Tiny Turnip

Christa Mrgan: You’re a Tiny Turnip in a big world! Explore a sprawling map, collect secrets, and gain new abilities as you crank your way to the stars in this radishing metroidvania!

Welcome to the Playdate Podcast, bringing you stories from game designers, developers, and the team behind Playdate, the little yellow game console with a crank. I’m Christa Mrgan. And today I am talking with Luke Sanderson about his game, Tiny Turnip!

And just a heads up: in this episode, we talk about gameplay mechanics, some aspects of level design, and a couple of the abilities you’ll earn as you progress.

Okay. Lettuce stop vegging out, and get right into it!

Luke Sanderson: My name’s Luke Sanderson and I’m the developer of Tiny Turnip. Just main programmer everything really, apart from music, which is Isabelle Chiming, she’s great, but no, everything else is me.

Tiny Turnip is a climbing metroidvania? Can you call it that?

Christa Mrgan: Yeah, totally. You can call it that. A metroidvania, an action game sub-genre that gets its name from Metroid and Castlevania, would typically have a big map to explore, with certain areas being blocked or gated until the player acquires new abilities or items.

Luke Sanderson: I think it’s that, isn’t it? Yeah. It’s the gating off of areas through abilities, really. So I think that fits a bill. Yeah. Uh, it’s an adventure exploration game. The main mechanic of it is just climbing everything. That’s how you move through the world. So yeah, as you go through, you pick up abilities and look at new levels, and there’s a big old map to explore. It’s hard to elevator-pitch. It really is. Cause the pitch is the gameplay itself. So it’s hard to talk about without putting it to people’s hands, really. That’s it! Just a big old climbing game.

When Panic did that reveal years and years ago, showing it all off and had the backing of so many good, like, indie developers, I was like, okay, this sounds pretty cool. It’s a nice little Game Boy style thing with its own store down the road and the ability to side load games onto it.

I thought this would be perfect for making little games for, ’ cause I think any game developer knows how easy it is to start a new project halfway through another one, so I thought this would be perfect to do that for.

A year or so back or released a game called Paper Pilot on the Catalog. That was a fairly quick turnaround, that one, and it’s less than a month. I think making that. That was just me learning Lua, really, and getting something out.

Christa Mrgan: Wow, i’m impressed that that only took a month! It’s a good game. There’s a link in the show notes. But, so I gotta ask: why a turnip?

Luke Sanderson: Whenever I show this one off, that’s the first question I get: why a turnip? One reason is it’s something just a bit odd and kooky and something you’d see in something like Wallace and Gromit. It’s just a bit out there. I thought, “yeah, why not?”

And secondly I wanted to keep it fairly characterless because at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter, 'cause there’s no real story to speak of, or characterization. It’s just you, the player, are climbing through the game. So it really is just a turnip. There’s a little bit of kooky life to it, which I think just helps anyway, but um There’s no name, no nothing. It’s just an object.

Christa Mrgan: So how did this idea take root?

Luke Sanderson: So it’s hard to talk about this game without talking about its sibling game. So this one’s called Tiny Turnip, and it’s like the sibling of another game I’m making called Turnip Mountain, which you are the same turnip climbing a mountain. In that game, it’s more level- based, like Celeste. And you use two joysticks on the controller to control each hand and the triggers to grab. So it’s a lot more dexterity needed to play that one really, and it’s a more of a speed-runner-friendly game.

But, as I was making it, I was thinking, it’s fun and all that, but what if I change it into a metroidvania? What if I made it more accessible? What if I did all that? And making this version for the Playdate was such a release and relief really, because I’d be correct in making both styles of games, really.

I think that the the level based one on Turnip Mountain works quite well, and this is a more laid back open world with a simpler control scheme, and that works as well. So I’m really happy that they both worked out, they worked out, I think. But yeah, in terms of. Getting it working right on the Playdate.

Getting it the right size and the right scale on the Playdate screen wants to be big and bold and to make it feel like you’re making a lot of progress with each grab you make. ’ cause it’s really easy in most games when you move with your, d-pad you’re just moving and you’re making some progress across the screen and it feels great 'cause you’re holding a button, you’re moving. Whereas an in Tiny Turnip, you really have to move quite a bit to do anything. And then you really gotta rotate the crank grab, rotate the crank, grab over and over. And obviously you get faster, you get better. You can start playing around with this expression of movement.

But at the start, it was really quite a trouble to make the player feel like they were doing well. Especially 'cause you have no power ups as well to really get you going. So I hope that people will see that through the gradual exposure through the world that you can really move about however you like.

And that’s the main theme of the game: expression of movement and control.

