published by Bigmode, which for readers is the publishing company created by famous YouTube personality Dunkey. What was your first interaction with Dunkey like?

It was actually after we had some email conversations that we wanted to meet, and they were gonna tell us about Bigmode before they announced it. I was already a fan, and I was excited to talk to him. I we had a Discord call schedule, and I was almost like, will he show up? And I seeing the video game Dunkey avatar in the meeting room. It was kind of funny being like, ‘Wow, I'm actually going to talk to him. He's here. He's a real person.’ But then I was kind of surprised by how shy and soft-spoken he was. Totally the opposite from his video persona.

But yeah, he's just a really polite, quiet, thoughtful person. And I guess people that haven't met him in real life maybe don't know that.

How quickly did it become apparent that you were going to work together?

Pretty fast. We met a couple of times, and we had really good chemistry with me and my partner Dan and then Dunkey and Leah. They were both just really nice and they were easy to talk to. I was a little concerned about giving up creative control and just wanted to feel them out.

And it just seemed like a good fit. We wanted the same things; on their end, it was a ion project, they wanted to get more involved in video games, and they loved them. And that's how I was approaching it too. It felt like I could trust them, to treat the project with care. And I felt like they had a lot to offer because they could get it in front of way more people than I'd ever be able to do on my own. It was all good.

Okay, are you ready to go a little bit deeper?

I'm ready.

Layer 2

I've heard a lot of people go so far as to call Animal Well a horror game, which I don't necessarily agree with, but the fact that I hear that sentiment repeated often is interesting to me. I feel like you've made a lot of design decisions that avoid genre [conventions], but still create that sort of feeling.

So my question I guess is…[pause]...it’s easier to tell when you scare a player, or when you thrill a player. But how do you know when you make something that simply makes a player constantly feel a vibe?

Hmm. Early on I was interested in taking a lot of ideas from survival horror games and combining them with puzzle platformer stuff. Those early Silent Hill and Resident Evil PlayStation games are very near and dear to me and...

Is that what the 'save phone' is [inspired by], by the way?

Yep. I wanted to do the save room music, give you a feeling that this is your safe area and you can decompress for a little bit.

I feel like some of those early horror games have what I think of as these good set-ups, where they're setting the stage to trick the player, almost like a trap. In Resident Evil 1, the first time you get the shotgun, it's mounted on a wall. You take it, and then you're like, ‘Oh cool, I found the shotgun, that seems like a really good item.’ And then you leave the room and you realise that [taking it] released a switch, and now the ceiling is going to crush you. So then you're like, ‘Oh no! But I want the shotgun!’ Ultimately, the solution is you have to put the shotgun back to get out of the room safely. You're kind of teased by it…You're told, ‘No, you've got to put it back.’ You get a sense of ownership for only a second, and then it's taken away from you.

Which is an emotional experience. It's like a kid thinking they can have a toy, and then their parents scolding them and making them put it back.

So you were chasing…the feeling of loss?

Yeah. That particular set-up taps into this primitive core memory that a lot of us have. l love that narrative set-up. In Animal Well, I reference it a little bit in the way you get this disc, and you eventually have to find the fake version of it, and swap it Indiana Jones-style.

But, yeah, [feelings] like that, or the feeling of being stalked across a world is also very scary. Just being chased by something and knowing you're being hunted by this thing that can navigate the world is also another scary idea. I try to not really reuse ideas either. Any time I put [an idea] in the game, I thought, ‘What's the hook here? What's the story behind this? What is the player going to do? How is the game going to react? And why is that interesting?’ If I have an idea like that, that’s a good start for a new area of the game.

Most games have an element of, 'These things are good for you, these things are bad for you.' Animal Well doesn't necessarily even have an opinion of you, in a way. It just is.

That was an important consideration with the animal design, because in real life I don't think there's really good and evil. It's all grey. We have to exercise our judgement in any given situation. ‘Is this dangerous? What does this creature want? What are their motivations?’ I think that's an interesting thing to think about.

With any animal or creature I put in the game, I wanted players to be a little uneasy. Is this helpful? Are they going to help me with a puzzle? Is this a threat? I need to approach it with caution. And I feel like people are much more engaged when they're thinking that way, and not just like, ‘Oh, I'm going to jump on this, this is bad, this is bad, oh here's a power-up, I'm going to grab it.’ When you just design like that, you don't have to think very hard about what you're doing and you're going to go on autopilot. I wanted to break those habits.

