Lynked: Banner of the Spark is a new hybrid-genre title that blends brawling and city building for a unique cozy-yet-combat-filled adventure. This is the debut title from developer FuzzyBot, a new independent studio founded by industry veterans Max Spielberg and Tatiana Dishlova, who previously served as directors at EA and DICE respectively. The upcoming release was announced at Gamescom’s Opening Night Live, and Spielberg and Dyshlova made the trip to Germany to discuss the game further.
in linksPlayers will join the Unibot Resistance and go on roguelite-style missions pitting them against Combots – evil robots set on dominating the world and eliminating all organic life – in hack and slash combat, which they can take on solo or with friends via multiplayer co -Op. Back in the city, they can also build their own settlement, befriending the city residents and improving their character among Komnat Runs. Although there is no release date for the final version of the game, it will enter early access on October 22nd on Steam.
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Screen Rant Interviewed FuzzyBot co-founder and creative director Max Spielberg and co-founder and CEO Tatiana Dishlova at Gamescom to discuss the gameplay loop, the title’s biggest inspirations and how the title balances its homeliness with its combat.
The first of FuzzyBot & Lynked’s origins
The benefits of a small team and the cozy combat blend
Screen Rating: The game is a really interesting hybrid of genres, and I feel like in recent years the term “cozy” For games, more and more is thrown out than the vague definition. Can you talk about why you specifically wanted to pursue this as a core aspect of the game, and how those aspects fit into the overall world and narrative?
Tatyana Dyshlova: We started the studio during the pandemic, and there weren’t a lot of games where you could hang out but also have action combat. Animal Crossing was a cool place to hang out, and Hades was a cool place to have a lot of action. But we wanted something that felt like a party game where you had moments of doing things together that were meaningful, and still had most of your gameplay with your friends that was around coordinating, succeeding, fighting bosses. But the core concept came from Max.
Max Spielberg: A lot of these things revolve around my favorite aspects of cozy games – I would say short bursts of activity. In games like Animal Crossing or even Stardew, there is a lot of downtime where you wait for things to happen. for me, In those moments I was like, “Well, I wish there was something else I could go do, activity-wise, that could contribute to the cozy side of the experience.” Being an action player as well, for me it was like, “Okay, it would be awesome to run out, do some raids or whatever, and come back with materials that I can use to fund the other side of the operation.”
This was our starting point. As we developed the game further, because our team was more action-oriented than developers, we realized that we didn’t want to do a clean 50-50 split. We wanted this game to be an action game to introduce action players to elements of the world of Homeland, where you come back from a run where maybe you failed, and you’re a little frustrated, you might have extra activities to make yourself Up in the next run as well as calm down and go fishing, harvest some of the plants you have been growing to make some money, etc., and both sides of the experience feed each other.
Obviously, you both have a really storied history of working in games at EA and at DICE. Can you talk a little about how you feel the AAA experience helped you participate in the creation of the studio and lead this new project together?
Tatiana Dishlova: Me and Max have a very clear split. I come very much from production and operations, and people management side. For me, many developers in my experience have realized that it is so much about the team. In AAA, one of the things that you get in your career is that you feel like you stagnate at some point if you don’t want to become an executive, so a lot of studios are around to create a space where people can always be creative.
Because In a smaller studio with experienced people, you can give them so many different places to stretch, and flex, and bring out what really drives them.Which is creativity in creating great experiences for players. I think most of my experience is just bringing the best out of each person we bring to the studio, allowing them to maximize their creative contribution. That’s what I think contributes a lot of heart to the game – long story short, it’s all about people.
Max Spielberg: Yes. In my career, I have worked on many different sizes of teams, maxing out at over 600 people. Tatiana and I worked together on a project where I think we really found our flow around the 30-person mark. It’s just been a really fun experience working with people who are at the top of their game in terms of talent, but also being able to move very quickly and make decisions quickly, and Due to a smaller size you will have to stretch a bit more and dabble in areas that are not your core discipline. After experiencing that in the world of AAA, I think that was our light bulb moment of, “We can do this outside of the system as well, and just have a really fun time doing it.”
In terms of inspirations, I’d love to hear more about what inspired you to start this indie studio journey in the first place, as well as when it comes to other games and other pieces of media that inspire you in this project.
Tatyana Dyshlova: For us, the initial group of six people with whom we had a chance to work together in an electronic arts studio in Los Angeles – it was called DICE LA, it’s now called Ripple Effect – we had a chance To work on several projects and found a lot of really great synergy. Everyone worked well together in our respective fields, so I think at some point we saw an opportunity to break out on our own and work with people we really trusted and really enjoyed working with. That was the first catalyst, just getting the opportunity.
