Interview with Ed Linley

Greg Livingston: Level layouts wind and twist around themselves, taking an irregular shape. Why did you take this approach?

Ed Linley: The levels were designed primarily around the 5 main objectives in each – the goal, the map and the three jigsaw piece collectibles. For each of these, we tried to place them in a memorable location. “Memorable” could be a particularly tricky jump, an interesting mixture of mechanics (e.g. conveyor belts or crumbling blocks), a section that simply feels good to launch yourself through or even just somewhere that looks nice! With those planned out, we’d arrange them together and try to remove any dead space, any areas that were nothing but connective areas without any memorable gameplay. The idea was that we’d then have levels where pretty much every area has something to see or do that is engaging.

Greg Livingston: What advantages does this have over a more linear level design?

Ed Linley: We wanted to encourage exploration around the levels and with the above approach we hoped to guarantee that if you do go and explore, you will find one of the hidden objects and be rewarded for your efforts. It also encourages replay, as reaching the goal shows you all the things you have or haven’t found on your way there, encouraging you to go back and explore a different route. I think that if we’d gone with a more linear route to the goal, we wouldn’t have had the collectibles. As a result, the levels wouldn’t encourage replay and we would have had to make many more levels to provide the intended game length.

Greg Livingston: In your level designs, do you ever want the player to be lost or unsure where to go? If so: how do levels achieve this? If not: how do levels avoid this?

Ed Linley: We know that sometimes the levels can be quite overwhelming and that getting lost can be very frustrating. We’ve tried to alleviate such frustration in several ways:

• Firstly, every level has a map pick-up which is usually placed in an area that’s not too tricky to reach or too off the beaten path. Once you have the map, it shows exactly where Bullet Pea, the Predator, the Doppelganger and the jigsaw pieces are.


• Secondly, we’ve included the arrow markers that try to point you towards the best route to the exit.


• The goal is always somewhere at the top of the level, so most of the time you know that if you’re heading upwards, you should eventually reach the exit.


• Our design strategy meant that if you do wander off and get lost, just keep going because there will be a jigsaw piece or other item along the path!


• There’s actually another feature that we unfortunately didn’t highlight in the game’s tutorial. You can actually move the view around to get a better idea of your surroundings by dragging on Bullet Pea himself. It only scrolls about 1 screen, but can be a valuable aid in getting your bearings (and keeping an eye on the Predator!)


• Our final way of addressing this was to include the hazard-free Easy Mode that is the only mode unlocked at the start. This lets player learn the routes, which comes in very handy in the Time Trial challenges.

Greg Livingston: The final level requires the player to hit three switches. Why is the game's goal changed for its last level? Does it emphasize any unique skills that are not tested in earlier stages, or is it a refinement of those skills?

Ed Linley: The ultimate goal in the game is to reach the top of the mountain, so the previous levels are all about finding the exit to climb upwards. With the final level, there is nowhere else to go, and we wanted a satisfying conclusion to the narrative we’ve included. Setting the level inside the Professor’s machine and having the level be about shutting down the machine seemed to make sense. Since Bullet Pea has extremely limited combat skills, we had to use the skill he has – precise jumping – to create our equivalent of a “boss fight”.

Greg Livingston: The main character can only move by jumping. The maximum power high jump can reach some crazy heights. How did you decide how high to make this jump?

Ed Linley: The jump strengths were actually determined a long time ago, back when I was developing Bullet Pea for the GBA. We tried a variety of jump strengths and we found that the highest jump would be one that could take you to ledges that were just about within visible range. So you could see a ledge and know that high jump would be required – though you might not be able to see that the peak of your jump would actually collide with an obstacle just out of view. So in a way, it was the size of the GBA screen that determined the maximum jump height.

By the way, about those “limited combat skills” – if you hit a Predator during a maximum strength jump, you’ll knock it away!

Greg Livingston: There are short gaps, long gaps, and everything in between. How much subtlety do levels ask players to get out of the jump meter? (For instance, should the player be able to differentiate a 7/10 jump versus an 8/10 jump?)

Ed Linley: We hope that a skilled player can judge the jumps pretty accurately! I’ve been playing for a long time and am usually quite good at judging a gap! We found that jump strengths 6 to 10 provided the most easily determinable difference between jumps. Only the trickiest collectibles to find require an exact strength of jump. Usually, we aim for “desired strength +/- 1”. So, for example, a jump that we wanted to require a strength of 8 would also be possible with a 7 or a 9.

Greg Livingston: Not a question, but I just wanted to add that the different modes in Bullet Pea are great. They're a nice buildup in difficulty with stricter and stricter challenges. The mimic mode in particular is a clever way to make levels hard.

Ed Linley: Thanks very much! I’d had the idea for Chase Challenge a long time ago but none of the earlier prototypes got round to implementing it, so I was very pleased when Anya added it and it worked even better than I’d hoped!

We did think of some other modes too, but they were beyond the scope we could do in the time. These included flipped maps, anti-gravity maps and we would have liked to experiment with multiplayer, but that would have taken us another year to do!

Greg Livingston: Bugaboo just has one level, a maze. However, there are multiple ways through it.

If you can recall when you first played: did you have a hard time finding a way out? Is it hard to separate a potential solution from a path that leads nowhere?

Ed Linley: It is a long time since I originally played it, way back when it first came out. I remember completing it once, maybe! I remember it being extremely difficult – just when you thought you were doing well, that dragon would turn up and ruin everything!

Greg Livingston: Is there any incentive to explore the cave? Do you find yourself compelled to see/try everything, or just find one path and stick to it?

Ed Linley: Just escaping was tricky enough! I do remember trying different routes, just to find one that wasn’t so fiendishly difficult!

Greg Livingston: The main character can only move by jumping. Its power meter is much faster than Bullet Pea's. How accurately can you execute the jump?

Ed Linley: I’ve found when replaying Bugaboo in recent years that the power meter doesn’t allow for anywhere near as fine control as Bullet Pea’s. It led to a lot of frustration, as it was difficult to release the jump at just the right moment.

Greg Livingston: How hard is it to get back on track after you improperly aim a jump?

Ed Linley: I always found it very hard indeed! In many cases, you’d fall so far you’d effectively be starting a level again. Some of the Bullet Pea levels in my original Atari ST version did this, and I quickly realised that it was a very mean thing to do to the player, so the final Bullet Pea levels try not to drop you that far if you misjudge a jump.

However, Bugaboo did always tempt you to try again. In truth, I lost my Bugaboo tape long ago and the desire to play it again actually led to making my own version with that original incarnation of Bullet Pea!

On a side note, it is a complete coincidence that “Bugaboo the Flea” and “Bullet Pea” both start and end with the same two letters! I actually only realised that after we’d released the game!

Greg Livingston: Who is Kupo, and is him/her named after Final Fantasy?

Ed Linley: Ha, Kupo is our cat. He’s a Brown Burmese and yes, we named him after Final Fantasy. We thought it was a cute name, and that when anybody spoke about him, they’d sound like a moogle!

Greg Livingston: When it comes to video game theory, which do you find most important: the game itself, the perspective of the developer, or the perspective of the player?

Ed Linley: As professional game developers, the perspective of the player comes first (although in some business models, the perspective of the paying publisher has to be considered too!) However, in the case of our home-made games, we tend to make games that we’d like to play and hope others do too. It may be not the most business-savvy approach, but we enjoy making games and hope that enjoyment comes through in the final result!