As a player, the way that it made me feel was constantly curious, and always uneasy.

Yes.

Everything was rewarding, and everything was bad. So it was constant tension.

I feel like that's a good state of mind to be in when you're exploring a space. It feels like not only are you literally exploring the environment, but you're exploring the creatures in it, and the game mechanics. You're just like trying to build a mental map of how things work and, I don't know. To me that seems fun.

Let’s talk genre then since we're kind of on the topic of Metroidvania, which is a noun I kind of hate. I’ll get into that, but first I'm curious about…I'm going to assume that you're obviously a fan of the genre?

Yeah, yeah!

So I’d love to hear a little bit more about what games inspired you in this genre, and what you took from them.

Yeah, I love a lot of those games. I think Super Metroid is probably one of my favorites. I like the idea of exploring a space and returning to places you've already visited, but then finding something new. It’s not just the idea that you're exploring, but that you still have these loose ends in your mind that you want to go back to. It’s fun. As a whole, I probably have a soft spot for the Metroidvania genre.

But I also don't like genre labels much. And it's actually been kind of sad to see the Metroidvania genre become sort of calcified. A lot of developers are very happy to just follow the blueprint, give you the double jump and a dash and, you know, all these movesets that are solidified from old ideas. It's not really fun if it's just a formula. I mean, I like the broad idea of these interlocking areas and abilities. I thought it was still a good framework to design a game in: it’s fun, it gives the player a lot of agency on what direction they get to go in, it's very rewarding to get new stuff and drip feed the mechanics. But I still wanted to make an original, fresh game, so I avoided almost all the existing tropes that I was aware of in Metroidvanias.

My little rant on [the name] is, if we had called all dramas like, ‘Ben-Hur-Commandants’ or something, then you’d get in the mindset of, 'So, it's got to have a race, it's got to have...'

It's exactly that. Yeah, it's like... it's actually really counterproductive for creativity when you have such a specific example. There's so many things you can take inspiration from, there’s such a giant, wide open, infinite possibility space, and we're all focused on these two data points that we have, and people are very afraid to deviate from it.

Do you have any non-video game influences that you used for Animal Well?

Yes. I take a lot of inspiration from just physical locations, so honestly, just going for walks in my neighbourhood. I started paying a lot of attention to these tacky animal lawn ornaments that were in people's yards, these goofy frogs and raccoons, all sorts of stuff. And I thought it'd be fun to sort of imagine, ‘What's the mythology that connects all these things?’ Because I feel like they're very common, but no one really thinks too hard about them. I thought it was kind of cool to combine this element of nature with people’s interests, because again, people tend to just be interested in animals created in their own image.

So that, and also museums. They are really interesting to me, in the sense that they're curating all these different ideas and they allow people to explore them in a lot of different directions that are very open-ended; they’re designed to be viewed in any order, so I think they were a good inspiration for me to use for my level design.

That's really interesting. I love that.

I want to mention, a couple of years ago — you know how websites are, they make you create lists of things [Ouch! - Ed.] — and one of the top two or three games I played back then was Metroid Dread. I absolutely loved it. I still love it. But after I played Animal Well, I feel like I enjoy that game a little less now… which is a healthy thing, I think! Because that’s how genre pushes itself forward. [Metroidvania games] in particular pride themselves in environmental storytelling and non-linear design, but Animal Well, relative to common experiences in the genre, is so vastly different that it made me realise that we need more ideas.

Yeah, I had a similar experience with Metroid Dread where it had been a while since I played a Metroid game, and it was one of my favourite series so I was like, ‘Oh, a new Metroid, I'm really excited for this!’ But I think I played too many [games like it]. It looked beautiful, it felt great to play, but it was still the same item set you get in all the Metroid games. They added a few new abilities, which I was excited to see, but I don't think it was enough to really maintain my sense of excitement throughout the game.

I love doing the last quarter or so of any Metroidvania where you’ve got pretty much the whole map open and you get to go clean up all the things you missed and fill in all the maps. But [in Metroid Dread] I was like, I know these are all just missile upgrades. And because I already know ahead of time what I'm going to get, I'm not that excited to go collect them all. Plus they’re not going to really enable any new gameplay experiences, really. It'll just see a number go up and I'll bomb all the hidden walls, or whatever. So it didn't create that sense of exploration and wonder that maybe I got in some of the earlier games when the whole formula was fresher to me.