Max Spielberg: Up early, me and Eric [Kozlowsky]Our art director really conspired, thinking about the game design. In terms of combat design, we’re referring to a lot of hack and slash games from the ’90s, so The old Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or Final Fight, that’s what we’re going for with this crunchy style of combat.
When we were talking about this, Eric and I were discussing other games at the time that were part of our childhoods that were major milestones in the world of gaming. Mega Man, of course, is a big one – we have robots on our game, that’s an easy way to think about, Sonic the Hedgehog. A lot of the games from that time influenced the visual style of the experience and had a different feel than a lot of Rogues you see today, or combat-based games you see today, which tend to be a little darker, a little more . Cruel.
Which are great, and I’m a big fan of the games as well, but I think for us, We wanted to try to present ourselves a little brighter, a little more elevated.. Even though, tonally, our game has that uplifting feeling, we are also contained in what is essentially a human apocalypse, so we are riding a line there, but we also think that only adds to the interest and the charm of the world.
Linked: Banned Of The Spark’s Core Mechanics
The game’s combat, village hub and future growth
Can you tell me a little bit about how the village hub will fit into what players are doing? You mentioned going back to the place and making it more cozy that way, and I’m curious how that fits into the overall combat threat. Is this an area that hasn’t been touched by this?
Max Spielberg: Yes, storytelling, it’s a secret haven, so it’s not touched. It won’t be talking in the middle of the night or anything. We wanted to be very deliberate about having a safe zone where you can spend as much or as little time as you want and not worry about thingsAnd that’s what our combat areas are for. But what do you do in your city beyond just hanging out, there are a number of activities that can basically further the advancement of weapons, your character’s powers, collection of resources, etc., which can be mixed with resources that you find In your combat to be able to make new and better equipment.
Or, if you’re more of a cozy player, and you want to have a place that you can really decorate, you’re free to use the elements of the game to build. But it’s also something that we knew for our action audience, we didn’t want to force it on players, so it’s one of those things that’s there for fun; If you want to mess with it, there are many options. But The core of our experience is to use the functionality of the city to improve your character Or create upgrades for yourself or new kit options that you can bring to the combat runs.
Can you talk a little more about the overall combat threat facing the world and how players will deal with that?
Max Spielberg: Are we talking narrative or systemic?
Both.
Max Spielberg: Narrative, the game takes place in the year 3000. Basically, humans have regressed to a point at this time where there are very few of them left, and the new, major society on planet Earth is robots. In our story, there was a rift at some point between two sides of the robotic characters, and they are at war with each other.
One is trying to, essentially, remove all organic life from planet Earth and create a very robot-only planet, and the other that you’ll be working with wants to be part of Earth’s ecosystem using sustainable energy concepts, and wants to Living among what was already there before, and trying to preserve some of it. When you fight, you are basically fighting as a human being for your own survival. But you’re also fighting for what the Unibot faction—which is the characters you’re working with—also aims to do, which is partly their own survival, but their own place on planet Earth.
In terms of mechanics, the way that the game flows, It’s a little different than your normal roguelite, where you play the first boss to the last boss in a single run, and as you master it you can finally make it to the end.. We’ve chunked it into more of a mission structure, so each mission allows you to choose how much time you want to play the game.
We have everything from a 10-minute mission to a 40-minute one. Where is this going to take place, what bosses will be there, what enemies are there, are there mutants? We have things that can change aspects of the game mode, change difficulty levels up and down. We really wanted to give players a choice in how they experience the gamedepending on if they play solo or if they have two friends ready, and also depending on the skill level.
One of the big things early on was players of a higher skill level who want to play with friends who maybe aren’t as good, they can team up and almost teach each other as they go along, so elements of sharing weapons, so the more Weapons that I make the more you have access to how we play with one another. You will go through a linear story, go through the missions, but then it also starts to spread in all the side content that you can experience. We have a generator that just creates infinite missions, so there’s a lot of replay value in that alone, but the main story arc takes you through a number of story-based missions that have context.
The combat itself, how deep does the systems side go in terms of mastery and that sort of thing?
Max Spielberg: There’s a mastery to the combat, it’s based on timing and understanding enemy patterns, when to dodge, all the sort of stuff you’d expect in a rogue. We let you power up your character to a certain point, but we want players to not just completely overpower the enemies at some point. I always find that when the difficulty becomes too easy, it becomes less engaging at some point.
I want to allow players to, if they feel things are getting too challenging, they can have a route to overcome itBased off of things they can do in the city and build skills and what not. But also really able to learn and master the various weapon sets or the wire, which is our grappling hook.
