Welcome to another edition of Developer Diaries! Featured this week is Riv Hester, the mind behind the upcoming title Pepper Grinder!
WHY NOT START US OFF BY INTRODUCING YOURSELF?
I’m Riv Hester, and I’m a pixel artist, animator and gamedev generalist. I’m making Pepper Grinder with help from Xeecee, who makes the music and Mathias from MP2 Games, who handles porting and support tech.
CAN YOU TELL US A BIT ABOUT PEPPER GRINDER? HOW DID THE IDEA FOR THE GAME COME ABOUT?
Pepper Grinder is an action platformer about a treasure hunter named Pepper and a drill she calls Grinder, which she uses to tunnel into the earth at high speeds, collecting buried gold and jewels before bursting back out again and into the air to reach new heights.
I’ve always really enjoyed platformers with an emphasis on movement. The momentum of Sonic on SEGA Genesis, the deliberate weight of Donkey Kong Country, the weird and varied situations of Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island. All of these things are really fun and interesting to me in different ways, and I think a lot of that is expressed in Pepper Grinder even if none of them initially inspired the project. At first, in my head, it was just Ecco the Dolphin plus Dig-Dug.
I built Pepper Grinder out from that starting point, so almost everything is centred around the drilling mechanic. There’s plenty of traditional platformer running and jumping, but that’s more like the connective tissue between the different ways you can use the drill. Tunnelling through terrain, drilling into enemies, socketing into various machines to operate them, using the drill to swim or even skip along the surface of the water at high speeds.
One of the earliest enemies you face in Pepper Grinder, a person-sized beetle, resulted from thinking about how you’d invert the classic Goomba archetype to show off the drilling mechanic. If it’s armoured on top you just tunnel under it and hit it from below, right? That one interaction kind of informed my approach to the rest of the game.
HOW HAS THE DEVELOPMENT JOURNEY BEEN AND WHAT MADE YOU CHOOSE CONSTRUCT?
Growing up I’d always been interested in making games, but my miserable performance in mathematics and inability to look at a block of code without my eyes glazing over had me feeling like I was bashing my head against a wall for long enough that I’d mostly written the aspiration off.
Instead, I studied animation in school, I guess just because that was as close as I felt I could get to what I really wanted to do.
But then things started to change and a lot more noise was being made about visual scripting. At some point, I stumbled across Construct 2 and it just clicked. Here was a development environment that felt perfectly catered to how I understood and thought about things, and most importantly didn’t make my eyes glaze over.
I prototyped a lot of different ideas then and eventually got pretty deep into a roguelike shooter project called Reliquary before I had the idea for Pepper Grinder. Sometime in 2016 I needed a break from Reliquary after two years of working on it in spare time, so I prototyped the core mechanics for Pepper Grinder, then simply called Drill Game as a working title, just to get it out of my system.
I shared a few gifs from it on social media and it blew up in a way nothing else I’d done ever had, so I was like welp, guess I’m working on this now.
WHAT'S BEEN YOUR BIGGEST DEVELOPMENT HURDLE SO FAR?
Probably difficulty tuning, or at least that’s the freshest in my mind. It’s very easy for me to grow blind to how challenging or even downright frustrating something will be for the average player.
While I thought I was being mindful of that blindness and tuning things down accordingly, some recent player testing we conducted shed a lot of light on how far off the mark I’ve been on that!
I think it’s really important to get people who are unfamiliar with your game playing early and often.
You can’t always solve these issues by just changing some values here and there, and if you’ve gone long enough without knowing something was going to be a big problem for people, it could mean changing or scrapping a lot of work.
HOW DID YOU GET INVOLVED WITH DEVOLVER DIGITAL AND WHAT’S BEEN YOUR EXPERIENCE OF WORKING WITH A PUBLISHER?
I’d actually been working with a different publisher for about a year and a half until we split over creative differences. It was amicable and I learned a lot from them, but the stress from near-constant miscommunication between us left me burnt out by the end. We just had very different mindsets about development and couldn’t find a middle ground.
Funnily enough, the day I got out of the meeting with that publisher where we officially put the axe to our partnership, a friend from Devolver was visiting and sitting on my back porch with the Doinksoft (Gato Roboto) crew so I joined them outside, opened a beer and told them what happened.
It was pretty much immediately recommended I pitch with Devolver next and that got the ball rolling.
I was still burnt out and not ready to resume work on Pepper Grinder but Devovler was really understanding and happy to wait. So when I was ready after a year of pointedly ignoring gamedev and getting by on art commissions instead, I took my time and put together a new demo and documentation to pitch with.
They’ve been a dream to work with ever since! No communication issues at all, incredible support and flexibility, and they have the faith in me to just let me cook. I couldn’t be happier.
DO YOU HAVE ANY ADVICE FOR PEOPLE DOING THEIR OWN GAME PROJECTS?
I’ll say it again, get people testing your stuff early and often!
Beyond that, beware the sunk cost fallacy. Don’t hold onto something you know could be better just because it took a long time to do. Even if you burn it all down and start from scratch, you’ll get back to where you were faster than the first time with all the benefits of building on a better foundation.
This one is especially important when you’re first starting out but never loses relevance.
ANY FINAL THOUGHTS?
I just want to thank Scirra for making such amazing tools, and thank everyone else for reading this!
I hope y’all enjoy Pepper Grinder when it releases next year!