I suppose one way to look at it is that the world is like really dense. In a game like Metroid or like Castlevania lots of the rooms are basically corridors filled of monsters or objects to go around because you move quite quickly in those games and there’s things to do in it. Whereas this one, the gameplay is the movement.

So each room really is its own little puzzle. And that was a really hard to balance between. Making a level like fun and, you want to go through it, but at the same time, because you might have to backtrack, like it’s not fun doing the same puzzle twice. So it’s laid out in a way where there’s a big hub world where there’s no puzzles. You can just go around at your leisure, but then when you get into these little levels that are offshoots of this main hub world it gets really dense and each room is a puzzle. So it’s a balance of those two things I’d say really?

I suppose one of the main inspirations is V-V-V-V-V-V. I hate saying that. Is it called V or V? V, I dunno.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah you had it! V-V-V-V-V-V, Terry Kavanaugh’s ridiculously fun but challenging platformer, where you’re constantly reversing gravity.

Luke Sanderson: Uh, that one – lots of vs. Exactly, yeah. That one for the world design. Just, just floating through it, having a great time with great music. That’s what I wanted. In terms of the gameplay, I’ve seen people compare it to like QWOP or Jump King, one of those like rage games where they’re hard to control on purpose.

Christa Mrgan: Coop is Bennett Faddis, hilariously masochistic browser-based game where you control a runner’s legs. Using the four keys Q,W, O and P. And Jump King is another kind of frustrating platformer, from Developer Nexile.

Luke Sanderson: But I’ve made my one hopefully finishable and fun, fun to finish, instead of making streamers go mad.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah, I haven’t played Jump King, but I’ll say that Tiny Turnip is a lot easier to get the hang of than QWOP.

Luke Sanderson: Tiny Turnip is pretty gated, but hopefully throws enough new things at you to make you feel like you’re going down this twisty, windy path that you’re just discovering.

But it’s pretty, linear, hopefully, at the first. Obviously, it opens up, but by that point you’ve become more comfortable with it. So, I think good backtracking, good ways of getting around the world are really important to stop fatigue. I’ve put some fail safes and some little extra mechanics in there towards the end of the game to help you with that.

I hope that’ll work. Yeah, lots of collectibles, lots of just feeling like you are like filling in this world, really. And. I think the gameplay of this one because, obviously you’re getting these power up to make get to further places, but you are actually getting better at the game through playing it. So I think that lends itself quite well.

Christa Mrgan: And for everything from unlocking abilities to backtracking and even just dialing in the core gameplay mechanic itself, Luke did a ton of play testing.

Luke Sanderson: Oh, yes, so, so, so much play testing. It’s so easy to play test in comparison to other games, 'cause you haven’t got to send them a file and have to download it through Steam. It’s just, here’s my Playdate. Sit down for a bit and give it a go.

I think the problem with a game where you move however you like, like I can zip through the game like pretty quickly. I’m doing tricks and I’m doing rolls and all that stuff, but then watching someone else play it, I’m just like, "all you gotta do is fling yourself around, let go, grab on. It’s, it’s easy! So yeah, balancing it was incredibly hard. I hope that I’ve made it easy enough for anyone to finish it. It does definitely get harder, but that’s more through complexity of the levels rather than asking the player to do too much. I hope. That’s the main idea.

Plastic Fern who were great, they gave me like probably the most important feedback of the whole thing, just getting the controls all right. And they were absolutely right that it needed a big old fix up.

Christa Mrgan: Yes. Plastic Fern did the QA and some play testing on Tiny Turnip.

Luke Sanderson: So, I wanted to make something with a crank straight away, 'cause, it’s just so unique. And the first builds of it, you held the Playdate, and you used your right hand in the crank and you used your left thumb to alternate between B and A to climb the walls and that it worked.

But after about five minutes, you just get cramps. You just fall apart. So then I played around with holding only B instead, as an example. So you alternate between hands and that didn’t really work right? Maybe thought tapping between B and A so you tap to grab and tap to release. There were so many iterations, honestly. About the good first couple of months were just trying to think of a way to not cramp up while playing this game.

At the end of the day I just thought, just make B button do everything. You grab with one hand and then the next time you grab it will just know to grab with the the next hand if it can. And that just made the rest of the game so much easier to build around because it leveled out the playing field. You don’t have to stretch your thumb across the whole console, it’s just press B. That’s really it.

Every time I get someone to play test it they hold the crank and they’re like, what the hell is going on here? They just have no clue. And then they grab the wall 'cause it says press B, and they’re like, “oh, okay. I get it.” And then it’s a slow.