This is our key combat mechanic, which supplements your core attacks. You have your wire, which is your way of manipulating characters in the environment. You can pick up objects from the environment to use as projectiles, you can drag characters around, You can even pick up enemy combos to throw into traps, into each other, off cliffs. It’s big, kinetic and dynamic in the way you can use it.
Then you have your main weapon in which we have three attack styles per weapon: you have your light combo, your heavy attacks, and each weapon has its own unique, special attack, which is a little more flourish and usually offsets. Which the weapon is not quite as good at. We also have unlockable Spark Powers, which add to the team dynamics of the game. Of course, you can use them all solo, but some of them promote co-op play – casting shields for your team, healing, such.
Then, as you develop deeper connections by completing side quests for the various characters back at your home base, you’ll eventually be able to access the characters in what we call support links, which is basically like a challenge or an ultimate attack that we perform once per Run. This can be anything from massive damage to something that will revive all the characters on your team that have fallen.
At the end of the day, the kit can get pretty big, and you have a lot of options to keep switching in and out. Even during our playtests, we’re constantly seeing new combinationsAnd that’s before you even start getting into the mid-round upgrades and things like that that add even more to the kits.
That’s actually another thing that I was curious about, is how the relationship-building aspect fits in. Because obviously, as a cozy trap, you think of it as more like, “I am going to marry this man.“
Max Spielberg: There’s no human-robot marriage in the game, unfortunately. [Laughs] You can be free with every character you save. We have two types of characters that will connect to your city. You have your main workshop of unibots that all provide some gameplay element: Smith, he’s your weapon Smith, he’ll build you new gear, Chip will upgrade your wire, like that, and then, of course, The Banner of the Spark, who are key story members who each bring their own set of upgrades to the city.
Then, along the way, you will save other villagers. We have almost 200 of them; There are 168 unibots, very fun-styled, visually. You can perform small tasks with them throughout the day, and they will provide you with extra currencies and skills. Besides being fun to run little errands for, their purpose is really to give you that, “Hey, I just need five more skill points before I move on to my next upgrade. I can work with this character and do it really quickly before Go on the next run.” Again, all of our activities are built to be done in the 15-minute time between combat runsSo the characters supplement some of that as well.
When the game comes out – I know it’s coming into early access later this year – what are you most excited to see players react to when they get their hands on this early access?
Tatiana Dishlova: I would say for my part, my favorite part of it is how many cool moments there are, both in the kinetic combat and things that you didn’t expect to happen where things just perfectly line up, so I’m just excited To see how players will gravitate towards these things.
But also, since we’re defining a new genre hybrid, I think we’re also very curious to see what the action player base will want in the city, where we have the opportunity to expand there; Therefore, how do we grow the combat of the heart? Even in our early playtests, I think we have a really strong combat system.
Also, people really like fishing. [Laughs] There is an interesting overlap between people who like fighting and fishing. for us, A lot of the concept is that it has so much room for growth on both sidesAnd we want to grow it with the players in mind. We have our thesis now, we are ready to put it out. We are finishing the last thousands of bugs. But when it’s there, we’re just very curious to see the feedback we get, and what we can provide for the players to keep them engaged in the world and in this hybrid genre.
Max Spielberg: I’m super curious—and we’ve seen this quite a bit, as Tatiana said, with our playtests—how action-first players are surprised at how much they enjoy spending time in the city. I think off the bat, some people are like, “Well, I don’t want to play that type of game. It’s not for me.” It is extremely beautiful, however I think once they get their hands on it and try it out, there are elements that we see people coming back to that they’re surprised they’re interested in.Beyond even fishing.
I also want to point out that we wanted to make sure that players were never forced to play the game in a way that we determined. That’s the other interesting thing: watching players spend their time in the different aspects of the game. The game is quite large for a smaller studio. We’re constantly surprised at how many hours are playable in the game beyond the repeatable stuffSo very interesting to see where players spend the majority of their time, and the types of kits they build, and the types of crazy combinations of passives and actives they go into combat with.
What will the meta actually turn into? Where can we help facilitate and build off of this point in time? Many points that we are really interested in players to check.
Do you definitely foresee a lot of evolution between the early access and the final version of the game?
Tatiana Dishlova: We come out with the first two-thirds of the game, and then We have another complete ending to the game – similar to how Hades has their early access – which we are actively working on. Part of the game is around working with the players to see where we’re going to build it out and catering to that, but part of that is also taking them through the story to the final ending.
Source: Steam, Linked: Banner of the Spark/YouTube