Releasing on the 28th of this month, Vengeance Hunters, in case you’re not aware, is a brand new beat ’em up, entirely developed for the Neo Geo. Born from the minds of the good folks at Nalua Studios, Vengeance Hunters is a game that I can’t wait to see in the hands of every beat ’em up fan, because trust me, this one will be a blast. To learn more about the game, I talked to one of the Lead Designers, Michael Monaghan, about the ins and outs of the game, and the experience of creating a brand new game for a 35 years console.

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TFK – Hello Michael, it’s a pleasure to have you here! Can you talk a little bit about you and your role at Nalua Studio?

MM – Hello! My name is Michael and I go by the online handle of “amerika*” (you Ramstein fans get it). My role with Nalua Studio is, on paper, Co-Lead Designer and also combat/gameplay Designer. However, since we are a small indie team, we all wear a LOT of hats so most of us qualify for about every role title you can think of. I am heavily involved in all aspects of the game and I also run all of our social media.

TFK – Before asking about the game, let’s talk about the system. Why did you guys decide to go with the Neo Geo as the base system?

MM – Quite a few of us on the team have a huge amount of love for the Neo-Geo. Not only did we see the big red arcade MVS cabinets everywhere growing up playing the likes of Magician Lord, Samurai Showdown, Metal Slug, Fatal Fury, and King of Fighters (among many others), a few of us also always wanted the prohibitively home AES system. One guy on the team actually owned one!

TFK – How complicated it was to get across all the documentation you guys probably needed to create a game for such an old system?

MM – The answer is, “difficult”. But since our programmer is extremely skilled and experienced, he was able to work through a lot of issues that we ran into when trying to build out the game. They took care of everything from the game’s programming to all of all of the tools we used and the build system and made it as easy as possible for the rest of us to work within the constraints of the Neo-Geo’s hardware and features.

TFK – Did the console’s capabilities interfere with your vision? Or did you guys have a clear picture in mind of what the Neo Geo was capable of doing from the start?

MM – For a hardware platform that was released in 1990, its raw power is pretty crazy. The ability to take data directly from multiple massive ROM banks and draw that to the screen quickly was amazing for the time. And that got even better over time as devs figured out ways around limits. However, the Neo-Geo does have some limits that myself and other designers were not aware of that shaped our game into what it is today. I knew the Neo-Geo could not do rotation in hardware, but I knew it could do scaling. But, there is a huge limitation to that scaling. It’s extremely hard on performance which is why you see it mostly in the 2D fighting games. You will see scaling effects in other games, but some of those are just the image being re-drawn at different sizes to simulate scaling since the Neo-Geo’s superpower is data storage and that fixes the performance issues.

A game like ours requires a lot of CPU for all the different things going on in any given scene and we needed to account for two-player mode. And we wanted to keep as close to 60FPS as possible despite the system being well known for slowing down even in one-player mode for non-fighting games. The Neo-Geo also doesn’t have as many parallax scrolling layers as you would expect it to. So the amount you see in Vengeance Hunters is the limit the system’s hardware allows. There are most likely some fancy ways around that, but for a first title, we stuck to what we knew the hardware could do without bringing it to its knees.
So, yeah, the Neo-Geo hardware definitely influenced our vision and design as things changed over time as we discovered that we could or could not do things. But I believe we did a good job working within the constraints.

TFK – Would you say you pushed the console’s limits?

MM – Oh definitely. We used every bit of power the Neo-Geo has in order to squeeze out performance. We were targeting always hitting 60fps in one-player mode and trying to hit it at all times in two-player. It was a big concern of ours so we had quite a few debug tools and builds that would let us see information that might not be noticeable when playing. Our programmer was a mad genius at optimizing his code to fix all the issues we found and I also had to get creative when designing areas with how enemies would arrive on screen to attempt to never exceed limits that would cause issues, but in a way that a player wouldn’t notice.
Some people won’t believe that because they, like me, thought the Neo-Geo was capable of tons of parallax and scaling. But it’s absolutely not without taking a huge performance hit. And a beat ’em up is not a genre where you have any CPU headroom leftover for non-hardware-based effects.

