Chris Seavor on The Unlikely Legend of Rusty Pup, voicing Slippy Toad, and more
ONM has published a new interview with former Rare staffer and Gory Detail founder Chris Seavor. Seavor discussed his background, the indie project The Unlikely Legend of Rusty Pup for Wii U/3DS, and voicing Slippy Toad.
You can find a few excerpts from the interview below. ONM’s full piece is located here.
On his background…
I’m surprised anyone has heard of me. Unlike other creative industries, there aren’t really that many well-known people in games, even within well-loved products. If I were to list my top 10 favourite titles of all time I’d only be able to name the designer of one of them off the top of my head and he’s someone I’ve met (Miyamoto. It’s Miyamoto). That said, there are still ‘characters’, although only Miyamoto even approaches the ‘rock star’ status to which I suspect some of the younger generation aspire. Anonymity suits me fine.
On how Rusty Pup plays…
It’s an exploration/puzzle game at heart; explore, nurture, acquire and build. You don’t control the main protagonist directly, as such. In some ways it could be said that ‘he’ (Rusty) controls ‘you’. Who ‘you’ are is also part of the story, so I can’t give too much away about that, either. There you go, clear as mud, eh?
Don’t worry though, it definitely isn’t an ‘experience the emotion, but little else’ type of game. The mechanics are solid and fundamental, the puzzles are fiendishly cunning, hopefully without being too difficult. There are boss fights, there are things to collect, things to build (with the things you’ve collected), there’s peril, horror, and humour and a few tears to be shed at the end, whichever ‘end’ that ends up being.
On where he began cooking up the combination of puzzling, platforming and pet-sim elements…
Things just evolve really… they certainly do when I design, anyway. I am not sure how it works for others, but I’m not one to plan things out meticulously and then stick to that plan. I have a core idea, we’ll try it out and take it from there. With Rusty Pup, after we got the core mechanic working it needed a few tweaks, but it also threw up a lot of other potential ideas.
What if Rusty could store ‘things’ in his stomach for later? What if, instead of being given things, he had to find them? What if he only found the ingredients and then you had to build whatever you needed to progress? What if the way you played made him angry? What if he got sad because of what you didn’t do? What if he could make friends with baddies, as well as bashing them? And so on.
On how much the current version of Rusty Pup represents the original idea…
It’s fundamentally the same, but there is more… lots more. We didn’t have any crafting in the original design, but we do now. We didn’t have an open world structure in the original design, now we do. We didn’t have a two-year-plus development cycle, either, but apparently we do now.
On voicing Slippy Toad in Star Fox Adventures and Super Smash Bros…
I had to prepare for many weeks to tackle the formidable challenge that was Slippy Toad. A trip to Tibet to contemplate my very existence, one week in the reptile house at London Zoo to absorb the essence of what it takes to be cold-blooded and toad-like (a few would say I’d already mastered those!). The rest was easy: just do a stupid sounding, high-pitched voice! Voilà!
