Interview with WayForward’s River City Girls Game Director, Adam Tierney

Thank you for taking the time to talk with us as the game gets ready for release. How did the idea for River City Girls come up?

WayForward loves reimagining classic gaming brands, and “River City Ransom” for the NES was always one of those games we were interested in taking a stab at. However, it wasn’t until another director here showed me the Super Famicom game, “Shin Nekketsu Kōha: Kunio-tachi no Banka,” that I got the idea for River City Girls.

In Banka, the main heroes’ typically sweet and passive girlfriends — Misako and Kyoko — were playable characters, and the combat involved crazy moves like throws, wall jumps, and curb-stomping downed enemies. I loved the visual of these skinny high school girls beating the life out of street thugs more than twice their size, so it was that game (even more than Ransom) that got us interested in aggressively pursuing the brand.

While in Japan, we pitched the idea for “River City Girls” to the brand’s owner, Arc System Works. They immediately loved it, and shortly afterward our companies began collaborating on the new game.

What were some of the challenges faced in taking a classic style brawler and modernizing it for today’s audiences?

Well the biggest, most notable change in Girls is the art style. The River City (aka Kunio-kun) series has had over 50 games released in Japan over the past 30+ years, and for whatever reason, the classic NES-style sprites have been used in most of those games. Although titles like Banka changed things up a little visually, we took the world and all the characters in a completely new visual direction. This was partly because it’s the style we landed on in the concept stage, but also because we didn’t want this game to get confused with any other River City game that came before it — it needed its own clear visual identity so that gamers wouldn’t wonder, “have I already played that one?”

Another way we reimagined the brand, while also ensuring the game would hook players until the end, was to not use any tilesets in the game. Most pixel games use “tilesets” for their background art, which means a small number of art pieces are made, and then stamped over and over to create the full world. With this game, every scene is drawn with unlimited tiles, and there are no exact duplicates between the game’s nearly 100 unique scenes, too. Every location has its own look, identity, and secrets. And doing that was critical to keep players from getting burned out and feeling like they’re doing the same thing over and over.

How many people were involved with the creation of the game? On the WayForward side, how does that compare with the team size for other projects?

The onsite staff was relatively small, maybe 8 or 10 full-time members. In addition we’d have people from WayForward’s various departments help, like VFX, SFX, UI, testing, etc. And we also worked with a lot of very talented contractors on some of the game’s art, animation, and music.

In comparison to typical WayForward team sizes, this was a small-to-medium effort. I’ve been on games where the onsite team is as small as three or four people, or as big as 30 to 40 people. So Girls was on the smaller end of the spectrum.

How has the team’s experiences on previous games influenced River City Girls?

WayForward does a lot of action games, including brawlers, which is what I’d categorize this game as. I previously directed “Justice League Heroes: The Flash” on GBA, which was a similar style of brawler, as well as “Batman: The Brave and the Bold” which was an action-platformer game, but still shares a lot of DNA with this game (both were specifically very influenced by Double Dragon II on NES).

And, of course, Bannon Rudis, our assistant director on the project, illustrated and directed the Kickstarter game “River City Ransom: Underground” before coming to WayForward, so he was particularly familiar with these characters and this style of combat.

What was it like working with Arc System Works on this title? What was their role?

Arc was AMAZING. WayForward’s been around for almost 30 years, and I think Arc was formed a few years before us. They’ve been a fantastic partner on this game. Because Arc is making some of the best fighting games ever right now (like “Dragon Ball FighterZ”), they were able to offer us guidance on keeping our combat tight and maximizing our VFX. They are also incredibly knowledgeable about the Kunio-kun lore, having purchased the brand about five years ago, and having made several Kunio-kun games since. So even though we were reinterpreting the characters in RCG, they would give us feedback that kept everything feeling very true-to-brand. I can’t wait to work with them again.

The soundtrack has some noteworthy talent behind it. How did that come about?

