Rogue Legacy 2 - Interview @Shacknews

The devs of Rogue Legacy 2 were interviewed by Shacknews.

Shacknews: You only showed off a five-second tease, but in that tease, we could see an art style similar to the first. Should players expect Rogue Legacy 2 to look visually close to the previous game?

Lee: It's no longer pixel art, but stylistically it’s very similar to the original Rogue Legacy. From the beginning we knew we wanted to do something new, so we teamed up with Matt Hammill, the Art Director for Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime (and fellow Torontonian), to do the art for RL2. And he's done an awesome job!

I think the art style is a perfect mix of old and new. Even though it's not pixel art anymore, it's still immediately recognizable and retains the charm of the original. We also brought on Glauber Kotaki, the pixel artist for all our previous games, except this time he's handling all the character animations. And even though the models are 3D, we're using stepped animations similar to games like Dragon Ball FighterZ to handcraft every single frame of animation. The results are really terrific and honestly, the static screenshots don’t do the game justice.

Shacknews: How much can you tell me about the setting? Are players exploring a new castle, assuming they're exploring a castle at all?

Lee: This game is much larger, and players will be exploring a kingdom rather than just a castle. The number of biomes in this world are going up, and we're trying to tie every biome together narratively. It's hard to explain now, especially since the details to the narrative stuff comes in very late, but we're excited with how we plan to tell the story to Rogue Legacy 2. At this point things are pretty fluid so it may not work out, but we can always pivot. We're also working on ways to make the biomes unique and interesting. Rather than just having the second biome have harder enemies, the structures of the biomes will change as well, with new rooms, environmental hazards, and so on.

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