Video game developers, like all artists, put a little bit of themselves into their work. For Brandon Yu, the solo dev behind recent samurai platformer HAYAI, that manifests in a desire to help his audience experience the same creative joy he does making games.
Yu, also known as Chaoclypse, is the kind of person that lives for the creative process, and he’s thought long and hard about how he can replicate the feelings of accomplishment that come with making something for oneself through the medium of video games. That quest led him down an unexpected path — the world of tabletop roleplaying games. Game ZXC sat down with Yu to talk about his dev experience and how TTRPGs have shaped his game-making goals. The following transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Q: Tell me a little bit about yourself and about Chaoclypse.
A: I'm Brandon. I'm a solo indie game developer. I graduated from university a few years ago, and I’ve been making games solo since then. I do all the art design and programming for my games. I like to do game jams, so I've participated in a lot of those. But, I've been trying to move towards slightly longer-form games — longer form being relative in this case, since I'm still trying to focus on shorter games.
Q: I’m interested in your focus on shorter games, but first, let’s talk about HAYAI. Can you give me a brief overview of that game?
A: HAYAI is a game where you play as a Ronin, or master samurai, and you use your mouse to draw out attacks. Time will slow down, and your enemies will slow down, and after you finish drawing your attack, your character will lash out at the enemies.
There are different characters and different ways that they might attack. One of them has a hammer that he smacks down at the end of an attack. For another one, time doesn’t slow down when he attacks. There’s also a leaderboard for score, and some people have really gotten into that. There's somebody who I think has 200 hours or something logged in the game. Yeah, like, they get really into the leaderboard stuff. Which is interesting, actually.
HAYAI, and another game I made called Skull Chainz, were actually done in a very short timeframe — about two weeks. I was working on Skull Chainz before I started on HAYAI, but I had just gotten wrist surgery after a boxing injury, and I wanted to do something else while I was recovering.
I decided to learn a new game engine, called Godot. I had used Godot in the past, but I had forgotten a lot of the finer points, so I essentially had to relearn it all from scratch. So, I spent one week learning Godot, then two weeks making HAYAI.
Q: Wow, so HAYAI was really more of a side project for another title. Games are incredibly labor-intensive, but two weeks is a really fast turnaround. Were you working from sun-up to sundown to build HAYAI in that short time?
A: I was working quite a bit, but I was still trying to take care of my health to a certain extent. When I was in university, I used to have a lot of those sun-up to sundown kind of days. I try to refrain from that nowadays, because I’m getting old.
I can only really work on games for about an hour or two before getting extremely exhausted and getting headaches. So for HAYAI, I was working a bit more than usual, but it wasn't like that for the entire day. I was working maybe five, six hours a day.
Q: I guess the game jam experience helps with the turnaround too, right?
A: Yeah, I’m used to it, trying to make stuff in a very short amount of time and building all the parts of the game. The prototype for HAYAI I actually made in just three hours.
Q: Let’s talk about the combat system a bit. I thought that the drawing functionality was interesting. Can you expand on that?
A: So, in the initial prototype for HAYAI, the player controlled projectiles with their fingers. The first concept was more of a cowboy game, where your character shoots their soul out of their body to attack enemies. Even before that, I was thinking of making it more of a wizard-themed game. Eventually, I decided that I wanted to make it a little more discreet, a little more analog, so to speak. I wanted players to have more control over it. Over time, that’s where the drawing combat came from.
I really love character action games like God Hand and Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, and I really wanted to do something stylish like those games. I figured this was my opportunity to do that.
Q: Do you make the conscious choice in your games to pursue a mechanic or feature that sets you apart from other indie devs? Or do you just like messing around with different concepts?
A: Well, yeah, that's definitely part of it. I always want to try to set myself apart, because I'm making small games. I do think that in order to make my game stand out, I have to start with a unique main mechanic.
Q: So, the whole time you’re working on HAYAI, you’ve got this other game, Skull Chainz, in development at the same time. What did the timeframe look like for that title?
A: It took a year or so to develop Skull Chainz. But, during that year, I was dealing with some health issues, so work was really on and off for me. That’s really bad when you want to do a short-term project. Skull Chainz should have taken just a few months, to be honest with you, but because I had to keep starting and stopping, it ended up taking a year.
Q: Were these projects your first as a solo dev?
A: Yeah, it was. I had done some other development projects for a studio making a mobile card game, but this was my first solo. I tried to make a bunch of other games, though — there was one concept where you play as a frog, and you go around suplexing other frogs. I also had this idea for a horror game that I put together really quickly.
Q: It sounds like you’ve played around with a lot of different ideas. How do you decide when something is marketable or not?
A: I don't know. The answer to that is that I have no idea. I don’t know if I think about whether something is marketable, but more about whether it’s something I'm proud of.
I think that's the main thing. I want to make something that I'm proud of. When it really hits is when I find a main mechanic that I can extrapolate on. It has to have width and depth, is what I’d say — the mechanic needs to have enough to it that I can expand it to a full game, but it also needs to be deep enough to where I can learn a lot from building it.