I knew I wanted the game to have a consistent beat, so that the girls could basically fight to the rhythm of the music. So that was the start of the game’s musical identity. Chipzel is a chiptune composer I’d been wanting to work with for several years, so we got her to compose the game’s boss battles, which would have a heavier sound than the stage tracks.

Then I needed more symphonic, less aggressive tracks for the stages; Dale North, a musician friend of mine (who composed the game’s retro arcade tracks) recommended Megan McDuffee, and we were immediately blown away by her catchy synth-pop beats, not to mention her singing ability! Megan sings something like seven full-vocal songs in the game, which actually tie into one of the game’s later boss battles.

Finally, Nathan Sharp (aka NateWantsToBattle) wrote and performed the music to our intro and outro songs, with Nate singing vocals on one of the tracks and Cristina Vee (our game’s VO director) singing the other one.

The soundtrack for this game is 62 amazing audio tracks by these five musical geniuses, including many tracks that pay homage to earlier Kunio-kun and Technos games.

What are some of the team’s favorite features in the game?

The “BARF!” dialog is a signature of the brand, so it was fun to get that in. Basically, every enemy that’s defeated says a little dialog line, which displays at the bottom of the screen. In “River City Ransom,” I think there were four or five lines, one of which was “BARF!” In our game, there are 50 possible lines for male enemies and 50 for female enemies. There’s no VO component for those (because of how constantly enemies are defeated), but if you glance down there as enemies are defeated, you’ll read some funny lines.

Accessories was also a cool system to add. In most River City games, you buy items to eat later, which refill your health (stamina) and also boost your stats. Accessories is a complementary system to that one where you earn permanent items (like earrings, watches, bras, etc) and can equip up to 2 of them at a time for a very minor, long-term gameplay bonus. These work similarly to the wearable objects in a Castlevania or Bloodstained game.

But my favorite new addition is the recruit system. When the last enemy in any room gets low on stamina, they will sometimes beg for their life. When this happens, the player can either defeat or recruit them. Recruiting allows them to be called back onscreen briefly, later on, as a helper attack (like the striker characters in Marvel vs. Capcom). You can recruit EVERY non-boss enemy in the game, and there’s even a Pokédex-style checklist of them, which incentivizes the player to recruit all variations of all enemies.

Misako and Kyoko are awesome heroines! What does each team member like about these two characters?

I love the dynamic of having a female duo with one aggressive, angry character and one more cheerful, sweet character. That’s Misako (angry) and Kyoko (happy) in a nutshell, although when Kyoko gets angry, she’s even more intense than Misako.

Kyoko seems to be a favorite among the team because she’s so peppy and silly. Our lead animator, Kay Yu, really got fun and creative with her animations, which have got to be the wackiest collection of attacks of any brawler character ever. A lot of the team also loved how their personalities came out through the writing and the VO we recorded. Mami (Kyoko’s rival) was pretty beloved internally for just how bitter she is to the main girls.

Are there or will there be any cat accessories that the girls can acquire to make them more powerful? Maybe an extra nine lives, or the ability to always land on their feet?

Funny you mention that…. I won’t spoil anything, but let’s say that a fancy cat plays a big role in one of the game’s quests, and that cats in general play a role after you beat the game once and move onto Game+ mode.

Meowtastic!

Can we expect more surprises to be added to River City Girls after its release?

I hope so! We’ve got a lot of ideas, so hopefully the game is well received and we can dive back into River City.

Could the dynamic partnership between Arc System Works and WayForward result in more games in the future?

Definitely! Technically, this isn’t our first crossover — Arc previously published our games “Double Dragon Neon” and “Bloodrayne Betrayal” in Japan. Both we and Arc seem to love how Girls came out, and Arc was a blast to work with, so I’d like to see us team up many more times in the future.

Any advice to developers and those who want to make a high quality game?

Surround yourself with talented, agreeable people. Our team on this project was amazing, and everyone involved helped elevate the final product in their own creative way. There are certainly people who can make a great game top-to-bottom by themselves, but for me, the magic is in finding the perfect staff and then trusting them to help shape the vision of the game.