Hello everyone! I am Deyton, and I have been writing for Nettos Game Room for a couple of months now. I love media journalism and will be graduating from university in a couple of months with a degree in journalism! I specifically love the internal part of game development, like the stories behind closed doors and things most audiences wouldn't know. I feel it is important to give these developers who design these games a voice, so when I heard I had a chance to speak with Madbricks about their new title Mexican Ninja, I knew I would have questions!
Here's what they had to say.
Nuevo Tokyo's setting is extremely original. How did you guys come up with the setting?
We let our minds fly with the premise of how Mexico would look like if Japan invaded it, and on top of that, that criminal organizations ruled (which does not sound very different from the current Mexico). We wanted to give it a very personal feel to how the streets would be, so we drew inspiration of our day to day mexican streets (not how it is popularly portrayed on the media), with a lot of pop-culture references or just things that one that lives in mexico would say, yeah that’s mexico, but through the lenses of an anime.
The artwork in the game reminds me a lot of Hades, and the gameplay feels like Streets of Rage. What other games did you look at to help create it?
Definitely SoR4 and Hades were huge inspirations. When it came to the art, we were looking for something that fit the Beatemup genre in 3D. Not so popular like SoR and Hades, there were Shing and 9 Monkeys of Shaolin, which aligned a lot with the expertise of our team. That and that we wanted to give it a raw and irreverent feeling, like Shank or Borderlands 2.
What were the hardest and easiest parts of developing this game? For the hardest part, was it surprising or expected?
The easiest part was coming up with ideas, there were too many of them! We were just very inspired by the main concept, that they just came and came. And the whole team pitched in, we played at least once a week together, everybody, and really everybody had amazing new ideas. It was hard deciding which ones stayed. It was surprising because at the beginning of development you feel like you have time for everything, but you don’t, it breaks your heart.
Was there something you left on the show floor you wish could've made the full game?
The beginnings of this game are rooted action movies (mostly on b-side), and we wanted to make tributes to Kill Bill and Old Boy, with very flashy encounters. Things get dicey in game development though and that didn’t happen. Although Sifu already made a tribute to Old Boy’s corridor scene, we thought with our irreverent attitude it would still be fun to make.
The bosses in the game are very funny and original. What did the process of designing and coming up with those really look like?
We wanted to make fun of certain archetypes in Mexican or Japanese culture (mostly Mexican). The ONE boss everybody knows was inspired by morbid reggaeton stars like Bellakath, or how an exploitative boss would be (mexicans and japanese, or at least the archetypes we see in anime, aren’t that different). We imbued them with so much of the personality that they already have in real life, that even somebody that isn’t Mexican and doesn’t get the full context of the joke, still finds them whacky!
I love the Skins in this game! Could you share some details about the process of making them, and what you looked at for them?
They are all filled with easter eggs and tributes to mexican pop-culture japanized. For example, Don Ramen comes from Don Ramon from a famous tv show “El chavo del 8”. Mexicans made this character fall in love with Hatsune Miku (I don’t know why). Mexicans are obsessed with the convenience store OXXO, it’s just iconic, so we added a skin for it. But really, we didn’t give much thought into it. If we thought it was funny, we put it in the game; if there wasn’t enough time or space to put all of them, we put whatever was the funniest.
Is there something you learned in developing the game that you want to use moving forward with other projects? If so, what are they?
We learned a lot about player expression and game feel. Beatemups can be linear and repetitive, BUT they feel great. It’s not an easy feat finding the sweet spot for the mechanics of the combat to feel satisfying. We put a lot of effort and really listened to feedback to find what we achieved.
What are some funny development stories that no one would ever know and that might live rent-free in the team's head?
Pandas aren’t Japanese. Carlos Rincones, who came up with the idea of Mexican Ninja, once wrote a script for TV that featured a scene where Crack Pandas got free and started eating everybody (and f*cking Sub-Zero from MK for some reason). So we thought it was very funny and thought a Panda should be in the game. It’s not that we knew pandas weren’t Japanese but by the time we said that maybe we should make more tribute to japanese culture we said “Oh s**t!”, but we rolled with it. We thought at the end it was very “Mexican Ninja” to roll with our mistakes.
Also some people said our ninja doesn’t look like a ninja at all, more like a samurai, so we sometimes call the game Mexican Samurai.
Lastly, are you happy with how everything ended up in the final project? Was this the vision you guys always had?
Hell yeah buddy. It wasn’t really the exact vision we had at the beginning. I don’t think we had a full vision of the game at the beginning besides from a beatemup that felt ridiculously cool (and mexican). There were a lot of firsts for all of us in this project so we really learned what the game wanted to be in the making. Yeah, the game is not perfect, but it is still something we poured all of our passion into, and it shows, so we are more than happy with what turned out. It’s like our weird little baby.
Fun question: I know this is Madbricks' first game, but if you guys could use any licenses to make a game, what would it be and why?
Machete would be cool. It’s ridiculous as Mexican Ninja, and we always said we wanted to make a game that felt like a machete movie.
But also on a completely different side Critical Role. We are fans of the youtube and animated series, plus we are seasoned D&D players.
For more on Mexican Ninja, you can read my full review of the title, or visit the Steam Page to try the game out for yourself today. It is also available on both PlayStation and Xbox consoles.
And for more exclusive interviews like this, you can head over to our Interview Page!
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