Risk of Rain has long been home to a thriving modding community, and the upcoming remake Risk of Rain Returns is being developed with those content creators in mind. Modding is an important consideration for indie games in particular, as fan-made content tends to extend the lifetime of these games for many years, and in some cases, specific mods even take on a life of their own and end up being the reason people purchase the game in the first place.
Game ZXC recently sat down with Hopoo Games founders Paul Morse and Duncan Drummond for an interview where they discussed the impact that the modding community has had on their development process for Risk of Rain Returns. They noted that modders have played an important role in the remake's development and that the team looked to the passion and experience of modders when balancing the game.
Risk of Rain Developers Say Modders Know the Game Even Better Than They Do
While game developers tend to move on to the next project once a game is released and hotfixes are applied, modders can end up working within the game for even more time than the developers, such as the Half-Life mod 13 years in the making. Modders have a unique perspective on their game of choice, learning the ins and outs over years of pushing the game's systems. Hopoo Games acknowledges this, and the team has valued the input of modders during development.
Obviously, you know, Duncan and I moved on to Deadbolt and then Risk of Rain 2 , so we weren't actively supporting the community that was there for Risk of Rain 1 . I think the coolest part was that the people, the modders, who had been doing this for five-plus years know the game better than we do.
So it's always cool to have the team that's working on it, like the super hardcore modders who know everything about the game. It's kind of nice to rely on them when they're like, “Hey, we think this scaling thing is a little too difficult for this thing.” We're like, “Yeah, you're probably right. We trust you guys.” So it's been nice having that group of people who are experts in the game take it forward.
Game developers have been increasingly paying attention to the work of modders, in some cases including mods with copies of the game in cases like Skyrim Anniversary Edition which comes with dozens of fan-made Creation Club mods. Mods can be useful feedback for developers, with quality-of-life and balance mods highlighting design issues that developers might have overlooked.
Hopoo Games Is Inspired by Ideas from Risk of Rain Mods
As a roguelike game featuring tons of items and creatures, Risk of Rain mods cover the breadth of the game's systems. Some mods add new items or tweak existing ones, while more comprehensive mods add a whole game's worth of content for players to discover. The developers at Hopoo Games have taken note of many of these mods, and the team has been inspired by many of the ideas that modders have come up with over the years.
It’s just a neat feeling, seeing stuff in our own game that we’ve never seen before. Like, “Oh, what is this? What is this item?” There are quite a few mod packs that have a lot of stuff like Starstorm that comes to mind.
People have taken stuff that's in Risk of Rain 2 and kind of tried to mod it and “backport” it into Risk of Rain 1 . It's always super cool to see stuff like little REX crawling around in pixel art, so that was always very inspiring for us to see.
Risk of Rain Returns will include a few entities from Risk of Rain 2, similar to how some mods have backported content from the newer game into the original. Risk of Rain 2 has enjoyed a substantially larger player base than the original, so bringing in some content from the sequel is a smart move that could attract players who missed out on the series debut a decade ago.
Risk of Rain Returns is in development and is set to release in 2023 for Nintendo Switch and PC.
