An emerging theme of 2024 is the success stories of animal-based indie games, with MMO raid-styled roguelikeRabbit and Steelfollowing hot on the heels ofSekiro-inspired crab adventureAnother Crab’s Treasure.
Rabbit and Steelproudly wears itsFinal Fantasy 14inspiration on its sleeve, blending theMMO’s iconic raid approach with aTouhou-inspired bullet hell design and cute rabbit girl protagonists, with a healthy dose of the developer’s previous titleMaiden and Spellunderpinning the whole experience.Rabbit and Steel’slaunch may benefit fromthe hotly anticipatedFinal Fantasy 14expansionDawntrailbeingon the horizon, but its unique blend of mechanics alone more than earns the success it is currently enjoying. During the World First race held on the game’s launch weekend, Game Rant sat down withRabbit and Steel’s developer, who goes by Mino Dev, to discuss hisFinal Fantasy 14love letter, the eventful nature of that then-ongoing race, and more.The following transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
The Launch of Rabbit and Steel
Q: Can you introduce yourself, please?
Mino:I’m Mino Dev. I am an indie game developer. I made two games, one calledMaiden and Spell, that released in 2020. The other is calledRabbit and Steel, which has been doing extremely well–beyond my wildest expectations. It seems people really, really liked the game, which is quite surprising to me.
Q: How does it feel to have the game finally out in the world?
A:I’m good. I was trying to hit the release date that I wanted, May 9, a bit hard for the past eight months or so, and I’ve been sort of crunching myself just getting things done. It feels excellent to actually have made it out on time. And for the game to be a success? That’s wonderful!
Q: As we talk, the World First Race is still ongoing, right?
A:Yes, correct.
There is currently a team that has beaten all five bosses, all they need to do is clear the run, and I don’t know when they’re going to do that. It does take about 40 minutes to do a run. It’s quite long, but you know, take it calmly and the balance gets you there. Sometime today, maybe within the next few hours. It’s super exciting.
I’m kind of glad that the World First Race has gone this way a little bit? There was a team that cheesed to clear, and we changed a rule so that there’s still a competition for a better way of saying it. I mean, that’s kind of expected of a roguelike.
The World First Race was basically this race to clear all bosses in the game–there are five bosses in the game and then there’s a final boss. We released the hardest difficulty, Lunar, and we had a little race to see who could clear all of them and the final boss. The way we did that was kind of like a lot of MMOs with their raid tiers. InWorld of Warcraft, it’s like this big event that Blizzard puts on where some teams compete whenever there’s a new raid to release to beat all the bosses in a raid tier.Final Fantasy 14is a little bit more of a community-driven thing. Idon’t think Square Enix wants to encourage itbecause of just the way they want to run their game, but I thought it would be fun. It’s something you can only do once in a game like this. This is the only time you can do something like a World First Race.
We did it, and there was a team that had some sort of cheese strategy, basically, where they had three of one class and then had one of another. It worked out so that if they just got one item, which was a fairly common defensive upgrade, then they could be invincible the whole time and do a whole bunch of damage and basically ignore the whole thing. That was very clever. But we all, including the team themselves, thought that’s not what everyone wanted out of the race. You wanted people to try the bosses over and over and clear them, so we decided to award them the “roguelike victory” or beating the game like a roguelike–cheesing the whole thing–and whoever wins the World First Race that is still ongoing, where the new rule is that they all have to use a different class, which makes the cheese impossible. They are going to win the raid victory, and we’ll have two separate trophies for that.
The Roguelike Champion team was trv, Doue, Insan1tea, and chiv who finished their cheesy accomplishment Friday, May 10. The Raid Champions were Lial, Acero(RyanGDS), akaya, and Youko who polished off the game’s final boss on Sunday, May 12.
Q: What inspiredRabbit and Steel?
A:I played a lot ofFinal Fantasy 14over the years. I’m definitely the sort ofFinal Fantasy 14gamer, as it were. Before that, I even playedFinal Fantasy 11, the previous MMO from Square Enix.
