Derek Yu's vision for a human-driven games industry in the story of UFO 50's development
When booting up a game like UFO 50, a collection of 50 titles whose 80s-inspired roots belie the modern design sensibilities that make them special, it's easy to feel overwhelmed.
The collection was released on September 18, 2024 to critical and commercial acclaim in spite of how unusual it is in the indie landscape, and it's hard to imagine how one would go about tackling the development process of such a vast homage to gaming and its history. So, we sat down with Derek Yu to do just that.
Yu, the rockstar indie developer behind Spelunky and Spelunky 2, worked on UFO 50 with a team of five other indie developers for over eight years.
Jon Perry, a childhood friend of Yu's, is known for board game design, but turned to video games for this project. Composer Eirik Suhrke has collaborated with Yu in the past, doing the music for Spelunky and Spelunky 2. Paul Hubans is a pixel artist and indie game dev known for Madhouse, Ojiro Fumoto is known for the smash mobile hit Downwell, and Tyriq Plummer is a pixel artist and animator also working on Catacomb Kids.
We begin our discussion with Yu by diving into how this team managed to wrangle the scope and perspective of such a massive project while dealing with the usual exigencies of making one game, much less 50.
"When you're working on a game, it's important to zoom out regularly to make sure you're not getting too lost in one small part of the project," he says. "That's even more crucial when it's a collection of 50 games! What helped us zoom out was setting regular deadlines where we'd try to bring each game to a certain level of completeness."
As far as collection-wide design principles went, it was important to Yu and his team to connect games together when they could. However, the first priority from which everything else flowed was making sure that each game could generate its own unique appeal.
"The most important thing for us was that the games were fun and interesting to work on, so that's where we started when it came to
Read more on gamesindustry.biz