For example, in Skull Chainz, there's this level where you’re fighting these floating eyes, but they can meet together in the middle of the gameplay and produce babies. The enemies in another can cannibalize each other. There’s some depth to the combat. The more crazy, the more gonzo, the better.
Q: So you find something that you can build on and learn from, and expand that into a full game. Do you pull elements from some of your failed prototypes?
A: Oh, 100%. Maybe I'm not in a place to give advice to people, but when people ask me for advice, I usually say that one of the things that people don't tell others to do in game design is look at bad or failed games. Nobody really sets out to make a bad game, but sometimes an idea fails, and there’s a reason usually why that idea fails. Looking at games that have failed, you might find a mechanic or an idea that’s actually good, but has been badly executed. Those can be, without plagiarizing, obviously, inspiration for your own work.
Q: Are there more games in your future? Do you feel like HAYAI and Skull Chainz are more passion projects or is this a career for you?
A: It’s interesting that you ask that, because I have been thinking about it myself. I’ve been asking myself: ‘do I really love making games?’ What I’ve realized is that, yeah, I do, but it's not really about just making games for me. I just love making stuff. More recently, I've been doing a lot of traditional tabletop RPG stuff, and that helped me realize that I just love being creative. I love making art. I love writing. I love making games. I love programming. And recently, I've been trying to do some music, although I’m terrible at it.
I think that there's this childlike joy in making stuff. Before I graduated, a teacher asked me about my goals, and I said that I want to inspire people to create. I’m not sure that I can do that through video games. I've actually talked about this to my player base, because I do sometimes make friends with some of my players. I asked one of them, this guy called Nokia who I’ve become good friends with, how I could inspire people to think creatively while playing my games.
His answer was two parts. The first thing he said was, “you kind of already are.” By giving players gameplay options and all that, I’m still allowing them to be creative and express themselves, in a way. That was something I had to chew on for a bit. The second thing he did, though, was suggest that I get into tabletop RPGs.
Q: How has that manifested itself so far? Are you working on a TTRPG?
A: So, I’ve started by playing this RPG called Mörk Borg, which is a Swedish black metal-type game that you play solo, instead of playing with a group. It’s so cool, and the mechanics are really light and easy to play with. That was my introduction to solo roleplay. When I first started, the idea of playing a solo TTRPG was a bit strange to me. But, the more I thought about it, it’s not really any different than playing a video game by yourself.
In the case of a solo RPG, though, you're making stuff up as well. You’re creating the game’s constraints and structures for yourself as you play. Essentially, you're designing the game as you play it. There's a lot present in a solo RPG that allows you to learn game design for yourself. I think that's a very pure form of design. You’re making something that you are going to enjoy, and if you don’t enjoy it, nobody else is going to play it.
Q: And you’re learning game design in a more analog way, with pen and paper, which seems more accessible.
A: Yeah, it removes certain barriers to game design, like learning to code, or learning to do art. You don’t need to do any of that. You just need an idea and enough dedication to see it through, and you can make your own experience. I think that could be liberating for a lot of people.
I have this YouTube channel where I record my solo roleplay sessions, and I’ve had people message me saying things like, ‘I've decided to pick up art,’ or ‘ I've decided to change the way I play games or think about things because I watched your series.’ I have never gotten that kind of feedback from video games.
I still love making video games, but this is a very different kind of fulfillment for me.
Q: Are you working on your own solo RPG content now?
A: I actually just released a book called Solitary Depths, which is a supplement to a Mörk Borg expansion called Sölitary Defilement. The game has a pretty generous license. They let people expand on the base game a lot.
Q: But is there any interest in developing an RPG of your own?
A: I’m not sure, but something I am thinking about is how I can take the elements I like about solo TTRPGs and bring them to video games. I’ve been using this game book programming language called Ink, which has been used for interactive story-type games. I’ve been messing around with some concepts that I’ve seen in other games to see if I can extrapolate it into a full RPG.
Q: In an ideal world, where you had the time and money to make that happen, what would your game look like?
A: In an ideal world, I’ll probably be doing exactly what I’m doing now — making short games. In an ideal world, I’d definitely be able to put in more time developing games instead of getting tired after just a few hours.
I actually do a lot of my development now on stream, to make up for the fact that I don’t have much time. That’s been helpful, because I’ll have people in chat say, ‘hey, what if you implement this idea?’ I really value creativity of all sorts, even in suggestions and things like that. So it's really fun to collaborate with people in a stream chat.
Q: It seems like you’re very motivated by the creative process, and inspiring that in other people.
A: I just want other people to feel the same sense of fulfillment that I get when I make something in a TTRPG. I want people to say to me, ‘dude, I used your game this way, and I put my own spin on it like this.’ That would be so cool. I really want to get that same experience in video games somehow. It’s been tough thinking about how I can do that.
[END]
HAYAI is available now for PC.