Nintendo Life: We played through the free demo you have on the Switch eShop, and we loved how versatile an item the yoyo is for Pippit! Do you remember when you had that lightbulb moment, when you knew you wanted to build a game around a yoyo?
Henrique Lorenzi: As game designers, we’ve found that one of the best ways to create enjoyable experiences is to take objects that the player is familiar with in the real world and transform them into gameplay mechanics. We’ve made it a habit to set up a board at the beginning of every project, where the entire team can participate by throwing in ideas. So we had a board full of images of ordinary objects like a hammer, a slingshot, a baseball bat, a hand saw, roller skates – you name it! The yoyo was special, though.
Not only could it be considered a ‘cool kid’s’ item, but the gameplay ideas involving it started pouring in non-stop! At that point, the lightbulb lit up, as you said – we realised this item would allow for a pretty extensive and deep game! We started sketching game screens, thinking about how the various challenges would play out – it was at this point that we also incorporated diagonals to the level design, which are places where the yoyo can bounce off of and help extend your range. Everything felt solid, and we were confident we had some great game-design possibilities in our hands!
Did the yoyo start life as anything else originally, or did you always know you wanted the main weapon to be one?
We knew we wanted to make some kind of a ‘Zelda-like’ game, but try to stray away from medieval fantasy themes. So we were looking for an item that could replace the sword in combat. After we stumbled upon the humble yoyo, we noticed a pretty strong point in its favour: differently to the usual approach of having the player juggle a wide range of items that each enable a certain action – like having weapons for combat, a boomerang for puzzle-solving, and special boots for wall-jumping and platforming –, the yoyo would be able to cover all of these use-cases on its own!
The player’s progression would be tied to the knowledge of particular yoyo tricks, so it perfectly translated the experience someone might have with the real thing. And regarding the game’s setting and themes, the yoyo provided a great opportunity to take everything into the contemporary era! So you’re a radical kid using your favourite toy in a modern-world city with modern-world problems. We had hit the perfect combo for the relatable experience we wanted to create!
From the demo alone, we can see a lot of Nintendo’s DNA in Pipistrello. This really does look and feel like something that would have been released on the GBA! What games in particular do you feel the team drew inspiration from?
I’m so glad you’ve noticed this! We’re longtime Nintendo fans, and everyone on the team has grown up playing Nintendo games. The Game Boy Advance really felt like peak handheld gaming back in the day, so we were excited at the possibility of bringing a nostalgic feeling to players familiar with it. We’ve even added an optional 3D Console mode to the game that simulates the experience of playing on a real GBA, including responsive buttons, an adjustable and rotatable camera, and – get this – even glare from the screen if you hold it at just the right position!
But of course, we didn’t want to just mimic the thing, but also modernise the gaming experience and make it appealing to new players as well: the physics engine has lots of quality-of-life improvements – such as coyote-time, corner-sliding, landing assist, and magnetic edges – and if you get a Game Over you can restart from the same screen without any downtime. One of our aspirations was perhaps to create a new source of joy that could be passed down through generations, just like Nintendo has.
Speaking of games that have inspired us, I’d say the most direct have been The Minish Cap and Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow, but we also took a page from older and newer games alike – from the first The Legend of Zelda on the NES, to the latest entries like Breath of the Wild.
Can you talk about the world map and exploration? Will there be interconnected areas like in a Metroidvania, or will there be sections that have a start and a finish, much like a Zelda dungeon?
There’s a bit of everything in Pipistrello! The navigation around the city is completely interconnected, with branching and merging paths. The city map is fully filled in and massive, so you can bet there will be something interesting no matter what direction you go in, and on top of everything, it’s teeming with secrets! Did I mention we also have a second layer to the entire city? Players can drop below to the sewers level and explore even more sprawling environments – something akin to the Dark World or the Depths!
Beyond that, once you reach a dungeon or mini-dungeon, the experience becomes more like a classic Zelda – strongly thematic and narrative-driven experiences which emphasise one or more specific game mechanics. Remember we kept our themes contemporary, so our dungeons take place in a police department, a shopping mall, a skyscraper mid-construction, a pop-culture convention, a sports stadium, and more! I think players will have a blast unravelling each location’s lore and secrets.
We had a blast with the demo, but we found the Don Mauretti boss fight particularly challenging! We liked how theoretically you could defeat him with simple yoyo strikes, but you could deal more damage by bouncing the yoyo off walls. Will the game have any sort of difficulty options, and on a scale of 1 to 10, how tough do you think he is in comparison to other bosses in the game?
