Spelunky Creator Derek Yu Talks (Dangerous) Shop

Spelunky is a devilishly designed platformer, with randomly generated levels and a high punishment for death. Thanks to creator Derek Yu, this unlikely combination of genres makes for a complete and cohesive whole that will keep you coming back, even as it kills you again and again. We liked Spelunky quite a bit, which you can read about in our full review.

But before the game the game hits XBLA tomorrow, we spoke with Yu about what it took to bring Spelunky to the system, features that missed the cut and the shifting nature of the XBLA service.

Q: Setting out to make Spelunky for the Xbox, what did you want to do to differentiate it from the original PC release?

A: I wanted to overhaul the graphics and music and make the controls feel more arcade-like. I also thought it'd be a great opportunity to add multiplayer, which was a feature that players had been requesting for awhile.

Q: What was it like working on the console version with such a small team?

A: It's certainly a challenge, and I think the hardest part was not that we were small but that we hadn't developed a console game before. But we were lucky to get some great advice from our indie friends as well as Kevin Hathaway, our producer on the project. It definitely pays to have someone on the Microsoft side that understands our particular situation.

Personally, I love working on small teams. Its such a rich experience to get your hands dirty with everything, from the art to the code to the business. The lows can be low, but the highs are VERY high.

Q: The graphical style is very different, was there ever any thought of keeping the original pixel art, or of including it as a filter of some sort?

A: I considered it because it was something that fans of the original game wanted, but it would have been too much extra work for a throwback. I love pixel art, but this game wasn't designed for it.

Q: Since Spelunky is randomly generated, how do you keep the difficulty curve intact, or keep it balanced for each point of the game?

A: The randomization definitely takes away some of our control in designing difficulty, but we still have enough that we can give the player a sense that "ooh, the Jungle is much more difficult than the Mines". It's not completely random, and a lot of the game is still hand-made, so to speak. You may get a run where the first level is harder than the last one, but it will feel like an exception to the rule. And that's one of the things that makes Spelunky so exciting, in my opinion - that those exceptions do exist.

Q: Is there anything that was planned for this version of Spelunky that didn't make it in?

I had an idea for an "Endless" mode where you kept going down and down infinitely, with no discrete levels. The ceiling would drop, so you'd have to descend quickly. Unfortunately, the mode wasn't as interesting as I'd hoped and I decided I'd rather put my time and energy into other parts of the game.