Kudzuis a new adventure game for the original Game Boy where players will take the role of Max, an apprentice gardener, who must find his mentor, Zoen. He’s mysteriously disappeared into the fast-growing kudzu field, which is based off the real-life invasive plant. Thanks to a successful Kickstarter, a Game ROM file for aGame Boy emulator or compatible flash cartridgewill be available, likely around December 2023.
Kudzulead developer Chris Totten walked through the project’s journey with Game Rant, emphasizing that he’s not remaking any classicGame Boytitles, but instead wants to build on what’s already been made and adaptKudzu’s adventure genre to 2023.The following transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
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Q: For our readers, can you tell us about yourself and your gameKudzu?
Totten:I’m Chris Totten. I have been making games since about 2006. A college buddy of mine said, ‘Hey, let’s make video games together.’ So, you know, famous last words, but I went to school for architecture and this kind of plays intoKudzua little bit. I actually learned what Kudzu was during a bad architecture school review. We had this site and we all found this field of what we thought was like really cool ivy, and being a bunch of kids that grew up in the northern US, we didn’t really know what it was and neither did our instructor. We all made our buildings like in it or around it or things like that.
During the review, the assistant dean who was there to review the project said I got to go first. He goes, ‘Chris, that’s not ivy, that’s Kudzu. It’s an invasive plant that covers everything else and chokes off its sunlight and murders the other plants around it so because you put this into your project, does that mean murder is important to you?’ And I was like frozen. I’m a junior in college, and I’m completely frozen.
My teacher steps in, and I’ll never forget this – this is something that sticks with me as a teacher – and goes, ‘Hey, we didn’t know that, so can we proceed?’ As though it was just this weird eye because everybody has it in their project. The assistant dean goes, ‘fine.' He’s a great guy. We’re still friends, but that was an interesting thing that happened that made me think about this funky plant and how it could become like anevil thing in a video gameyears later. When I got out of school, people weren’t really building buildings because of the recession, but I had this game thing and I got jobs doing 3D and teaching people 3D. That just sort of turned into a career in the game industry and on indie projects and at universities.
Kudzu came about after I told that story to my wife several years later. She grew up in the south and it wasn’tKudzuthat she was fighting off, but she was like, ‘oh yeah, my brother fought off invasive vines in our backyard when we were growing up.’ Like, ‘oh man, we should make a video game about Max fighting plants with a machete. And like that,Kudzuwas born [laugh].
It wouldn’t be years until I made it like aGame Boy game. It was a project that I had on a shelf thinking, ‘I’ll never make this, the scope is too big.’ And then this cool engine came out that lets people make Game Boy games. It’s been cool to see how it’s grown from this thing that I found on Twitter to now, a huge thing in the game industry. It’s been really cool to be part of that community.
Q: Let’s talk a bit about the main character. Can you describe Max for me?
Totten:Max is in the tradition of action-adventure heroes, a silent man of action. He’s mostly asilent protagonist. He’s a gardener. He is a cool guy. He’s lightly based on my brother-in-law, so we have little references like my brother-in-law sometimes likes to put pinwheels in his garden, so Max in the game likes to put pinwheels in his garden – things like that. We were like, ‘Hey, let’s make him an action hero.’ He’s kind of a vehicle through which people can see, ‘Oh, it’s Link’s Awakening.’
It’s not quite aremake ofZeldabut Max is awake at the beginning of the game where Link is always asleep. Max becomes this vehicle through which we’re able to kind of communicate our intention.Kudzugot those elements ofZeldaandMetroidand all those other sorts of games, but one of the goals is to make it its own thing and having a character that we can do that through has been really fun.
Q: There’s a mysterious disappearance of his mentor Zoen. How does that disappearance affect Max?
Totten:It affects that whole little community that he’s in.The idea is that Link is a swordsman. I’m playing Tears of the Kingdom right now, and they’re like, “oh, he’s the knight, he’s a swordsman.” Things like that. Max is a gardener and a scientist in this is community of scientists, botanists, gardeners, and landscape architects, and they’re not used to combat. So this center of this community, the person, Zoen, that brought them all together kind of wanders off and throws everything into a little bit of disarray. Max doesn’t really hesitate mostly because that’s how you move the plot of the game forward.
He’s going to go in and attempt to find him. I think that provides a lot of other opportunities for a lot of other characters. Zoen’s disappearance is really just the inciting incident. He starts things off, but pretty quickly it gets bigger than that.
