I thought about this Bugsnax so much so that it feels like I’ve eaten one of the suspicious little old women. It’s been a week since I finished the game and I still catch myself muttering “bunger bunger bunger” as I run my day. To quench my hunger for more Bugsnax without actually consuming bugsnax, I decided to send an email to Kevin Zuhn, principal creative director and writer of Bugsnax, some of my burning questions.
(This interview was slightly edited for clarity.)
Kotaku: Can you tell me what your vision was for bugsnax? How did you come up with this idea? How was your design process?
Kevin Zuhn: The original seed came from an old drawing I made in college with a waffle mixed with a caterpillar (Wafflepillar), which I turned into a pitch about collecting food beetles. That combined with [gameplay designer] John Murphy’s presentation about muppets that are moved by what they eat and [CFO, programmer, webmaster] Devon Scott-Tunkin’s field about screaming bananas, and by the end of our pitching process it had become Bugsnax!
When we set out to make the creatures ourselves, we made a big list of iconic foods (burgers, french fries, cake) and iconic bugs (ants, dragonflies, scorpions) and looked for ways to connect them. We wanted to make sure we had a wide variety of flavors, temperatures, body shapes, abilities, and so on. Sometimes we build a bugsnak based on a very strong visual design, sometimes to satisfy a mechanical need and other times just for the sake of a joke! You could say that our design process was a controlled mess.
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Kotaku: Did you hire professionals to fix the bug? For some reason, I have a great fantasy that bugsnax are expressed by people who don’t act normally, who work for your studio and you pushed one day into a booth and said “give me the best impression bugnsax ”And the best were picked.
Zuhn: I wish any of us at Young Horses had the talent to do that, but bugsnax are expressed by professionals! The good guys at Brightskull sounded like Robbie Daymond [the voice of Sailor Moon’s Tuxedo Mask] and Cristina Valenzuela [Sailor Mars from the same show]and they were assigned six bugs each. In the recording booth, our vocal director, Michael Csurics, told them, “You’re a hot dog, you’re crawling like a worm, you can only say your own name, which is Weenyworm. What does that sound like? ”And they improvised hilarious voices until we found one we liked. The scripts were the funniest thing in the world, because the whole page would always say “Scoopy Banoopy”. The whole process was that the bananas started to finish and I liked every step.
Kotaku: And the bumps are all unique characters. They all have desires, fears and insecurities, which makes them remarkably complex as NPCs go. What was the thought process for them?
Zuhn: I wanted Bugsnax to be an overall story, so my first goal was to define what role each character played in Snaxburg society. We started with very broad archetypes: the mayor, the farmer, the archaeologist. Once we established them, the next question was why each of them wanted bugsnax. What is the hole in their life that they are trying to fill? I wanted to make sure that each of them has a different answer, so that they have different perspectives on what bugsnax are and what is important in life. This helped me to concretize more details about how it works!
Hence my favorite part: what do they think about them? I drew big diagrams that looked at who would be friends, partners or enemies and why. How does the problem in their lives affect their relationships, good and bad? With all these questions, I managed to build missions and scenes in the game around the biggest sources of conflict of the characters! I really wanted to make sure that all this feels grounded and organic, because absolutely everything else about the game is ridiculous.
Kotaku: If you were to take an internal survey to find out who would be everyone’s favorite bugsnak, what would it be (and why is it Bunger)? Do you similarly have a favorite Grumpus?
If I do an internal survey, I will get ten different answers! Young Horses never agree to anything. My personal favorite is actually Preying Picantis, but Bunger has a special shelf in my heart. There’s just something magnetic about Tom Taylorson’s performance as a dog. As for my favorite grump, this is Chandlo Funkbun (because it’s by far the most fun to write).
(Kotaku: Bunger all day. But I also like Sweetiefly jam.) Were there any vomits that were cut from the final product?
Zuhn: Oh, a lot! We had bugsnak concept pages and had a system for voting on our favorites. Everything below the voting threshold was reduced. Victims include a grilled cheese crab, a ham fly, a spaghetti-meatball snail and even the original wafflepillar! There are dozens of other unused models, some of which have even been prototyped, but any bugsnak that actually received a full treatment for the 3D model remained until the end.
Kotaku: A bugsnax that confused me was Paletoss. I didn’t understand his name until I realized, “Spirit! It should be a palette! ”Do you have anything you can share about how you came up with the name of your snax?
Zuhn: There are palettes that throw you: Paletoss!
Every few months, the Young Horses would gather for a name change meeting, where we would go bugsnak into bugsnak throwing names until we found one to agree on. At best, we would make a solid pun by merging the name of the bug with the name of the snack (Fryder, Scorpenyo, Buffalocust). If we couldn’t do that, we’d try to use their flavor or behavior (Paletoss, Sweetiefly). And if all else fails, we’ll turn the words into pretty nonsense (Scoopy Banoopy).
The end result of this is that I have an Excel spreadsheet full of hundreds of failed bugsnax names, each more stupid and desperate than the last.
Kotaku: So the “good” end of the game implies that Snorpy was right all the time. Will we end up facing Grumpunati in DLC or further? (Are there plans for DLC or a sequel?)
Zuhn: You should take what Snorpy says with a big grain of salt, because, like all the characters in this story, he’s only half right. We still know what we want to do post-launch, but we certainly haven’t finished working Bugsnax yet. I know I’d love to leave that plot hanging forever!
Kotaku: You always meant for Bugsnax to become just as dark, or was it something that just happened? If you caught bugsnax and fed them to your friends – something that encourages you to do – you are preparing for a rather bleak ending.
Zuhn: Absolute! I knew from the beginning that bugsnax were dangerous parasites and, in their first models, they were not very cute. At one point there was an even worse ending in which the Grumpies become zombie-hungry snakes that eat each other and then you. So if anything, the game has become easier and quieter over time!
I wonder what an ending is essentially like The Walking Bugsnax would have worked with the sweet and sweet song of the game “It’s Bugsnax!“Perhaps Young Horses would have chosen a more appropriate sound, something like death metal?” Imagine a version of “It’s Bugsnax!” made by Babymetal. In fact, it sounds pretty bad.