The 8-Year Journey Behind an "Overnight" Viral Game
push to talk #28 // feat. the creator of ruffy and the riverside
A few weeks back I came across a viral Dexerto tweet for a game called Ruffy and the Riverside.
Its elevator pitch is instantly grabby: “Copy and paste textures to solve puzzles.” And its 30 second trailer (which I’ve embedded above) is a masterclass in gracefully demonstrating a unique game mechanic.
Even the music is a bop! This game’s got all the makings of a breakout indie hit.
But it turns out that Ruffy is far from an overnight sensation. Its creators have been hard at work on it for over eight years, and their approach to developing a distinctive hand-drawn art style is hilarious, sort of crazy, and much more labor intensive than any art pipeline process I’ve heard of before.
Will it all pay off? We’ll soon find out.
My Q&A with the creators of Ruffy and the Riverside is below. But first, this week’s spicy news links.
Scuttlebutt and Slackery
The week’s most-shared, oft-Slacked, and spiciest games industry news links.
A Debate About Manor Lords Success Metrics Gets Heated - If you’re a healthy person, you probably don’t keep up with games industry LinkedIn drama. But a lot of sickos like myself eagerly followed a kerfuffle that erupted this week when the lead dev of The Long Dark suggested that recent Steam megahit Manor Lords was a “case study in the pitfalls of Steam Early Access” due to its declining CCU numbers. What followed was a lot of spicy debate, but it’s culminated in some positive results—including an apology from the Long Dark guy—and this fascinating and thoughtful interview with Manor Lords publisher Tim Bender in RPS. (Rock Paper Shotgun)
Super Mario 64 Speedrunning Has Never Been Better - One of the top SM64 speedrunners beat his own world record in the intense 120-star category by ~20 seconds this week—a feat that should be impossible 28 years after the N64 launch title’s release. I’m obsessed with this stuff because I love when systems fall apart in interesting ways, and this kid from Michigan is breaking SM64 in ways its creators could have never imagined. Even if you don’t follow speedrunning, any game dev who’s ever played SM64 will enjoy this. (Weegee on YouTube)
A Conversation With Bayonetta and Devil May Cry creator Hideki Kamiya - This is the most charming interview I’ve ever seen with a Japanese game dev. The host, a former artist who reported to Kamiya-san on Ōkami, confronts him about how he occasionally got drunk and made bad decisions. Their respect for each other shines through as they sit on a park bench and laugh it off. Kamiya-san is constantly forgetting things, and the shades he’s wearing are insane. It’s a joy to watch. (UNSEEN on YouTube)
Stellar Blade Dev Shift Up Goes Public and Raises $320 Million - The trend to watch here is an emerging wave of South Korean AAA studios capable of making global hits—a long-coming departure from the days of AAA being dominated exclusively by NA, EU, and Japan. (The same thing is happening in China, of course.) Props to the Shift Up team for the big IPO. (IGN)
The 8-Year Journey Behind an "Overnight" Viral Game
I love digging through official YouTube channels for games that have been in development for a long time.
Usually, even for the biggest hit games, there’s a weird mixture of popular trailers and weird behind-the-scenes content that nobody watched.
And with eight years of content to dig through, the YT channel for Ruffy and the Riverside is richer than most.
Some of the oldest iterations of the game are mere tech demos showing off Zockrates Labs’s first attempts at translating hand-drawn Crayola-and-paper art to 3D. Another clip from 2018 introduces an early sketch of Ruffy, the game’s bearlike main character, and is more like a hallucinogenic music video than a trailer:
Few of the trailers on the channel have more than 1,000 views—a funny and inexplicable disparity with the game’s official TikTok account, which regularly uploads posts which earn hundreds of thousands of views. But year by year, the channel demonstrates shows a dev team slowly iterating their way toward realizing a consistently charming core idea.
Look, I’ll be honest: I don’t actually know if this game is going to pop off once it finally launches—nobody does. But to my eye, it’s got the right stuff.
I was curious to know more about the dev team and how Ruffy’s art style works, so I reached out to Zockrates Labs studio’s founder Patrick, who was kind enough to chat with me.
