Yarntown wasnāt actually supposed to happen. Itās not exactly an accident ā you donāt accidentally craft a fully playable love letter to a PlayStation 4 classic. But going into the project, indie developer Max Mraz didnāt expect it to go so far ā or for it to attract so much recognition.
Yarntown is a free action RPG that looks and plays like a SNES version of Bloodborne. Itās a bit rough around the edges, but for a game made in just a month, itās a pretty impressive facsimile of the PS4 game. You explore a cursed Gothic town full of dark beasts and giant bosses, level up your stats using echoes, and use the familiar dodge roll-centric combat system, complete with parrying and the ability to regain health by attacking an enemy that just hurt you.
All of that just kind ofā¦ happened. The project was really just meant to be a way for him to mess around with enemy behavior while working on another game using the Solarus action RPG engine.
āWhile developing my other game, Ocean’s Heart, I wanted to give the enemies behavior like those in Bloodborne,ā Mraz explained. āBy the time my coding skills caught up to a point where I could do that, however, it was kind of too late. The enemies’ code had become, like, an insurmountable spaghetti Rube Goldberg machine. So Yarntown started because I wanted to experiment to see if I could write a system for enemies like Bloodborne‘s.ā
But messing with enemy behavior led to implementing a stamina bar. The stamina bar led to parrying. Parrying led to adding a gun. Before he knew it, his experiment had become a game in and of itself.
āIt was a very If You Give a Moose a Muffin situation. He’ll want, I think, jam? And it leads to a cardigan and a puppet show, or in this case, a free video game,ā said Mraz. Then he added, āThat analogy probably won’t make sense if you haven’t read the same childrenās books I did.ā
While Yarntown took only a month to create, with Mraz mostly working on weekends to get it done, it built on his years of experience with the Solarus engine ā an engine that was originally built to help create a The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past fan game before becoming its own open-source engine. Mraz himself discovered the engine when he was setting up a Raspberry Pi to be an emulator and realized that the Solarus engine was pre-installed on the software he was using.
āThe idea of making my own game and seeing it on my TV was enough to cause me to spend like three-to-four years toiling away to make that happen,ā Mraz said. āInitially, I had like no knowledge of coding and was baffled by basic things like āwhat is a function,ā but I am stubborn and stuck with it.ā
When Yarntown was finished, he wasnāt expecting it to gain a lot of attention, saying it was always āonly a little side project.ā
Over 40,000 people downloaded that side project based on word of mouth alone.
āI figured people would like playing a Zelda/Soulslike, but, like, wow, it’s a lot of people who liked it,ā said Mraz. āI really enjoy seeing just how many different languages the streams on YouTube are in; it’s super rad to make that many people happy.ā
The only negative feedback Mraz ever received was about features that he didnāt include ā most notably, people were disappointed that Eileen the Crow didnāt show up in the game. He added her in after watching one too many streamers get disappointed by her absence. But other than that, heās content to keep the game as is.
For now, his attention will go back to Oceanās Heart, which he describes as a lot more in-depth than Yarntown, both in story and combat. And while he does say the game has some similarities to Soulslikes, he stresses that itās a lot more lighthearted.
āImagine if in Bloodborne, your hunter ended up embroiled in a tic-tac-toe championship scandal,ā Mraz said.
Despite the attention that Yarntown has gotten, however, Mraz didnāt use the opportunity to promote his upcoming work.
āIf I were smart about this, which, all evidence points to the contrary, I would have gotten a Steam page up for Ocean’s Heart for wishlists or whatever,ā said Mraz. āBut I just made a fun game and wanted people to be able to play it. I’m hoping when Ocean’s Heart releases everyone will say, āOh, this dude made that Yarntown game, and that was surprisingly good.āā
Even if Yarntown doesnāt end up benefiting his future projects, Mraz said heās just pleased it brought some joy to people.
āI, for real, do want to say to everyone who’s played Yarntown that I am super happy you’ve enjoyed it,ā he expressed. āI just made it for fun for myself, so the fact it seems to have made, like, thousands of people a little happy for a bit? I didn’t mean to do that, but it’s a great unintentional consequence!ā
Published: Aug 17, 2020 01:36 pm