I don’t know if you want to put this in your article, but the issue with scaling is that the Neo-Geo can only scale a very large image down. It was not meant to take any image and scale it up and down in-hardware. So you have to draw all assets extremely huge and then scale it down and have enough headroom to bring it back up during gameplay. So it’s OK to do in a 2D fighter that doesn’t have anything else going on in a scene for the CPU to do, but it’s not OK for a beat ‘em up that has tons of characters, other sprites and checks going on that the CPU has to account for at the same time.

TFK – I know you can’t talk figures, but how is the demand for the Neo Geo version?

MM – There are a lot of Neo-Geo collectors out there. As a new game from a new studio without any proven history, I’d say we are doing pretty darn well with demand for the game. I know quite a few people who are waiting on our partners at Stone Age Gamer to carry the game. I am hopeful that we will go from fairly in-demand to really in-demand once the game releases and people see the quality level we were going for in every area.

TFK – Let’s talk about the game. Why going for a beat ‘em up as your first game?

MM – A Beat’em’up action game was chosen in part because a few of us on the team really like the genre. And partly it was chosen because we think that genre could use another good entry on the platform. The genre works well in an arcade setting so it was the perfect choice to start with from our perspective.

TFK – The characters are a pretty unique bunch, where did you look for inspiration for them? There were any character cuts in the production that you can talk about?

MM – The characters’ looks were all designed before I joined the team via concept art and descriptive texts. I can tell you that Loony’s design changed a bit due to our pixel artist claiming him “FOR IRELAND!!” though LOL.
There were not any cuts. But I did have an idea of how a fourth playable character would play if we had decided to add one.

TFK – You guys once said that Marvel vs Capcom was one of your inspirations, so I would like to know how this inspiration shaped Vengeance Hunters. What other games did you guys look for inspiration?

MM – The biggest inspiration for Vengeance Hunters in regards to the gameplay was more modern 3D action games that the 2D beat ’em up evolved into over time. Games like the Devil May Cry series or Bayonetta. But also a bit of, “What if Marvel Vs. Capcom was a beat ’em up??”.
The idea behind that was to make a 2D beat ’em up that somebody who mostly wanted to mash one or two buttons could play and have fun like any other beat ’em up. Bayonetta, for example, allows this even if it’s not optimal or all that fun. HOWEVER, if you want to start learning some really basic chain combos that are easy to perform and then try to chain those together in unique ways that include each character’s signature move, then you’ll find that the game has a lot of options for players who want to use them.
I tried to balance the game so that anybody could play it and be successful in their chosen play style. Hopefully, every player ends up finding a play style that suits them and is fun for them. I do suggest experimenting and remember that VH is a 4 button game.

TFK – How hard was it to balance the combat to make it approachable to newcomers and interesting to veterans?

MM – It is pretty hard. Since we are locked to a 12Mghz CPU and no benefits of having a modern engine with mostly plug-and-play libraries that would assist with things like enemy AI, I had to make a few concessions here and there to keep the game easy enough for all types of players yet hard enough for experts. And hitting that for everyone, due to that being a very subjective area, is pretty hard.

Mostly I wanted to make sure that players who are new to gaming, new to the genre, or old vets who only really played the early 90’s beat ’em ups where you didn’t do much beyond punch a few times and watch the enemy fall down. I want everyone to be able to pull off ‘cool stuff’ without much effort. So, for example, if you just hit the Light Attack button, you will find that all playable characters do a 4-hit combo that will end in an uppercut-type move that launches enemies straight up into the air.

You can then follow that up with a number of different attacks or simply move on and do that to the next enemy/group. I hope people learn that they can chain tons of things together and use each character’s signature move in ways they are not used to when playing another era-appropriate beat ’em up action game.

TFK – There’s no point in having nice combat, if you have nothing to beat, so, how did you guys come up with the many enemies in the game? How did you make them interesting?