There’s another character, Grace, who is Max’s rival. Grace has lived in the area for a while – that becomes important – and comes from a long line of gardeners–that also will become important. She sees this as an opportunity to prove herself to this famous gardener and his team by showing off her gardening skills and her adventure skills. There becomes this little bit of tension between the two of them as they are trying to save Zoen at the same time.
Q: I know there are other quirky characters that players will meet along the way. Can you tell us who or some of who your favorites are?
Totten:There’s Truffle, who is the mapmaker. They are the person you buy maps from. I’ve given Truffle they/them pronouns. They are the nod to that architecture jury that I had in school, and that’s why I had a lot of fun writing Truffle. You can unlock cat people in the world. You kind of have to follow up on it, we made them part of a mini-quest.
There’s Tina the Llama, because again, they unlock the possibility of animal people, so there are llamas. But Tina is a goat herd, and that’s one of the mini-quests in the game. you’re able to collect goats and they get sent back to Tina, and the goats munch away on this field of Kudzu. Sometimes there’ll be something that they find underneath and you get it. That could lead to some pretty big things in the game. Players should definitely do that quest, try to find all 20 goats.
There are characters who will be like, “this is what kudzu’s deal is, this is when it was introduced to the US, and here’s why it’s invasive.” I have famouslandscape architects or landscaperswho are ghosts that you may meet that help you on your journey. They don’t all deal with kudzu, but I just thought, oh, we’re going to make this little gardening verse. There’s another character, a mysterious little girl, her name is Flora – I don’t want to reveal too much, but she’s one to watch out for too. Players should be on the lookout for her because she becomes really important in the plot of the game as well.
There are some that I haven’t even mentioned that I wish I could mention. I will say this. One of the fun things about making your own video game, and I’ve said it in past interviews, like, I’m not here to recreate anybody’s childhood. I don’t want to make another thing that’s so close toLink’s Awakeningthat it’s really like, “why don’t you just go playLink’s Awakening, right?” I wanted to create this like another world of its own, but I still get to put in a few references.
There is a boss who’s a lot of fun and they were a lot of fun to write, who is like a reference to one of my favorite boss fights of all time, which was the end ofMetal Gear Solid 3–the Sniper Battle that took place in the four zones. I have a four-screen boss battle that is like against a sniper, and I promise I make it work. It’s not like a guy is suddenly with a sniper rifle. It works within the fiction of this world.
Q: It seems like nature seems to play a vital role in the game, especially just with theKudzu. And in this aspect, it’s almost as if they’re the villain because they’re invasive. Does that element of nature play the villain role in the game? And then if so, what is the goal of that?
Totten:It’s not really that nature’s the villain, it’s that invasive plants are the villain. There are things in this ecosystem that have been kind of put out of whack because of this invasive species. Everything was kind of in order when the Kudzu came and this particular kudzu and–this gets into spoiler territory–but there’s something wrong with this kudzu. It’s not just like if you were to drive down a highway in Maryland or Virginia, you’re going to see Kudzu right off the highway. It’s not that kudzu, it’s like there’s something else going on there.
But the game is becoming this whole thing about invasive plants in general. It’s not that nature is against you, it’s that there’s this invasive species against you that’s also swallowing all the natural things and manmade things around them. It’s a super destructive, invasive species. At the same time, there are things in nature that can be harnessed for good in this game. One of the things with the Kudzu is thatI started trying to make this game for Game Boy, but it was like, where did the game come from?
I actually have some gifs of really early PC prototypes that I made years ago, just piddling around before actually making it as a full project came to reality. And because it was on a computer, the Kudzu was spread way more. I had to pair that down when the game went to Game Boy, but the cool thing about that was that I had to start really thinking hard about the ways that Kudzu could be utilized. It became a hazard in the game, but then it also became something that you can use in puzzles. There are puzzles where you don’t just cut the kudzu down, you actually have to make it grow in a certain path to open a door.
Even though the Kudzu is an invasive force, it’s also something that helps you, and then there are other characters that use nature in different ways. There’s a mini-quest that helps you expand your ability to carry health potions where you collect leaves for a chef who knows how to cook with those leaves, otherwise they’re super poisonous. That’s based on a real plant and real culinary traditions using native plants. You’re trying to get its ecosystem back in check.
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Q:Kudzuis being marketed as a new game for Game Boy. Why do you want to release it on this console even though it’s been discontinued for quite some time?