Release of, “oh, okay. I get it. Oh, okay. I get it.” And then when you think you get comfortable I just shove in a new mechanic or like a new type of level, and it’s like, oh, okay. Okay. It’s just constantly twisting what you think you can do with this sort of climbing game by just mixing all these mechanics together.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah, I felt like the pacing of unlocking new abilities was really good. And it turns out I really love just rolling around as a turnip. That’s very satisfying to me. And I wondered if Luke had a favorite ability.

Luke Sanderson: I think that’s gotta be the jump power up, which is pretty important in the platformer. You’re locked to the bottom half of the map for such a long time, and then you’re given this release of " yes, you can finally jump." And then it all just starts making sense. You can get out of the depth of this world and fling yourself to the top.

It’s great. And that’s what All the levels that come off from the hub world later on , they’re all to teach you to play around with this mechanic as much as it can really.

I’m a terrible artist, absolutely awful. So Turnip Mountain has a palette of five colors, and I thought that’s pretty close to two. So, and Playdate’s got two colors, so what a relief. Working in one bit, I love strong art styles that are bold and I find that when I’m playing a lot of recent games, I think it’s just me getting old. But when I’m playing like newer games, I can’t tell like what I’m looking at half the time. When it says, go down this corridor, I can’t, where’s the corridor?

There’s too much foliage, there’s grass everywhere. I don’t know, man. I play the New God of War recently. Excellent game, but I can’t tell what is happening half the time. Whereas, something like Mario 64, you can just tell, all right, that’s a hill. Go run down that, nice and easy. And I think, one bit is a, perfect distillation of that: it’s just, that’s a wall or not wall. It’s only one of two things. So yeah, everything’s big and bold. There’s barely any dithering or any grays, if you want to call them that. It is just black and white. Nice, big, chunky graphics because I think anything more complex than that, it would take me ages, to be perfectly honest.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah, the art is clean and legible, and there is something very Ardman-like about the turnip itself. Its little articulated arms wearing gloves really remind me of that remote controlled shopping cart in the Wallace and Grommet Short called Shopper 13.

And while Luke was confident in creating the art for the game, for the music, he wanted to capture the vibe of classic NES games, but didn’t feel like he could pull it off himself.

Luke Sanderson: I listen to lots of 8-bit-styled NES music. I used to do it years and years ago, terribly.

Christa Mrgan: So he was delighted to find Isabelle Chiming’s music!

Luke Sanderson: I found her on YouTube and she said she was doing commissions, so I just messaged her, said, “Hey, do you fancy do something like that?”

We just hit it off straight away. She’s doing the music for Turnip Mountain. We started that years and years ago, literally. And then, halfway through making it, I thought, I’m making another Turnip— fancy doing that as well? So yeah, we just got together on that. Yeah, she’s fantastic.

I think she’s really brought a life to the game that’s elevated it quite a bit. It’s odd, kooky. I wanna say Earthbound-y sometimes

Christa Mrgan: Yeah, Isabelle actually has a four-part album of Earthbound- inspired songs, based on her Earthbound D&D campaign. So, yeah, that tracks!

Luke Sanderson: Just, yeah, it’s her own essence in the game, and I think it really helps it.

I gave her some references like, it, it’s the hub world. It has to be mysterious and here’s one or two songs. But um, at the end of the day, let her do her own thing, really. 'Cause, I hired her for her music. So I trust her judgment and I just wanted her music, really.

I trusted it would be good and it was good.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah, you’ll wanna turnip this soundtrack! And Luke handled the sound design himself.

Luke Sanderson: The sound design is just, it’s just me in a eight bit tracker going whoop, whoop, and little bits and dots. Now it’s really about as complex as it gets, I’m afraid.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah, but while it might not seem like much, just having some kind of audio-based feedback is so important to making a game feel full and responsive.

Luke Sanderson: no, it absolutely is. I’m currently putting the sound effects and design for Turnip Mountain and it’s making an absolute world of difference. I’m taking sounds from Tiny Turnip actually and putting 'em in that, and it’s just so much better. It’s an absolute world of difference.

Christa Mrgan: Nice. And as far as development struggles go, the biggest challenge for Luke was keeping the frame rate up while adding complexity to the game. But overall, Lua was a nice change from his typical game dev environment.

Luke Sanderson: I work in a mobile games company. I work in Unity, so that’s C sharp, so it’s a nice little change to go from, all these C sharp things and then jump into Lua and, I don’t have to care about code cleanliness so much in my own personal project, so I can just code wherever I like. It’s quite fun.

I think Lua’s pretty simple to get around. It’s like a JavaScript-like language. Pretty easy. Like, quite fun. Lots of different tile sets for the levels. Nice bit of juice here and there, if you’re going into water, then there’s waves and all that.