My first indie game was a bullet hell fighting game calledMaiden and Spell.If you’ve ever playedTouhou, it’s something similar to that, but instead of it being you against the boss, you both play as the boss and try to hit each other. The reason that that’s important is that, when I started making my second game, I went through a few different prototypes for games that never really went anywhere. But when I came up with the idea of, “Okay, what if I just madeFinal Fantasy 14raids?” I already made this bullet hell fighting game, which has rollback netcode, and it had ways to send patterns over the internet, like all the bullet hell patterns, that was very efficient and allowed for very, very good netcode so that you could play from anywhere to anywhere. You didn’t have to worry about ping, thanks to this rollback thing that worked very well.
I had all the tools in place for that for something likeRabbit and Steel. I had the code from my previous game, and it just seemed like something I could do, perhaps even something that only I, uniquely, was capable of doing in the way that I did because I had the code from my previous game. A lot of the way thatRabbit and Steelis, is as a result of working off my previous game. I think a lot of people, when they think of an idea like a raiding roguelike, would probably try to include some other things that are fromFinal FantasyorWorld of Warcraft.They might want to make it 3D, they might want to make it 20-man instead of four, or they might want to try to have a bazillion things on their hotbar instead of just four.
A lot of people have called it a mix ofTouhouandFinal Fantasy 14, but in a way,Maiden and Spellwas a mix ofTouhouand a fighting game, and thenRabbit and SteelmixesMaiden and SpellandFinal Fantasy 14. There’s a lineage but it basically just seemed like something I could pull off, so I did.
Q: Why rabbits?
A:I mentioned that I was doing some other prototypes for games. One of them had the “different animal races as humans” kind of idea, so there were crows, wolves, dragons, rabbits, and frogs. I kind of had this idea of the world, but when I looked at it holistically, it was just turning into this very generic fantasy thing that didn’t really stand out, I thought. So I had an idea: why not just make all of the main characters rabbits rather than having a mix of different animal races? It kind of catches the eye just ever so slightly.
That’s hard to explain, but if you say, “Oh, it’s a raiding roguelike,” that’s an interesting idea. Then you say, “All the characters, all the playable characters, are rabbit girls,” then people are like, “Oh, wait, what? That’s sort of weird. That’s sort of interesting.” I thought it would help differentiate the game from a very sort of generic fantasy and something immediately recognizable, if that makes sense. That’s mostly why I did it.
Also, I do like rabbit girls, I guess you could say. They’re easy to draw. It’s easy to come up with new ones.
The Pick-Up-And-Play MMO Raid
Q: What are some of the raid mechanics that are adapted forRabbit and Steelthat players of MMOs would recognize?
A:The very most recognizable thing and the bread and butter of allraid mechanicsis having to spread out and also having to stack together. One interesting thing, actually, I’d like to mention about stacking together: I am very, very proud of this solution that I came up with for stack together. If you played the game, you know, but it’s this ring of bullets that spreads outwards in a crisscross pattern. InTouhou, you might see something like that. InTouhou 10:Mountain of Faith, there’s a boss called Suwako, who does this attack called Mishaguji-sama. It’s like this crisscross pattern, and it’s a very simple mathematical formula.
InMaiden and Spell, one of the characters, a character called Sun Priestess, uses this attack, and the gimmick of the attack is that if you’re inside the ring, it doesn’t hurt you because it goes outward, but if you’re outside the ring, it’s extremely difficult to dodge. Using that for a raid stack mechanic was probably the best idea that I had over the course ofRabbit and Steel’s development, and in code I still call them Sun Priestess circles. The code is actually full ofMaiden and Spellthings.
I have those kinds of stack circles, and I also have a lot of other things like lasers and spinning lasers, crisscrossing AoEs. A lot of the things that are inRabbit and Steelare leaning a little bit more towards the things you have to dodge. I focus on that more than other mechanics.
InFinal Fantasy 14, a lot of things that will happen in high-level raids are caused by debuffs. You’ll have a debuff, you’ll explode after 20 seconds, and anyone in an explosion will also get the debuff. Then after 30 seconds, three people have to have this debuff go off in a specific spot–stuff like that is kind of how their raids work. I tried to avoid that stuff not because I don’t think it’s good design because I do think it’s cool within the context ofFinal Fantasy 14, but because it’s a tiny indie game that is supposed to be pick-up-and-play. You can’t have any really complicated stuff like that inRabbit and Steel. You can’t do things that need to be puzzled out and understood quickly. It needs to be very obvious why you died.
