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I thought of Bugsnax so much so that I feel like I ate one of the suspicious little creatures myself. It’s been a week since I finished the game and I still find myself whispering “bunger bunger bunger” as I go through my day. To satisfy my hunger for more Bugsnax Without really consuming any bugsnax, I decided to email Kevin Zuhn, senior creative director and author of Bugsnax, some of my burning questions.
(This interview has been edited slightly for clarity.)
Kotaku: Can you tell me what your take on bugsnax was? How did you get the idea? What was your design process like?
Kevin Zuhn: The initial seed came from an old drawing I made in college of a waffle mixed with a caterpillar (the waffle), which I turned into a talk about collecting insects from food. This was combined with [gameplay designer] John Murphy’s talk on muppets who are mutated by what they eat, and [CFO, programmer, webmaster] Devon Scott-Tunkin’s speech on Howling Bananas, and by the end of our pitching process he had become Bugsnax!
When we decided to make the creatures themselves, we put together a great list of iconic foods (burger, fries, cake) and iconic insects (ant, dragonfly, scorpion), and looked for ways to relate them. . We wanted to make sure we had a wide variety of flavors, temperatures, body shapes, abilities, etc. Sometimes we would build a bugsnak based on a very strong visual design, sometimes to meet a mechanical need, and sometimes just for the sake of a joke! You could say our design process was a controlled chaos.
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Kotaku: Did you hire any professionals to voice the bugsnax? For some reason I have a big fantasy that bugsnax is voiced by normal non-voice acting people who work for your studio and you just pushed everyone into a booth one day and you said “give me your best. bugnsax printing “and the best were chosen.
Zuhn: I wish one of us at Young Horses had the talent to be successful, but the bugsnax are all professionally voiced! The good people of Brightskull called out Robbie Daymond [the voice of Sailor Moon’s Tuxedo Mask] and Cristina Valenzuela [Sailor Mars from the same show], and they were assigned about six bugsnax each. In the recording booth, our voice director, Michael Csurics, was telling them, “You are a hot dog, you crawl like a worm, you can only say your own name which is Weenyworm. What does it look like? And they would improvise hilarious voices until we found one we liked. The scripts were the funniest thing in the world because the whole page just said “Scoopy Banoopy” over and over again. The whole process was bananas start to finish and I loved every step.
Kotaku: The grumpy are also all unique characters. They all have desires, fears, and insecurities, which makes them remarkably complex as NPCs. What was your thought process for them?
Zuhn: We wanted Bugsnax to be a whole story, so my first goal was to define the role that each character played in Snaxburg society. I started with very broad archetypes: the mayor, the farmer, the archaeologist. Once we fixed them the next question was why each of them wanted bugsnax. What is the gap in their life that they are trying to fill? I wanted to make sure that each of them had a different answer, so that they had different perspectives on what bugsnax is and what is important in life. It helped me give more details on how they act!
Hence my favorite part: what do they think of each other? I drew great graphics to see who would be friends, partners, or enemies and why. How does the issue in their life affect their relationships, good and bad? With all of these questions answered, I was able to build quests and game scenes around the biggest sources of character conflict! I really wanted to make sure it all felt grounded and organic, because absolutely everything else in the game is ridiculous.
Kotaku: If you were to do an internal investigation to find out who would be everyone’s favorite bugsnak, which one would it be (and why is it Bunger)? Do you also have a favorite Grumpus?
If I answer an internal survey, I will get ten different answers! Young Horses never agree on anything. My favorite is actually Preying Picantis, but Bunger has a special shelf in my heart. There is just something magnetic about the performance of Tom Taylorson’s cheeseburger-as-dog. As for my favorite grumpus, it’s Chandlo Funkbun (because it’s by far the most fun to write).
(Kotaku: Bungered all day. But I also like the sassy Sweetiefly.) Were there any bugsnax that were cut from the final product?
Zuhn: Oh, a lot! We had written bugsnak concept pages and we had a system to vote our favorites. Everything that was below the voting threshold was cut. The victims include a grilled cheese crab, a bacon fly, a meatball snail and even the original waffle! There are dozens of additional unused models, some of which were even prototyped, but all the bugsnaks that actually received full 3D model treatment stayed until the end.
Kotaku: One bugsnax that confused me was the Paletoss. I didn’t understand his name until I realized, “Duh! It’s supposed to be a palette! »Do you have anything to share on how you came up with the names of your snax?
Zuhn: These are paletas that launch you: Paletoss!
Every few months the young horses would come together for a denomination meeting, where we would go bugsnak to bugsnak throwing names out until we found one we could agree on. Ideally, we would make a solid pun by merging the bug name with the collation name (Fryder, Scorpenyo, Buffalocust). If we couldn’t do that, we would try to use their flavor or behavior (Paletoss, Sweetiefly). And if all else failed, we’d just twist the words into cute nonsense (Scoopy Banoopy).
The end result is that I have an Excel spreadsheet full of hundreds of failed names for bugsnax, each one more wacky and desperate than the next.
Kotaku: So the “good” end of the game implies that Snorpy was right from the start. Will we be able to face the Grumpunati in DLC or sequels? (Are there any plans for DLC or a sequel?)
Zuhn: You should take what Snorpy says with a big grain of salt, because like all the characters in this story, he’s only half right. We’re still figuring out what exactly we want to do after release, but we’re definitely not done working on Bugsnax again. I know I would hate to leave this storyline hanging forever!
Kotaku: Did you always mean to Bugsnax to get as dark as this, or was it something that just happened? If you catch some bugsnax and feed them to your friends – which they encourage you to do – you set yourself up for a pretty dark end.
Zuhn: Absolutely! We knew from the start that bugsnax were dangerous pests, and in their early designs, they weren’t very cute. At one point there was an even worse ending where the Grumpus become zombies hungry for snakes that eat each other and then you. So if anything, the game just got lighter and sillier over time!
I wonder how an ending that’s essentially The Walking Bugsnax would have worked with the game’s sweet sweet theme song “It’s Bugsnax!“Maybe Young Horses would have chosen a more appropriate sound, something like death metal? Just imagine a version of “It’s Bugsnax!” made by Babymetal. It actually looks pretty badass.
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