Free Radicals
Double Fine project lead Lee Petty on the wild and wonderful mutations of ’80s-inspired roguelike. ROBIN VALENTINE
SPARE CHANGE
“Mutations kind of go hand-in-hand with an apocalypatic setting, I’m always very interested in a player character whose identity is shifting over the course of the game, and mutation seemed a really interesting way to explore that.”
MORPH SUIT
“I liked the idea that the characters themselves are relatively neutral. They don’t have really crazy silhouettes. So we left room for the mutations to really kind of define the character, at least visually, as the game progresses.”
BEYOND HUMAN
“One of one of the early things we said was, it was really interesting to see that as the world is somehow getting a little bit better the player character, although getting more powerful, is becoming something less than human.”
MONSTER MUSH
“We structured the enemy mutants so that they didn’t seem like an organised society, like they were not sentient or evolved. We didn’t really want the player character to just be murdering a slightly different species than themselves.”
LIVE A LITTLE
“You’re sort of adapting to survive in this environment. And we wanted the mutations themselves to kind of be surprising as well, thematically and visually, so that maybe how to get the most out of them wasn’t all on the surface.”
OUT OF TUNE
“We did have a brief moment early in pre-production where the game was called One Man Band of the Apocalypse. And it was more about crafting musical instruments instead of mutating. But it was horribly confusing!”