Totten:I really loved Game Boy growing up. I had one since Game Boy’s first round of popularity in the early 1990s. Part of it was that I did see this engine, GB studio, appear a few years ago, and I thought that was really cool because it was a way that people could make Game Boy games without having to write them in the native assembly language. It made Game Boy development really accessible. I’m mainly an artist and designer by training, and I’m not a programmer. It was really appealing to me that I could make something more fully featured and not have to assemble a huge team–because that was the thing with this idea for this game was like, “Oh man, I’ve been here before.
This could become a $500,000 indie project real quick… if I were to make a big Unity game or something like that. It turned into a weekend project, which grew into not just a weekend project because it seemed it was more approachable. One reason was the approachability and the memories that I have of this engine. There’s still that big homebrew community out there. It’s not just, “no, I can’t go to Target and get a new Game Boy.” There is still a passionate homebrew and player community. That’s why working with Mega Cat Studios has been so great because they’ve been making and publishing games for this community forever, for the NES and Sega Genesis and things like that.
Q: You already mentioned that the game has been inspired byZeldaandMetroid. Were there any other influences or inspirations?
Totten:This is because it’s another Metroidvania, butHollow Knighthas been a big inspiration. When I talk to fans about inspirations and I mentionedHollow Knight, they’re like, “that doesn’t look like itsHollow Knight.” What they think I mean by that is I’m going to say that it’s gothic and darK, which is funny becauseHollow Knight’s very cute. But what I mean by that is I come from an architecture background, I’ve worked a lot in level design. I actually published two books on level design including one called anArchitectural Approach to Level Design, which people seem to like.
I think a lot about level design structure and there’s a lot in that world that takes the edges off of something likeSuper Metroid.In those games, you have a lot of backtracking and things like that.Hollow Knightdoes a really good job of making a very approachable world that you can move through any way you wish, and that’s something that I really wanted to do withKudzu. Without getting into too much of the weeds, I looked at games like that and thought, okay, how can I have this feeling of being able to say, oh, I need to go back and then have it not be a huge chore?
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Q:Kudzulooks and sounds like a Game Boy game. What kind of feelings or emotions are you hoping that players experience?
Totten:We’re not trying to reinvent people’s childhood because I think that’s a dangerous game to play where you don’t want to try to make something so like another game that you end up feeling like a knock on, but there are little hooks like the art style and the perspective which is very much like Link’s Awakening. There are little callbacks. There’s a gate at one point in the game that you have to get through [and] it’s one of the main quests. That gate is very heavily modeled on a piece of art fromSuper MarioLand2.
The box has a snake in the same posture and position asKid Icarus: Of Myth and Monsters, which is another Game Boy game. So there’s all these like little Game Boy callbacks. That’s partially me enjoying making a Game Boy game and making my inner nine-year-old happy, but then also trying to give some Easter eggs for the people who are going to look for those things. But at the same time, I hope the world gives them something new to see. People have commented on this, they really like the advent, they like the sort of reality of it. I hope it makes people laugh. There’s like some goofy characters and dialogue in there likeLink’s AwakeningandEarthBound, and there aresome really directEarthBoundandMotherreferences.
I actually did get a wine-drinking ghost in there fromMother 3for people who are fans. I love that ghost so much. I hope it evokes that feeling because the characters are all goofballs. The dialogue in that game is famous because all the developers were all watching Twin Peaks at the time…I hope it gives them something new to chew on.Link’s AwakeningandMotherhave probably been too influential on my game writing.
Q: What do you hope thatKudzucould add to the Game Boy library?
Totten:Some of its genres are pretty well established in the library. My hope was to make something that was more in tune with modern game design thinking. Looking at something like aHollow Knightand thinking about the world structure, like I loveMetroidtoo. It’s a fun game. But I kind of have to play it like I’m in 1992 because it really is just this tunnel and if you need anything, you got to go hike way back up. That was what my goal was. This is a genre that there’sLink’s Awakening, but there’s alsoFinal Fantasy Adventureand other games. I mean heck my game’s not a platformer, butTeenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: Radical Rescueis like one year beforeSuper Metroidand four years beforeCastlevania: Symphony of the Night.
But again, it’s like, well what if one of these was made today? There are still some Game Boy things with just how you have to do stuff. I really tried to make it something where instead of when you kill an enemy, you don’t get a heart, and that fills up your life meter. You might get a jar of its Kudzu jelly, but it’s basically a health potion. Then it’s up to you to choose when to do that.
Q: Is there anything else that you’d like to discuss that we didn’t talk about?
Totten:I hope people enjoy the game. I hope they add it to their Game Boy libraries and help us get it to Nintendo Switch, so they can add it to their Switch libraries if they don’t have Game Boy anymore. I hope they enjoy it and check it out.
[END]