There’s a great library, I’ve forgotten what it’s called.

Christa Mrgan: It is called Fluid! It was created by Dustin Mierau, creator of Playmaker and Crankulater, and the developer of Blippo+. There’s a link in the show notes.

Luke Sanderson: It’s on the um, forums for Playdate, which are an absolute lifesaver. But yeah, someone made a, water system with the waves and they ripple when you touch them.

And that had to be like a complete rewrite of how they draw things in that as well, because I draw things in a funky way in this game in the first place. And to even get it working was a whole thing, and then getting it running nice. And there’s this effect in the game where the water ripples in the game all the time.

And that’s just a checkerboard pattern moving left left left left right. Which means you have to redraw the water every frame, which is just Oh, a whole thing.

And making sure it all runs, relatively quickly on the actual hardware. I felt like every time I added a new mechanic, I think, oh, I’ll just put some water in here. That’d be a great idea. And then frame rate tanks. And then, you know, obviously testing on simulator and it works great and you test it on device and it crashes. And there are some more mechanics later in the game that are even more intensive and it’s just—ugh!

I’m trying to hit 40 FPS and that was an absolute pain to get with the water, multiple tile sets. Just oof. But, I think we got there. It’s pretty close to 40 frames through the whole thing. So, I got it. In the end, I think it runs okay. So I’m happy. That was the hardest part. And probably the other hardest part was getting the world design all right. 'Cause I, I used LDTK make the world, if you’ve heard of it, it’s a excellent program for putting all these rooms in your world together. And it was just a constant shuffling of all these different puzzle rooms and trying to think, “is this too easy? Is this too hard? Does this connect right to the next place?” Uh! So yeah, just constant changing of so many important bits until I get it in some way like, “right, I think this makes sense. Leave it.”

Christa Mrgan: And there’s a nice little bonus challenge for the high achievers among you.

Luke Sanderson: Throughout the game you can collect these stars. They’re completely optional. They don’t do anything. You just collect all of them and you’re a great star player. But yeah, thinking where to put these and God, is that too hard? Is that too easy? Just, yeah, playing around, and like, rewarding players who want to go the extra mile. That was excellent. 'cause you can sort of forego any sort of balancing and just say, “I can do it. Let’s say you do it.”

Luke Sanderson: I’m happy with it. I hope Panic’s happy with it. I hope the people are happy with it. I hope

people get the thrill of improving, really, throughout the game. The main thing is that, " oh, I’m actually getting good at this now, because I’ve been in this room before and I had trouble before, but now I can do it. Not just because of a new mechanic, but because I have gotten better."

So, I hope people get that, but it’s a hard thing to teach because you can’t really teach players to get good. They just do it. Hopefully.

Christa Mrgan: Hopefully! I hope you enjoy climbing around with your articulated Tiny Turnip arms, and get to explore the entire map of this veggie-inspired metroidvania! I’m rooting for ya!

Find out more about Luke, his other Playdate game Paper Pilot, his upcoming game, Turnip Mountain, and a bunch of other things we mentioned via the links in the show notes.

Thanks so much for listening, and stay tuned for more episodes about Playdate season two, coming soon to the Playdate podcast feed.

Luke Sanderson: Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoy the game, and goodbye!

Christa Mrgan: The Playdate Podcast was written, produced, and edited by me, Christa Mrgan.

Cabel Sasser, and Simon Panrucker composed the theme song.

Additional music was composed by Isabelle Chiming and comes from Tiny Turnip. Huge thanks to Tim Coulter and Ashur Cabrera for wrangling the podcast feed and working on the website, James Moore for making me an awesome Paydate audio extraction app, Kaleigh Stegman for handling social media, and Neven Mrgan, who created the podcast artwork and site design. And thanks as always to everyone at Panic. Playdate Season Two is available right now on the website and on Catalog! And of course, Playdate consoles are available at play.date.

Okay, this post-credits bit is starring me for once! Just a little behind-the-scenes to show you one reason I prefer to cut out the audio of me asking the interview questions and write all-new narration for this podcast: I often have a really hard time speaking in full sentences. And I’m not always quite this bad, but here’s a great example. This is me confirming to Luke during the interview that yes, Tiny Turnip is a metroidvania, and explaining why I think it qualifies as one:

Awesome. Yeah, I think it qualifies as metroidvania if it’s like, 'cause like, not, like, it’s not linear. Uh, 'cause you can go forward and back. You like level up by, you know, like, like things are gated, basically. Like your abilities, like you earn, like you get new abilities.

Um, what else makes it a metroidvania?

Oh my God. So eloquent! Anyway, you’re welcome.