Spelunky 2
Derek Yu makes a return to his classic action Roguelike
PC, PS4
After Derek Yu shipped Spelunky for Xbox 360 and PC in 2012, he took a big break from making games. He’d just become a father, and he was also recovering from the stresses of remaking his freeware GameMaker game with programmer and fellow designer Andy Hull. But Yu wasn’t exactly idle. For a start, he had to look after his new daughter, but he also started writing a book about Spelunky’s development and design, a way for him to unpack his thoughts about its creation. And in it lay the seed for a sequel.
“I was essentially doing research on my own game,” Yu tells us. He spoke to everyone involved in its development, and finally read what had been written on the game and watched videos of people playing. “I’d thought about making a sequel for a while, but it made me want to do it even more because I’d just relived the development of the first. I could see it a little more clearly because I wasn’t in the middle of it.”
Yu isn’t working with his old dev partner on Spelunky 2, but Hull provided one of its core ideas when he suggested adding another dimension to levels – a back layer accessed through doors hidden in the walls. “As soon as he said it, I thought it was a great idea,” says Yu. “I really wanted to extend on that feeling of finding a secret door or passage.” Spelunky
has secret doors, of course, but they take you to new levels, such as the City of Gold and Hell. The sequel’s second layer is a space that exists alongside the one you came from, and Yu loves it because it allows the magic of discovering shortcuts and other delights that exist within the space you’re already exploring.
Spelunky was in the vanguard of procedural generation, using a technique which knits together lots of pre-designed level blocks to create a practically infinite variety of much larger ones. Since it works so well, Yu didn’t mess with this formula for the sequel, but the layers do mean that the player can circumvent some obstacles, thus adding some wrinkles to the way he designs its level elements. But generally, he’s aiming to design with a light touch. “We’re definitely approaching the game with an ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ mentality,” says Yu. “There’s plenty to build on from the original anyway; I see the original game as being set. I hesitate to call it perfect, but for me the original Doom was perfect for what it was, and that doesn’t mean I’m sad they kept adding to it.”
That mentality has led to the radicalseeming introduction of physics-based liquids, through which water drains from pools and lava floods passageways. For Yu, it adds more dynamism to the levels, and though it might seem to edge towards the chaotic, he reminds us that it fits closely with the original. “Spelunky was always about chain reactions of consequences leading from your actions, like when a landmine would blow up and send a rock flying which hits your head.”
Yu feels this new approach to liquids makes the world feel more alive, that you’re playing in a bottled ecosystem. That’s a sense that was always a part of Spelunky. And besides, Yu and Hull wanted to add physics liquids to the first game, but they just didn’t have the resources to implement it. Yu knows he needs to make sure it doesn’t lead to too much chaos, but on the other hand he relishes the idea that the splashy obstructions will encourage players to creatively use items to get around them. “It’s a balance, right, to add these random elements and make sure they align enough times that the player feels they had a fair shake at things. That’s where the balancing comes in.”
Another feather in the project’s cap is Blitworks, the Barcelona-based studio which ported the first game to PS3, PS4 and Vita. As it ported Spelunky, Yu knew Blitworks grew to know the game as well as he did, and so, keen to work with a whole team of engineers, he approached it for the sequel. “I felt that if they didn’t accept my offer, it wouldn’t get made. They were a key element to making it happen.” And just to round off the sense of a team coming back together for another go, composer Eirik Suhrke is also returning. “I was just excited to work on a sequel,” says Yu. “It’s not something I’ve done before; I had a lot of ideas. Spelunky was really fertile ground.”
“We’re approaching the game with an ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ mentality”