It does feel way more challenging in the demo! That fight has been tailored for players with many hours of experience in the game, and we didn’t want to nerf the boss for the demo and risk losing the interesting bits. We offer three scenarios in the demo so that players can have a taste of different parts of the game, but these scenarios aren’t consecutive in the full game at all. At the point you go against Don Mauretti in the full game, the player will have access to many Badges and Upgrades, not to mention Charged and Special Moves such as the Parry and the Flurry Attack – all things that the full game introduces at an appropriate pace, providing detailed explanations and training areas to practice – so we’re confident the player will have the ability and the tools necessary to overcome these fights! The game’s progression is not linear, so a player can even explore other city districts and fight other bosses before going into Don Mauretti’s turf.
Beyond that, the game also offers several difficulty settings, which allow the player to fine-tune the gameplay experience to suit their tastes, both to the easier side as well as the harder side. We’d say Don Mauretti is about a 7 or 8 on the difficulty scale, and the four main bosses have all been designed to display a similar level of challenge. These four main bosses serve as the final trial on the player’s mastery journey throughout each city district and dungeon, so each one offers something different in terms of required skills and fight dynamics. But don’t forget there are still other bosses and mini-bosses (and secret bosses!) for the player to track down and fight!
We also noticed some issues with the frame rate dropping pretty substantially in the final section of the Don boss fight (we were playing in handheld mode.) Do you hope to have those issues worked out for the full launch on Switch?
After the demo launched, we’ve gone through extensive optimisation passes on the Nintendo Switch. We’re so sorry about your previous experience! Now I can say that all areas of the game run perfectly smoothly, including the boss fight you mentioned, no matter if you’re playing it docked or handheld! The Nintendo Switch is a priority of ours, and we’ve put a lot of work into it, with things like HD Rumble support tailored for each action Pippit can take. We believe it’s one of the best platforms to enjoy the game on! The updated demo should be available shortly on the Nintendo eShop, so you don’t have to just take my word for it.
We took a look through the developer credits and we noticed you have Yoko Shimomura on the team composing the soundtrack! Whoa! Can you talk about the process of pitching the game to her and what it’s been like working with her?
Having grown up with Nintendo games, we’ve naturally grown up attached to Yoko Shimomura’s work as well! With our idea to develop a GBA-inspired game, who else would be most suited to bring on board if not her? We felt that, taking into account her work on Super Mario RPG and the Mario & Luigi series, and especially Superstar Saga on the GBA, she could bring unmatched authenticity to Pipistrello’s retro design aesthetic, and it could result in the game being elevated even more towards that Nintendo standard we were seeking. Naturally, it was kind of nerve-wracking contacting a world-class composer like her for the first time! We didn’t know if she’d even agree to working with us.
We knew she could have a very tight schedule, so we made sure to pitch this to her very early on – we sent out the first email one whole year before production actually started! (Maybe that was an excessively long time? But it pays to think in advance!) Much to our surprise, she was very open to the idea! We sent her full documents describing the game and the setting, along with screenshots and videos of the areas she’d be composing for, as well as some musical references (some of them her own songs!)
I imagine it must have been quite a surprise to her that we weren’t looking for a full orchestral sound, but we actually asked for the production to take a step back and embrace the GBA era! So she employed some of those vintage Roland Sound Canvas synthesisers used back in the day, for a real throwback. We were extremely happy with the experience, and will most definitely be looking to repeat this partnership in the future! I hope players will keep an ear out while playing the game!
Finally, we have to know…does anyone on the development team know any rad, real-world yoyo tricks? Bonus points if they can prove it!
As kids, we had a lot of contact with toy yoyos, and companies were even packaging them with snacks and soda. But that’s hardly anything that allows us to be considered enthusiasts, let alone professionals at the yoyo.
That said, we did actually go deep into research while developing Pipistrello, watching yoyo competition videos, learning the theory behind a multitude of tricks, and speaking with people who know this topic way better than us!
Some people on the team obtained professional yoyos during development to aid in the creative process (and played around with them for a bit), and one of us actually has more experience with the diabolo, a related apparatus. All in all, though, I think becoming a yoyo champion is a fantasy best left to Pippit at this point, haha!
Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo is available now on Nintendo Switch and other platforms – there’s a demo on the eShop, too. Biggest thanks to Henrique for taking the time to share so many stories surrounding Pocket Trap’s latest game.