Read the Push to Talk Q&A with Patrick of Zockrates Labs below:
PUSH TO TALK: From your YouTube channel, it looks like you've been working on this game for a long time. Can you tell that story?
PATRICK: Yes, we started it 8 years ago as a hobby project. The idea of the core mechanic of swapping textures in the game world to transform the whole environment came to me when I went through some old black and white drawings. One showed a waterfall, but with a lot of mist on the bottom. Somehow it looked like it could be both, a waterfall or a smoking stream of lava. Then it came to me: how cool a game would be where it could actually be both?
We made a prototype and then founded the company. Of course, we thought we’d be done with the game in 12 months. Turned out, it would be seven years. And that hobby project became a small company.
I’d love for you to say a bit about the art style—it looks like a lot is hand-drawn? How does that work? And how has the style evolved over time?
We started to draw it all because we were so bad at 3D animation in the beginning. With our artistic background drawing was the easiest thing to do.
Soon it appeared that the hand-drawn look was quite nice, so we kept it and continued to draw everything: characters, textures, the map etc. Ruffy himself has over 600 drawings, because he has many animations and most of them had to be drawn from eight sides (actually five sides, because three sides can be mirrored).
The game must have tens of thousands of drawings by now, but we never counted them to be honest. Needless to say, most drawings needed to be refined and drawn again several times, so paper costs and pens were high, not critically high, but I think few studios spend hundreds of dollars on pens.
Later we also started to use digital drawings, which are still executed by hand of course, but on a tablet and not on paper. That way we did not have to scan every single sheet of paper.
Can you talk about your hopes for how the game does sales-wise? I ask in particular because it looks like you've just now started picking up a lot more wishlists after a long period in development
Our goal is to make enough money to be able to produce a sequel to Ruffy and the Riverside, and I think that goal will be reached.
That said, those wishlists only reflect a part of what we consider a success. Most important are the experiences the game will bring. After all, we think of it as a piece of art and we will judge it by how well we made our ideas work, how much of the potential could be brought to life and how well it ages.
Looking back at art we did years ago, some seem to be the foundation of future works whereas others appear to be an entry that was good at the time but do not matter anymore for our current work. Only time will tell and sales will be just one answer to it.
Why do you think the trailers have gotten so much more attention recently?
I think it’s the drawings and the option to interact with them. The art style of hand-drawn textures and the mechanic of swapping those textures seems to have a magic connection. Maybe this is because any drawing is a kind of a projection—an idea of the thing it portrays. It looks real, because it is really there, but also it’s drawn, so it clearly communicates that it’s only a projection of something.
This ambivalent combination of reality and imagination resonates wonderfully with the possibilities to exchange those textures based on your own ideas. You swap one given texture (or idea) for your own idea and immediately see it become reality in the game. This is a very immersive and satisfying thing to do.
Also our main character makes you smile. When he applies textures, he throws them like a baseball. I wanted a down-to-earth animation because it’s such a nice contrast to the rather sublime and noble act of creating something new. With every texture swap he just fires out a new reality.
Is there anything I'm not asking you, but which you think is important for players and other devs to know about Ruffy and the Riverside?
Well, maybe another fun fact. My son is called Raffael but we call him Raffi most of the time, which sounds just like Ruffy. He’s very proud that "he’s in the game.”
My second son Henry was a bit disappointed that he was not, so we named a young bear Henry and gave him the role of a little smart archaeologist that helps Ruffy to find treasures. In fact, we often do hikes and search for fossils, so the game reflects that in a nice way now.
How does Henry feel about the bear that's named after him?
He’s proud of course, and he’s looking forward to playing the game and solving all the puzzles that the little in-game bear “Henry” will set up for him. When I wrote the dialogue for the game, I wanted to make Henry just as curious, clever, friendly, cheeky, funny, and lovable as my son.
I can only hope that I succeeded and that he likes it. But that´s just another thing no wishlist can give me.
That’s it for this week. I’m gonna spend 8 years working on my next post. (It’s gonna be a real humdinger.)
Or… maybe not. I’ll see you next Friday.
Love the interview and that line at the end about his son liking the game. Great work!