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Castle Crashers' designers talk inspiration and arriving on Nintendo Switch
Over a decade after its debut, Castle Crashers will soon become a portable experience via the Nintendo Switch. We interviewed the game's designer, Dan Paladin, to mark the occasion.
In August 2008, Castle Crashers launched on the Xbox 360. An RPG beat 'em up with over 30 levels of wall-to-wall mayhem, the game was a tribute to an earlier, simpler time in gaming. Game designer Dan Paladin took inspiration from the Kunio-kun franchise – more specifically, the NES adaptations of the arcade games.
Paladin cites River City Ransom and Super Dodge Ball as key inspirations. Both contained the sort of simple, but expressive physicality that Castle Crashers has in spades. And both were very much what you see is what you get. The game mechanics themselves were easy to learn; in River City Ransom, you pressed one button to punch, one button to kick, and both at the same time to jump. However, those individual moves had to be thoughtfully, strategically combined to attain mastery. Complexity comes through simplicity, at least in theory – nostalgia gives us rose-tinted glasses.
"A lot of beat 'em ups, when you go back and play them, are not quite how you remember them," says Paladin. "We remember things being crisp and clear, and when we go back, it's pixelated. We remember there being more enemies on the screen than the hardware could support."
Paladin bore this in mind when he designed Castle Crashers, because he didn't want to replicate the past so much as capture our nostalgic, outsized memories of playing those old games. So, he and his team upped the resolution and the framerate from those 8-bit predecessors. They filled the screens with enemies and they allowed co-op players to bring each other to life, because they thought that would be more exciting than the more traditional permanent 'Game Over'.
Early arcade games were prohibitively difficult. Sometimes, this was the result of bad design, but more often, the difficulty was artificially inflated, forcing casual players to dump more quarters into the machines to make any sort of headway. In Castle Crashers, the 'Insane' level of difficulty is optional; you have to beat the game to even unlock it. And even if your skills don't develop quickly enough, you'll eventually be able to best Castle Crashers by attrition.
"We don't ever really want a 'Game Over'," explains Paladin. "If you keep losing a level, you're still keeping all your XP, and you're still getting stronger. Eventually, you're going to be so powerful that you can't lose.
"The main idea [of Castle Crashers] is that everything is silly and nothing takes itself too seriously. There's animals that propel themselves by pooping, and weird expressions that things make, and strange stuff that you run across. Have fun, be silly; that's what it's all about."
The response to Castle Crashers has been consistently, overwhelmingly positive, starting with its initial acclaim in 2008, when it was released on Xbox Live Arcade. By 2012, Castle Crashers had sold over two million copies on that platform. It was ported to the Playstation Network in 2010 and to PC/Mac in 2012.
In 2015, game studio The Behemoth re-released Castle Crashers on the Xbox One as a Remastered edition, with better graphics, an additional mini-game, and all content from prior iterations of the game. And at PAX East on March 19, 2019, The Behemoth confirmed that Castle Crashers would be released on both Playstation 4 and Nintendo Switch later this year.
The Switch release is particularly notable, as this will be the first time that Castle Crashers will be available on handheld console. Paladin always wanted to work with Nintendo on Castle Crashers, but they didn't have the opportunity to 'fit' it into Nintendo's various hardware gimmicks, such as by making it split screen, or by incorporating motion controls. However, the Switch, unlike the DS, is single screen, which allows for a more seamless port and transition.
"The mobility is appealing to me," says Paladin. "I've always wanted this to be a handheld. For me, the portability is the major draw. Whenever we port something, we give it some love, so it's never just porting. I don't see that stopping. We don't want our games to disappear."
As for what's next for The Behemoth, Paladin can't say, although he reveals that their next, unannounced game will be in a genre that they haven't done before. Beyond that, Paladin expresses disbelief at the company's success; this all started with a creative partnership between Paladin and Newgrounds creator Tom Fulp. Co-founder John Baez mortgaged his house to kickstart the company.
"I couldn't have guessed back in 2008, that people would still be playing our old games," says Paladin. "For us, it's a feeling. We want people to enjoy their time together. We never think about money, we never think about whether the market wants that thing right now. We just wonder if it's cool, if the world needs it, and if it needs to exist. We've always operated on this naive message, and somehow, it's worked for us."
Castle Crashers will arrive on PS4 and Switch this year.
