I’ve been thinking about Bugsnax so much so that it looks like I ate one of those suspiciously addictive creatures myself. It’s been a week since I finished the game and I still find myself mumbling “bunger bunger bunger” throughout the day. To quench my hunger for more Bugsnax without actually consuming any bugsnax, I decided to send an email to Kevin Zuhn, senior creative director and Bugsnax, some of my burning questions.
(This interview has been slightly edited for clarity.)
Kotaku: Can you tell me what your vision was for bugsnax? How did you get that idea? How was your design process?
Kevin Zuhn: The initial seed came from an old drawing I made in college of a waffle mixed with a caterpillar (the Wafflepillar), which I transformed into a presentation on collecting insects made from food. This was combined with [gameplay designer] John Murphy’s speech about muppets that are mutated by what they eat, and [CFO, programmer, webmaster] Devon Scott-Tunkin’s argument about strident bananas and, at the end of our launch process, became Bugsnax!
When we decided to make the creatures themselves, we made a large list of iconic foods (hamburger, fries, cake) and iconic insects (ant, dragonfly, scorpion) and looked for ways to connect them. We wanted to make sure that we had a wide variety of flavors, temperatures, body shapes, skills, etc. of a joke! You could say that our design process was controlled chaos.
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Kotaku: Did you hire professionals to give a voice to bugsnax? For some reason, I have a big fantasy that bugsnax are voiced by normal people who don’t act as voice actors who work for your studio and you just pushed everyone in a booth one day and said “give me your best bugnsax impression “and the best ones were chosen.
Zuhn: I wish any of us at Young Horses had the talent to do that, but the bugsnax are all voiced by professionals! Brightskull people called people like Robbie Daymond [the voice of Sailor Moon’s Tuxedo Mask] and Cristina Valenzuela [Sailor Mars from the same show], and they were assigned to six or more bugsnax each. In the recording booth, our voice director, Michael Csurics, told them: “You are a hot dog, you crawl like a worm, you can only say your own name, which is Weenyworm. How does that sound? ”And they improvised hilarious voices until we found one we liked. The scripts were the funniest thing in the world because the whole page said ‘Scoopy Banoopy’ over and over. The whole process was a banana from beginning to end and I loved every step.
Kotaku: The grumpuses are also unique characters. They all have desires, fears and insecurities, making them extremely complex as NPCs are. What was your thought process for them?
Zuhn: We wanted Bugsnax to be a whole story, so my first goal was to define the role that each character played in Snaxburg society. I started with really broad archetypes: the mayor, the farmer, the archaeologist. After solving them, the next question was why each of them wanted bugsnax. What is the void in their lives that they are trying to fill? I wanted to make sure that each of them had a different answer, so that they had different perspectives on what bugsnax is and what is important in life. This helped me to give more details about how they act!
From there, my favorite part: what do they think of each other? I drew big charts tracking who would be friends, partners or enemies and why. How is the problem in your life affecting your relationships, good and bad? With all these questions answered, I was able to build missions and in-game scenes around the biggest sources of conflict for the characters! I really wanted to make sure that it all seemed grounded and organic, because absolutely everything else about the game is ridiculous.
Kotaku: If you did an internal search to find out who would be everyone’s favorite bugsnak, what would it be (and why is Bunger)? Do you also have a favorite Grumpus?
If I take an internal survey, I will have ten different responses! Young horses never agree on anything. In fact, my favorite is to hunt Picantis, but Bunger has a special shelf in my heart. There is something magnetic about the performance of Tom Taylorson’s cheeseburger as a dog. As for my favorite grumpus, this is Chandlo Funkbun (because he is by far the most fun to write).
(Kotaku: Bunger all day. But I love the cheeky Sweetiefly too.) Were there any bugnax that was cut from the final product?
Zuhn: Oh, a lot! We had elaborate bug concept pages and we had a system for voting for our favorites. Everything below the voting limit has been cut. The casualties include a grilled cheese crab, a baconfly, a spaghetti meatball snail and even the original wafflepillar! There are dozens of other unused designs, some of which have even been prototyped, but any bugsnak that actually received a full 3D model treatment remained until the end.
Kotaku: A bug that confused me was Paletoss. I didn’t understand your name until I realized, “Duh! It is supposed to be a palette! ”Do you have anything you can share about how you created the names for your snax?
Zuhn: Palettes that throw you: Paletoss!
Every few months, the Young Horses got together for a naming meeting, where we went from bugsnak to bugsnak throwing names until we found one we agreed with. At best, we would make a solid pun by merging the bug’s name with the snack’s name (Fryder, Scorpenyo, Buffalocust). If we couldn’t do that, we would try to use its flavor or behavior (Paletoss, Sweetiefly). And if all else failed, we would just distort the words into cute nonsense (Scoopy Banoopy).
The end result of this is that I have an Excel spreadsheet filled with hundreds of flawed names for bugsnax, each more silly and desperate than the last.
Kotaku: So the “good” ending to the game implies that Snorpy was right all along. Will we face the Grumpunati in DLC or sequences? (Are there plans for DLC or a sequel?)
Zuhn: You must take what Snorpy says with a great grain of salt, because like all the characters in this story, he is only partially right. We’re still figuring out what exactly we want to do after launch, but we’re definitely not done working Bugsnax still. I know I would hate to leave this plot hanging forever!
Kotaku: You always wanted Bugsnax get as dark as it gets, or was it something that just happened? If you are catching bugsnax and feeding your friends with them – something they encourage you to do – you are preparing for a rather dark ending.
Zuhn: Absolutely! We knew from the beginning that bugsnax were dangerous parasites and, in their first designs, they were not very pretty. At some point, there was an even worse ending, where the Grumpuses became zombies hungry for snakes that eat each other and then you. So if anything, the game got lighter and more silly over time!
I wonder how an ending that is essentially The Walking Bugsnax would have worked with the game’s sweet theme song “It’s Bugsnax!“Maybe Young Horses chose a more appropriate sound, something like death metal? Imagine a version of “It’s Bugsnax!” made by Babymetal. That really sounds really bad.