Q: You do a lot of grouping up of mechanics and regions; what was going through your mind while you were planning out what mechanics would run together?
A:One thing I wanted to have was a new mechanic for every single boss. Every single boss needs to have at least one thing that only they do, with perhaps the exception of the final boss and some of the final stages because you can’t really practice them, so I didn’t want them to surprise you with anything too new. Some of the mechanics that I decided to go with this or that are actually based, again, aroundMaiden and Spell, so a lot of the raid moves that the characters use within the game are moves thatMaiden and Spellcharacters use.
For one example, the crow boss uses a time stop, and then you have to do raid moves and stuff like that. There was a character inMaiden and Spellcalled the Royal Arcanist, who also used time stops; she could hit people with like a little clock andit would stop them in time, then she could debuff them. She had this sort of aesthetic of being a witch, who was using a lot of debuffs and my idea was like a high-level character that specialized in debuffs. But that carried over into the Crow’s Nest enemies–that sort of aesthetic that Royal Arcanist had in my previous game. Then with the dragons, there was another character inMaiden and Spellcalled Dreadwyrm Heir who was a dragon. They used a lot of lasers and very fast attacks, so inRabbit and Steel, it’s again lasers and fast attacks.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that I carried a lot of stuff over and I have this idea of what elements look like in my games. This is what a water element attack looks like, and then the frogs will use that, which is the same as the characters inMaiden and Spellthat used that. If you playMaiden and Spell, you’ll see where things come from. A lot of stuff,a lot of stuffcarried over.
Q: Were there any mechanics you used that wouldn’t work as well in an MMO? Any certain things you were able to do because you are a more arcade-y experience?
A:Well, the roguelike mechanics, for sure, I’ll say that. I think that someone in the reviews was like, “Oh,this is what variant dungeons should have been.” But the way the game works, really, has a lot of things that MMOs can’t do, just because of the way that players interact with other players.
For instance, you gain items that improve your DPS. At the end, it shows you your DPS. It has a DPS meter that tells everyone who’s doing the most damage.Final Fantasy 14, quite famously, doesn’t want people using parsers, they don’t want people checking each other’s DPS, and they don’t want people to worry about how much damage their other party members are doing, because it leads to a lot of player toxicity.
The way that they’ve designed the game, they couldn’t have a roguelike system like this one where you have some item that makes one of your cooldowns five seconds faster or something like that, because that might be completely overpowered on Black Mage but completely useless for Warrior. That’s something that is incompatible with a lot of designs that not justFinal Fantasy 14,but a lot of MMOs do.
The roguelike elements and the DPS elements are sort of this thing that only I can do because it’s this pick-up-and-play experience. If you don’t have good DPS in this run, you’ll have good DPS next run, and the DPS that you do as a player isn’t necessarily tied to how good you are. It’s sort of random and based on the loot, and because of that, instead of when you see those DPS numbers at the end, you’re not like, “Oh, you did not have enough DPS. You’re out of the group. You can’t beat this with us.” You’re instead like, “Oh, wow, you did 1000 DPS. That’s a lot. Wow, congrats. That’s amazing. It’s awesome.” That experience is something that I think I can do uniquely without that toxicity MMOs always struggle with.
Raiding Together or Solo
Q: That makes me think of how players ofFinal Fantasy 14notoriously hate party finders and pick-up groups. How did you take the lessons of that into your matchmaking?
A:This is another thing fromMaiden and Spell. A lot of games use automatic matchmaking where you just click on “find game” and you attempt to find a game. That really doesn’t work very well for smaller games, and it really hurts the community aspects in the name of convenience. Matchmaking like that was out of the question.
I think that when people use lobby systems, they’re a little bit more forgiving when no one’s on. Imagine a game likeMaiden and Spell: I don’t know what its current active user count is, but if you went into it right now, you probably normally wouldn’t see any lobbies but you would see a Discord button. That says to players, “Hey, if no one’s on, join the Discord because you know people still play this game.” If I want to play this game with other people, I can just join a community that does that.
