Interview: 20XXs Chris King Shares His Take on Mighty No. 9s Issues

20XX is a new game inspired by Capcom's Mega Man X series of games. Developed by Batterystaple Games, the game was originally funded through Kickstarter and is now available as an Early Access title on Steam. 20XX was conceived as a platformer with roguelike mechanics, allowing for the procedural generation of levels. 

The game's beta build launched recently on September 15. 

I spoke with Batterystaple's Chris King, programmer, designer, and "grand poobah" of 20XX to talk about the game's recent launch, and his take on the Mighty No. 9 debacle. 

For those not in the know, Mighty No. 9 is Comcept and Keiji Inafune's spiritual successor to the Mega Man games. It was funded on Kickstarter to the tune of $3.84 million and has seen a number of unexplained delays, much to the disappointment of its backers. 

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In your own words, share with us your artistic vision for 20XX.

This might not be terribly deep for an artistic vision, but 20XX is about awesome replayable action that you can share with a friend.

20XX is a roguelike, procedural type of game. Are there any plans to make a campaign or story mode similar to the Mega Man X games?

We have no plans to add a static level set at this time, but proper world flavor/lore is in the works.

Can you tell us about the new Casual mode that was just added to the game?

Casual Mode scratches two itches; it's great for players that're just getting into the game, and it gives a very firm feeling of meta-game progression for players who're into that sort of thing.

Casual Mode runs start with the player choosing three of the passive items he's unlocked to take into the run. When you first start playing 20XX, this means passives like a small health boost, a little more damage, speed, jump height, etc -- but later in the game, the player can start with an air dash, a second jump, a speed+attack boost, and other powerful starting abilities.

It's still a tough game -- Casual just gives you a bit of a headstart.

Tell us a little about the process it took to fund and develop a game through Kickstarter and the challenges your team faced.

To be clear, the funds we raised on Kickstarter haven't covered all of our costs. (This feels like it's the case with most projects these days, but that's another story.) We used Kickstarter to help supplement development -- we weren't a particularly newsworthy project at the time, so we set a modest goal we thought we could hit ($20k) and barely pulled it off at the buzzer, thanks to a backer that reduced his pledge by $400 with about two minutes left in the campaign.

We made some mistakes, two of which were major. One, we started it too early. 20XX looks and plays a million times better than it did during that campaign -- if we'd started it later on, we'd've been able to raise more. Two, we started it to coincide with the opening of both our Greenlight campaign and PAX East 2014 (where we showed the game). Kickstarter campaign managing is a full-time job, and we didn't give ourselves the time we needed for it at all in those crucial first days.

The month we spent on Kickstarter was overwhelmingly more stressful than any other part of 20XX's development -- the idea that there's this very exact goalpost you have to hit or you get nothing, combined with the way our project's funding trend teetered on the edge of success for the entire month, made for a really unhappy time. I'm still glad we did it; I just wish we'd been smarter about it.

One high-profile game similar to 20XX is Comcept's Mighty No. 9, which has seen no shortage of drama. What do you think of the issues surrounding its development, specifically with regards to development team's negative interactions with the community and more recently, the delays.

As a gamer, it's really sad. I want to play a wonderful, complete MN9 just as much as everyone else! Community management is hard, especially when you're dealing with a tremendous number of fans of a venerated IP like Mega Man. There are some lessons there that we've really taken to heart since we launched on Early Access -- always communicate openly with your fans, especially when the news is bad -- and don't make promises you can't keep. (And if you do end up making a promise you can't keep, tell your fans the exact moment you know you can't keep it, and tell them why.)

Why do you think Mighty No. 9, which was budgeted to the tune of $3.8 million, looks and plays the way it does? Speaking as a developer, what do you think went wrong?

It's hard for me to say -- my team is two fulltimers, including myself, and a bunch of part time help, so I don't have a lot of experience making games in large teams. I can't even imagine what I'd do with a budget of $380k, much less ten times that.

It looks like one too many poor decisions made that nobody spoke up about in time.

As an Early Access game on Steam, what has the development of the game been like, with regards to the community’s ability to provide feedback? How has that impacted the development of the game?

Having our game on Early Access didn't provide us with a ton of revenue at first, but it did provide us with a wonderful community of players that give us open, honest feedback about everything we do with 20XX. Having a small throng of dedicated fans has been really important to us -- without their feedback, the game would be substantially worse off. In return, we do our best to be totally open with them, and take their feedback into account when determining direction on whatever issue we're sorting out.

I spend a lot of time interacting with the 20XX community -- while it's time I could be spending designing or coding, it means the time I do spend making the game is spent making a better game. Totally worth.

What are your plans for the future of 20XX leading up to its official launch, and beyond?

We've still got a ton to add to the game. Now that we're in beta, most of our character and environment art is done, so we can focus on adding more Powers, more passives, more challenges, more level variability, sort out our story, make sure the netplay is perfect, fix all the bugs, and so on. We've made 20XX play well and look good; now we can focus on making it awesome.

Beyond release is a great question! There's a ton of content -- new level themes, new characters, and so on -- that probably won't make our initial launch. If 20XX is successful enough, we'd love to spend awhile post-release making DLC or free content (depending on our financial situation).

Are there any plans to release it on consoles?

Not at first, but if 20XX is successful we'd love to bring it to consoles (or Vita/3DS/etc). 20XX is a console game at heart, and is best played with a controller -- it's just so much easier to release games on Steam first.