[That] made me aware that when there's a secret, it needs to be actually surprising, and it needs to break from the pattern that even the current game you’re playing established. Because as a player, you're constantly trying to fit a model around everything you're experiencing. I think it's important to be aware of what that model might be in the player's head and either continue filling it in or break from it to surprise them.

I think that Metroid even tells you where the secrets are after a certain point?

Yeah, that's pretty common and a lot of people have said, ‘I wish Animal Well did that.’ And it's like, well, they wouldn't be secrets then. [laughter] You're not entitled to get everything. If you get bored, then stop playing! That’s just going to make the secrets less meaningful for the people that did put in the work.

Layer 3

We're in the final layer. Are you ready?

All right.

Okay…why bunnies?

Why bunnies? That's another good question.

You see, it's a callback to the first question…

[laughter] I don't know, I like bunnies. I have this picture that I got taken on Easter at Sears when I was two years old where I had some bunnies on my lap and I was wearing this striped overalls Easter outfit. I think I've always just thought they were cute and interesting.

And I think intuitively, people associate them with mystery and going down the rabbit hole and magic tricks. They're always associated with these things that are magical or curious. It was an intuitive fit for them to represent the secrets in the game. I also like the idea of a collectible being a living creature that you're not actually collecting, you're just scaring away.

It's really tempting to sit here and be like, 'Here are a bunch of things in your game, can you make meaning out of them?' I won't do that. But there is one item that I'm going to call out, and I'm not even going to ask you about it really, I just want to talk about it conceptually: The Cheater's Ring. It's a thing you can get through great — and I mean great — effort, and [spoiler warning] it allows players to clip through walls. And if you do that, then there are designed experiences and even characters that you can find that shouldn't be able to be found, which means they’re scripted, but only by effectively 'breaking' the game.

So my specific question: with this in mind, can you expand even more about your relationship to the way a player develops their expectations? Because between this and a few other things, you seem to have made an entire element of Animal Well revolve around the concept of breaking expectations for what secrets are even supposed to be.

Yeah, I've now realised that no matter what you put in a game, it will get found. There's no amount of effort that you can put into hiding a secret; I still trust that it will be found and appreciated and wondered about. So [instead], the harder it’s buried, the more interesting it is, in a sense.

In a way, I was deg a game for myself. I think back to secrets I found in old Nintendo games, like the warp whistle in Mario, or even glitches in games that I was too young to know whether they were a secret, or a bug — I didn't really even know what a bug meant. And because of [those experiences], I know how powerful [secrets] can be and how much they can inspire the imagination. It's just such a meaty thing to think about. They tap into the very core magic of games when you're younger when maybe you don't know how they're made — I mean, a lot of people still don't know how games are made, and there's a lot of things in games I don't understand how they're achieved. Either way, I think it's exciting to get people thinking about where the boundary of the creative design space is and the technical aspects of how the game functions, and to blur that line a little bit, to try and remind people that there's a person that designed this game.

[Secrets] are almost an invitation to relate to creators and to think about their design process. They are very much worth putting into a game. I wish more games did that.

I feel it necessary to clarify that the Cheater’s Ring isn't even a true debug mode, in a sense. It feels very explicitly designed to be another layer of meta-commentary.

Yeah, I think it was a way to almost like…I don't want to go into too much detail, but I was thinking of it as a way to give players a behind-the-scenes look, like the bonus features on a DVD where you get to see some of the cut content, or see a little bit behind the scenes of what's still there. I didn't ever really want to delete anything from the game? It was almost like I was just building over itself as time went on.

My favourite playful thing in any game…well, my favourite video game at all is Super Mario Bros. 3.

Okay, I think that’s my favourite video game as well.

Yeah! And when I was a kid, there was no internet, so we just talked to each other about 'secrets'. And the fact that the game hard-coded the ability to break it by going behind the levels was so playful. It sparked an internal dialogue with my little self that I never forgot.

Yeah, I still , you get on the white block in the third level and you hold down for like, what, 10 seconds or something and then you're behind the scene and it's amazing! Why is that in there? Yeah, that's burned into my memory. It's like a core memory I have.

Do you have a favourite secret in a video game?

[long pause] Honestly, I think that…might be it. That's the one that comes to mind. It's not the most elaborate secret, but it's very surprising and unintuitive, and it's still something you don't see in games nowadays, being able to go into the background of a 2D platformer. So yeah, honestly, I'll definitely say that one right now.

Thanks to Billy for taking the time to chat. Animal Well is out on Switch - and it's rather good.