TumbleSeed: from Ice Cold inspiration to Rolly Roguelike with designer Greg Wohlwend ⊟
TumbleSeed, out May 2 on Switch, PC, and PS4, is a cute, colorful, beautifully cartoony action-adventure game about a seed rolling its way across a treacherous world. It quickly becomes apparent upon playing it, that TumbleSeed is also a brutally difficult Spelunky-esque game about attempting to make just a bit more progress in a procedurally generated gauntlet. It’s both of those, built onto a tribute to a vintage mechanical game. It’s a dense mixture of influences and inspirations somehow made into a confident thing of its own.
The many ideas behind TumbleSeed started to coalesce, designer Greg Wohlwend told me, over an Ice Cold Beer.
(Image: The Arcade Flyer Archive)
Wohlwend happened upon Ice Cold Beer -- and the TumbleSeed team (Benedict Fritz, David Laskey, Jenna Blazevich, Joel Corelitz, and Wohlwend)-- while playing competitive Killer Queen at the Logan Arcade bar in Chicago. “Benedict [Fritz] and David Laskey would do some of the commentary for some of the tournaments, and me and my team were one of the top two or three teams, usually top two, in the tournaments,” Wohlwend said. “And between rounds of Killer Queen, Benedict would be hanging out there, we’d play Ice Cold Beer when it was working.” Being a mechanical arcade game, the unit was prone to breaking down. “So many moving parts that need to be repaired and custom ordered, and I’m sure it’s a nightmare for them, and I’m not even sure they make any money on it -- probably even lose money on it. But I think they love it and realize it’s such a good game and such a weird game that they try to keep it around.”
One day, Fritz decided to prototype a digital take on Ice Cold Beer, which Wohlwend saw on Vine. “It took him like two or three hours - it’s a super simple thing to do actually, you just throw some circles with colliders on them, and spawn them in a rectangle, and then use Unity’s built-in physics to get something down,” Wohlwend said. After seeing that prototype, Wohlwend enthusiastically offered to work on the game. “It’s so exciting,“ he said, “when you take something that’s purely mechanical, so static, almost cement, it’s in stone, and dream about the almost infinite possibilities of what that would be digitally.” The ideas came quickly, to the point that the process of following up on all the good ideas ended up taking a year and a half.
“We thought it would take two months, and we’d release it for phones, for iOS and Android, because we were both mobile developers in the past. But so many things in the game were telling us that it needs to be on a larger screen, we need sticks, ideally, and all these things.” The goal was to continue the legacy of Ice Cold Beer as if the Taito game had a legacy -- if it had been allowed to evolve in multiple iterations, and cross over into new video game versions, after its 1983 release. And part of honoring that legacy was maintaining the clear visibility of the large Ice Cold Beer cabinet,” because that’s a huge part of Ice Cold Beer, being able to see the entire board, and plan out ‘first I’m going to shoot this gap, and then I think I’ll be pretty safe over here, and then if that doesn’t work out, maybe I’ll be able to hug the wall on the left, but if it does, then I can stay still and then maybe push quickly to my goal.’ And so there’s all these, almost fighting game-quick decisions that you have to make as you climb the beer glass, I guess. And that just wasn’t happening on a smaller screen.”
With the move to consoles and PC came an expansion not only of the screen, but the design style of the nascent game. “When you’re going away from the space of this could be a runner game, quick upward, or a score attack survival game... Let’s make this a bigger game, let’s make this something that you’ll want to spend hours and hours with. And that feeds into the source material, because you would have to spend hours and hours with Ice Cold Beer.”
“Whether you want to spend hours and hours on a bar stool,” he added, “is up to you.”
Ice Cold Beer’s game design was married to abstract elements from other games the team loved, like Dark Souls, Spelunky, and Zelda -- some of which also happen to reward hours of replaying with a deep understanding of difficult mechanics.
From Dark Souls came the “campfire” concept -- “If I rest here I can always come back here and it’s a bit of a checkpoint, but also, it means that everything above it, or after it, gets respawned so I have to keep focus on that. It’s more like a checkpoint, and that’s probably what Dark Souls thought -- oh, there are these checkpoints in Sonic, so let’s use that.” In the final game, players are able to “plant” flags at certain spots if equipped with the default power set.”
Spelunky’s shops were a direct inspiration as well. “But also just sort of the enemy design,” Wohlwend said, “and the aspect of having things exist in the world and there’s not any arbitrary rules where, well, you planted a shotgun and when an enemy rolls over it it does nothing. When a thing exists in a world, it should be part of a system in the world as opposed to for you, this special player. You’re not special, you exist in the world, you have to adhere to the rules of the world.”
One prototype involved a series of rooms pieced together in the style of The Binding of Isaac. ”It worked really well, and it was probably our second most successful prototype. But that’s just another example of having this inventory of things to try and throw at the game.” What they didn’t have to throw at the game was a direct digital antecedent -- nobody else was out there working on an Ice Cold Beer-style game about rolling a ball up a flat plane*.
Mega Man provided another piece that helped complete the TumbleSeed puzzle-- a variety of powers, some available by default, some purchased from stores, that give different abilities to the player character. For example, you can use a “Thornseed” power to grow thorn weapons from the seed, or a “Heartseed” to harvest more HP from certain spots. “Wow, these suit powers. I can have choice, and I can choose between like ten different suits for one plot, and it’s so interesting, and I can combine them together to make more interesting things happen for certain situations I might want to execute.” Wohlwend said that any number of games could have inspired the idea of multiple powers to equip, but as a Mega Man fan, that was the way he thought about it.
“As a game designer,” Wohlwend told me, “when you play a game, it’s impossible to not try to break it down into its sub-puzzle pieces.” With all these inspirations pointed out, it’s easy enough to spot them. But the specific elements that went in were abstract enough that TumbleSeed doesn’t seem like a mishmash of influences. Instead, the game stands as a unique, original piece of art.
*Except, Wohlwend discovered, for Backbone Entertainment, who released a Shrek-themed one on Xbox Live Arcade in 2007. It’s called Shrek-n-Roll.
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