As a developer, watching people play your game can be a nerve-wracking experience. It seems like an age ago (it was only 2018) that I was on a busy showfloor at the EGX Expo, peering over the shoulders of players getting to grips with Valfaris, the 2D action-platformer that myself and fellow Steel Mantis dev, Andrew Gilmour, were working on at the time.
Luckily, the reaction was overwhelmingly positive. The demo we had prepared was no pushover, and I remember seeing players dying over and over. But most were determined to push forward, and they eventually made it to the end with a big grin on their face. It showed me there was something about Valfaris that made people want to persevere and conquer it. Seeing this was an incredibly rewarding experience, and it made me feel we were making something worthwhile.
Fast forward to today, and we’re excited to be revealing Valfaris: Mecha Therion. Anyone familiar with Valfaris will immediately notice a major difference in the sequel – it’s not a platformer, but a shoot ‘em up. New ideas and features are, of course, entirely expected in a follow-up, but switching genres? Not so much.
Despite knowing players enjoyed the platforming action of Valfaris – as I’d seen first-hand at EGX and was reinforced post-launch by positive user and critic reviews – we both decided we wanted to do something new with the sequel.
Before we arrived at that decision, however, our original plan was to make a sequel to Slain: Back From Hell, a 2D hack-and-slash platformer we released in 2016. It was going to be a 2.5D platformer and we got as far as making a bit of gameplay with some 3D elements. We had a section with the character walking around a spiral staircase, and it looked pretty cool. Even at that point, though, I was already feeling that making another entire platformer was going to be a drag.
It was then Andrew suggested something totally crazy: that we abandon the project and make a shmup sequel to Valfaris instead. It was completely out of the blue, but I grew up playing games such as Thunder Force, R-Type, Gradius, and Raiden, and had already made a shoot ‘em up around 2008 called Cy-Clone, so I was very into the idea!
I was immediately enthused by the change in direction, and – as there are plenty of differences between a platformer and a shmup to consider – straight away started to think about the game from a design perspective. Most notably, a platformer generally allows the player to go at their own pace (rising water/lava levels not withstanding