Pokémon Snap, systemic comedy and siding with the player: How Bugsnax came to life
A launch title for the PlayStation 5 in 2020, Young Horses' Bugsnax very quickly become an indie darling thanks to its silly critters and fun mechanics to catch them, its compelling story, and its great cast.
At GDC yesterday, Young Horses' studio head John Murphy looked back at Bugsnax's six years of development, the challenges to follow up on the success of 2014's Octodad: Dadliest Catch, and the lessons it's taking to its next project.
While Bugsnax ultimately overtook Octodad in terms of success, Murphy shared, the process leading up to it took a lot of pitching and prototyping.
"We hadn't pitched a game in more than four years after Octodad," Murphy said. "We took a long time to figure out what we wanted to do. We were also worried about the sophomore slump. All we had known at this point was Octodad, so we ended up just returning to the same method that we learnt from mentors in school about how to decide what to make: everyone reflected on what they were preoccupied with or inspired by, and everyone on the team would pitch."
Murphy showed a few of the many inspirations that the Young Horses team had, which included things like Space Jam or "Pharrell's big hat."
"We [then] went through multiple rounds of fewer, more detailed pitches starting with elevator pitches or just titles of games – here we got things like 'Burrowing dirt bros' or 'Alternate reality Steve Irwin'. We may never know what those actually would be as games because we never got that far!"
Other ideas at this stage included game names such as "Hunger is anger" or "Game made of bones," which we're really hoping Young Horses is working on as we speak.
One of them was called "Snacksects Paradise," which remained Bugsnax's codename internally. The
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