Coyote's greetings!
With the PC release of Laika: Aged Through Blood just around the corner (October 19 - Woohoo! 🥳), we've prepared a little developer Q&A where you can learn more about the game's creation, the decision to use anthropomorphic animals, and the generally dark tone. Also, why we call Laika: Aged Through Blood a "motorvania".
We hope you have fun reading! And if you have any further questions, feel free to post them here in the comments. We will answer them bit by bit, or in another update. It depends on how many more questions you have. ☺️
1 | How would you describe what Laika: Aged Through Blood is about?
Laika: Aged Through Blood is a Western-inspired story of revenge of a mother protagonist fighting to keep her community alive against a bird army trying to occupy the place they live in. It is a mix of a metroidvania, with a twin-stick shooter and the movement of the first 2D flash motorbike physics games, and it has big boss fights and power ups for your bike.
2 | What inspired you for the storyline of a mother coyote riding through a post-apocalyptic wasteland on a motorcycle?
It's been a few years since we thought of the first iteration of the story and it has changed so much, since because of the way we work every part of development is an ever changing collective effort. But I do remember that when we took the gameplay prototype this game was built on top of and we decided it needed a cool story to make it less "arcade", Edu Verz (designer) was really into old Westerns and I had been writing a short comic inspired by Berserk about a woman outlaw knight that rescued a young girl, and that focused on how this super gruff typical action protagonist would deal with having a child under her responsibility while doing all the typical gruesome game/manga protagonist stuff. Even though it looks nothing like what I had been writing before, we thought mixing it with Westerns and making it about a mother protagonist would be super cool in a video game story, since there wasn't anything like it that we could think of. ☺️
3 | Why did you go with a world of anthropomorphic animals?
That is like our signature when we make games, we use anthropomorphic animals as just another (very useful) storytelling tool. Since we started our game making journey making short pixel art games with few resources, making our characters anthro as if we were telling a folk-tale meant that we were able to tell the player a lot about the characters in our games with very few pixels, and we eventually became known for always doing this.
4 | You’re calling Laika a “motorvania”. What does that mean to you? How did you integrate elements of riding a motorcycle with combat?
The first prototype of Laika we developed was a love letter to motorcycle flash games and twin-stick shooters, and when we decided to make it a metroidvania too we encountered many problems because traversing a metroidvania-like world with these controls made the game feel super different than regular metroidvanias such as Hollow Knight or Blasphemous. It made sense to call it a different new genre, since there are not a lot of examples of games that feel like what we were developing (and also it sounds catchy)!
5 | What are some of the cool tricks you can do on the motorbike? Do you have a favorite?
The coolest one is doing the backflip to reload your gun for sure, but you can also stop bullets with your bike, and flip your bike to return bullets to the enemy for example.
6 | Can you describe some of the creatures players will encounter in the game? Is there a boss that really stands out to you?
All the enemies in-game are an imperialist birds army, and the bosses of the game their gigantic contraptions. There’s a boss that is basically the “pope” of the bird’s society that I really like, because it has this very Blasphemous-y vibe while looking extremely goofy at the same time designed by Renato (concept artist). I love it when videogames bosses are like this.
7 | What are some of the levels like? What are some hazards players will need to watch for, or objects they can make use of with their motorbike?
Laika has basically a wasteland filled with secrets to explore, and big condensed story-important areas with their own unique mechanics in them. For example, there’s a level that you have to traverse using a shotgun’s recoil, and another one in which you change the design of the level by using a grappling hook. Marcos (level designer) made them super fun to move through.
8 | The storyline and the overal mood are pretty grim. Why did you decide to go with a darker tone?
Since this is such a tricky game to learn the controls of, we thought we needed a very grim and striking beginning of the story that would act as the “starting fireworks” to set the mood of a revenge story and keep the players hooked enough to not get frustrated in the beginning. The game has a good bunch of lighter moments too, but the darker moments help a lot to give the world a pre-apocalyptic vibe.
9 | Do any of you ride motorcycles in reality? Where are your favorite places to ride?
This is super ironic, since most of us don’t even drive! We just thought it was the coolest way a character can move. 😎
10 | Is there anything in Laika you removed, that sometimes you regret and wish you could put back in?
In the first iteration of the story, the game was even grimmer with an almost permanent red sky and Laika and her daughter lived alone in a repurposed war tank. A hub with a lot of community fit the game we were making the best, but I think the vibe of “alone against the world” that the game had before was a really cool story too.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1796220/Laika_Aged_Through_Blood/