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IndieGamesOfCohost
@IndieGamesOfCohost

With INDIE INTERVIEWS, I talk to the game developers hanging here on Cohost to learn more about new games you might love.

I've seen the colorful work of @ctmatthews pop up on my Cohost feed over and over again, so I knew I had to chat with her to talk about her projects! We discuss sidescroller inspirations, Assist features, and custom level editors. Enjoy!

You can wishlist Ducky's Delivery Service on Steam

You can find Chessplosion on Steam and itch.io

Introduce yourself for everyone here on Cohost! Who are you?

Hi I'm C.T. Matthews, or you can call me Cass. I make strange 2D action games about ducks! Previously I spent a long time working as a programmer at various game studios and competing in fighting game tournaments (I won Evo a couple of years ago!). One day I'll make a fighting game of my own...

Is there a project you're working on currently? Tell us about it!

I'm working on Ducky's Delivery Service, an action game where you are a duck who uses a propeller backpack to fly around and deliver mail. It's inspired by games like Balloon Fight and Crazy Taxi and it's coming to Steam and itch.io on July 20th!

How did you find yourself first getting into game development?

I was always a huge fan of arcade-style 2D action games, and in the mid 2000s I became completely obsessed with Japanese indie PC games such as Melty Blood, Suguri, La-Mulana, Sispri Gauntlet and the Touhou series. These drove me to want to make games of my own so I studied software engineering...and started working as a programmer at a AAA game studio on a project that I wasn't really interested in at all. The curse of entering the workforce during the 360/PS3 era of western AAA games...

After a decade of working for various game studios and daydreaming about all the cool games that I would be able to make if I had infinite free time, I eventually forced myself to sit down and make a game from start to finish. That game was Chessplosion, and I kept going from there!


I feel like a lot of people who make sidescrollers have some game as a baseline inspiration for how the physics, level design, and mechanics should work. Some sidescrollers feel like they have Mario DNA, or Megaman, or Sonic, or Castlevania. Because of how Ducky's Delivery Service works, I'm curious, were there any games that helped as inspiration for the game feel, or were you completely on your own here?

Balloon Fight was the biggest inspiration for the Ducky's Delivery Service movement physics, along with various other games like Jetpack Joyride and that one old Flash helicopter game. But although they were a starting point, it took lots of prototyping and iteration to end up with how the game feels now.

The delivery mechanics were inspired by Crazy Taxi, I added the ability to throw packages because it felt fun to do, and for the level design I mostly just made some spaces that felt good to fly around in. The good thing about a game with full unrestricted flight is that people can deal with pretty much any random level design that you throw at them, as long as you take their reaction times into account when they're flying vertically (because you can't look very far ahead vertically on a 16:9 screen).

After I finished programming the game's mechanics and creating all of the levels, I found out about some existing 2D flying taxi games like Space Taxi (C64) and Ugh! (Amiga). The movement physics in those games is completely different to Ducky's Delivery Service (less Balloon Fight, more Lunar Lander) but it was still a huge relief to know that there might be an audience for this kind of strange game.

Both of your games list Assist features in their bullet points. What kind of Assist features did you include, and what led you to including them?

Ducky's Delivery Service and Chessplosion both give you the ability to slow down the game, adjust your health (all the way up to infinite health if you want), and skip any level or puzzle. What lead me to include those options was that I wanted to be able to accommodate the players who need those options. I can't really think of any other way to explain it.

I was a little worried that lots of people who didn't need those options would turn them on and ruin their own experience, but that didn't seem to happen with any other game that has assist options and thankfully it didn't seem to happen with Chessplosion either.

The other thing that lead me to include the assist options was that it didn't take a lot of work to make them. The biggest technical challenge was letting people slow down the game while keeping it looking smooth and feeling responsive, which is a surprising amount of work for a game that has to support fully deterministic rollback netplay. But thankfully it turned out fine, and the same tech got reused to make the game look smooth on fancy 240Hz gamer monitors.

I noticed that you added the ability to create and share custom puzzles in Chessplosion. Was there anything that you learned from that, either from the development itself or from playing custom levels afterward?

The main thing I learned from the development of the puzzle editor is that deciding how players should share user-generated content is sometimes far more annoying and time-consuming than making the content creation tools in the first place. You either have to host the files on a server somewhere, make the players manually send files to each other outside of the game, or give people a way of sharing things without requiring a file (e.g. a long passcode that contains all of the data inside it), and all of these options are annoying in their own way. Especially if your game ends up running on multiple platforms!

Playing other players' custom levels taught me that there are all sorts of interesting level ideas out there! Chessplosion's built in puzzle mode entirely consists of spatial challenges on a 7x7 board with a grid of unbreakable walls, but other people made all sorts of inventive layouts and timing-based puzzles that I never would have thought of myself. It's easy to accidentally place restrictions on yourself when you're working on your own game's levels, often without even noticing that you did it.

Any advice for aspiring indie devs out there?

Make games and finish them! Spending a year of my free time making Chessplosion taught me far more about game development than the previous decade's worth of free time that I spent on abandoned prototypes for huge overambitious metroidvanias and 3D platformers.

And if you love a particular type of game, play them a lot and really try to understand exactly how they work, from both a programming and design point of view. I learned a lot about action games by recording 60fps footage of games that I like and stepping through it frame-by-frame, and you can do that too. There are a surprising amount of solid genre-specific resources out there too, like Sonic Retro's Sonic Physics Guide and Boghog's bullet hell shmup design videos and doc. It sounds silly to say something as obvious as "you should really understand the genre of games that you are working in", but you would be surprised how much of an advantage it can give you.

Lastly, are there any indie games out there you've been playing recently? Any favorites to shout-out?

Recently I've been playing Touhou Great Fairy Wars, which is a Touhou shmup themed around using your ice powers to freeze groups of bullets. I've always loved that bullet-chaining mechanic in games like Every Extend and Twinkle Star Sprites, but I think Great Fairy Wars might be my favorite iteration of it! I can tell that I'm going to be playing this for a long time.

Lys and Ruka's Magical Bag is a fun action roguelike featuring all sorts of interesting ideas adapted from places like the Shiren the Wanderer series of turn-based roguelikes, as opposed to simply taking all of its inspiration from the usual western indie action roguelike hits. It's a nice reminder that you should play more than just the biggest hits in your game's narrow subgenre. There are lots of other things out there in the world to be inspired by!

I've been replaying TorqueL too! If you like 2D physics-heavy platformers such as Umihara Kawase and Elasto Mania, you can't go wrong with some TorqueL. It's one of those games where as soon as you've seen five seconds of gameplay footage you'll instantly understand exactly how it works and you'll be shocked that no one else thought of it before. Give it a try!

Thanks so much for talking with me, Cass! I'm super pumped to play Ducky's Delivery Service, it's not often you find the Balloon Fight + Crazy Taxi mashup you've always needed in your life. For everyone else, follow @ctmatthews on Cohost! Until next time, keep playing those indies!


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