MM – We tried to give enemies a varied moveset that goes beyond what most games in the genre have for the era. One enemy, named Rosendo, can drop in from the sky with a knife attack on to the player, he can throw his knife at the player, he can jump at the player with his knife, he can choose to do a couple of different attacks with those knives, he can block (and block % chance goes up with difficulty) and he can counter-attack if you keep punching into his block (also goes up with difficulty).

We also made different colored variations of him that prefer to do particular moves over others. We have one where he drops in and throws a knife (that you can punch back at him!!) and leaves, another version that will take a ranged position and throw his knife most of the time, but can and will melee you, and another that will prefer jump attacks over all the rest. All of them have slightly different color palettes so that the player can learn to identify them and prioritize them.

Repeat that for all enemies in the game pretty much. Especially the bosses. Oh, each boss has three phases and they all gain new abilities in each phase. I never thought bosses that mostly stayed the same through the whole fight were interesting. I also never liked bosses that simply threw ‘jobber’ enemies at the player during a boss fight was interesting. So I made sure Vengeance Hunters did not have that (one fight has other enemies, but you’ll see why when you get there!!!) and I tried to make each boss fight unique and require the player to figure them out. A lot of effort went into making both enemies and bosses unique and challenging in their own ways.

TFK – There’s a thin line between a fun challenge and an unfair game so, how hard was balancing the enemies in the game?

MM – It wasn’t that bad since we didn’t have to approach the game as a quarter-stealing arcade game meant to make the max amount of money from players. I was able to make it feel more like a power fantasy where, if you know the game just a little bit, you can do some crazy stuff and you probably won’t have much difficulty getting through on Easy or Normal mode pretty quickly. You can easily clump enemies and you won’t have one of them break out of your hits and randomly hit you without any chance to respond like

what is common in many of those types of games. But you still need to be aware of what enemies can do and avoid damage. You might be destroying a group in front of you, only to have another enemy behind jump-stab you and whittle away at your HP. And bosses have mechanics and abilities you will need to learn to identify and prioritize. If you simply stand there and try to punch, you might have a rough go.

TFK – And how did you approach those bosses? Was it hard to design them?

MM – I wanted to make sure the bosses were all unique in their presentation, their abilities, and their mechanics. I also did not want to include a bunch of extra enemies you’d already defeated 30 times on the stage to be a part of that. Which made each boss fight much harder to design and tune, but it is way more fulfilling in my opinion to beat them once you figure out how to. For example, one boss will require the player to double tap to dash to more easily avoid some attacks. And it will also require you to jump and use your strong attack if you want to shorten the fight. Another boss will drastically change its preferred move set after gaining new moves in each phase. This will hopefully keep players on their toes and give them something different to contend with than what was common for the genre during the 90’s.

TFK – The game will be released on the 28th and, since this is primarily a Neo Geo game, is expected that we won’t see any future updates so, what are your plans for the future? Could a sequel be on the table if the game is successful, or do you have other plans already in mind?

MM – Yes, the game will officially come out on the 28th. Hopefully, that means all platforms, but there still could be slight delays that are out of our control for a couple of them. We do have the ability to update even the Neo-Geo carts via SD card. However, we hope we never have to do that. That will only be used if there is some major issue is found that we did not see or simply could not find during testing. As for a sequel if the game is successful? We’ve talked about it or doing spin-offs. Anything is possible!

TFK – Did you guys have considered the possibility of porting the game to other retro-consoles? Maybe the Dreamcast?

MM – We have and the DC and other platforms have been considered but we kept our sights focused on the Neo-Geo AES/MVS platforms for the game. We do commonly get requests for the Neo-Geo CD as well. And, related, we have also talked about a ROM release in the future for the Neo-Geo version of the game. However, that would be pretty far down the road and will likely be locked to the NeoSD platform

TFK – Do you have something to say for the current and future fans of the game?

MM – We are currently working on our next game and progress is going great. It’s in a different genre than Vengeance Hunters. That is all that I can really say about that right now 🙂

I would like to thank Michael for taking the time to answer my questions, and you for reading this interview. You already can wishlist Vengeance Hunters on Steam, but the game will also be available on consoles.
If you are interested in the MVS version, you can find it on this link.