That design is preferable in indie games rather than the thing that a lot of indie games do where they add random matchmaking. A player goes on, they hit a random matchmaker for a little bit of an older game, and they don’t get a match because no one’s playing at that moment. They have no way of saying, “Hey, does anyone want to play with this? Come wait with me!” because there’s just a queue and the queue never ends. They refund the game, they write negative reviews, they call it a dead game, they post the concurrent user count to Reddit, and “Wow,look at this dead game.” Then the videos on YouTube are made, asking what happened to this game and discussing its downfall, its death, etc, etc. Rather than like, if you find people to play it with, you have people to play with.
That’s the way I wantRabbit and Steelto be as well. I’m sure this rush at the beginning won’t last forever. At some point, there will be a very small number of people still playing the game. I don’t know if that’ll be in a year, five years, or 10 years, or however long the Steam servers stay up, but you can still just login and play it with your friends as long as the peer-to-peer matchmaking lobby works. I think that’s kind of important.
Q: Can you explain the differences between the multiplayer and the solo experience?
A:Originally in the demo, and my original vision of the game, was that the solo experience would be a very different game where it was mostly a bullet hell. It was mostly using bullet hell things while you did your rotation, and that could be something of a unique thing. However, in the full game, I had to tone that way, way down. Over and over, over the course of making the full game, I made a lot of new mechanics that I could use in both versions of boss fights, so I didn’t have to fall back on bullet hell.
It’s very easy to make bullet hell patterns that are difficult–you just put more bullets on the screen and make the dodges more precise. You can have creative, pretty little patterns that are absolutely deadly. They’re all very easy to make, but making like a single-player “raid encounter,” with you know, cleaves and teleports and circles is a little bit more difficult, but I kind of got used to it over time.
One of the key motivations behind this decision was, when the demo was part of the Steam Next Fest, some people were trying it out. There was one very famousFinal Fantasy 14raider, who has gotten like World Firsts and stuff–I don’t want to mention exactly who–couldn’t clear normal mode. I saw him struggling to just clear solo normal mode because of the bullet hell. This was a person who was very, very good at video games, obviously like they’re one of the topFinal Fantasy 14raiders, but they just could not clear Normal mode because even the normal mode level of bullet hell was too much. That’s just one of those things where I’m very used to bullet hells, so Idon’t understand how difficult it is for someone who isn’t. I definitely wanted to turn that back to catch the people who aren’t really into that and people who aren’t used to that kind of thing.
The single-player is single-player raid mechanics. There are no spreads, obviously, because those would not make sense. Basically, it’s completely different game code-wise, although I do copy and paste between the multiplayer and single-player quite a bit. There are similar mechanics, but everything has been made to work for a single-player.
That’s another thing, actually, that’s very important to me: that there is a single-player mode is something that’s also inMaiden and Spell. WhereMaiden and Spellis a fighting game, so normally you fight one-on-one, I did go through the effort of putting in a complete story mode where you go through bosses and they have unique attacks. There are extra bosses and stuff like that in the game. I wanted that forRabbit and Steelas well, so that you could just play it alone if you wanted to. Because again, at some point, there will be no one left to play the game with, but even then, it will still be a good game because there is single-player.
Q: What can you share about the single-player story?
A:The story is about a kingdom, this little country called the Moonlit Kingdom. The setup to the story is that the founding of this kingdom was when a rabbit was so extremely lonely that the moon itself came down to comfort her and talk to her. After that experience, she decided to found a kingdom. That’s like the fairy tale behind the kingdom’s founding.
Then we come to the modern day within the game’s lore. A couple of weeks ago, all contact with that kingdom was lost, and anyone who goes in doesn’t come back out. So your job as adventurers is to go into the kingdom and figure out what happened. Throughout the game, you kind of have an idea of what happened, if you are paying extra close attention to the story. It can be a little bit hard to follow at times because there are a lot of characters jumping around and talking, and you’re doing runs at the same time. But yeah, that’s the story–just trying to figure out what happened to this city and attempt to solve the problem.
Q: Tell me about the character classes?
A:Sothere’s ten in the game, five were in the demo.
The Wizardis the one I started with because mages, but she was a very simple design. She got me into the groove of what kind of thing makes a character class inRabbit and Steel. I based her a little bit off ofFinal Fantasy 14’s 2.0 Black Mage, where she’d have a random proc to do an extra bit of damage. Black Mage had the Firaga proc, and she has a reset on her special that does a lot of damage, as well as a mobility option.
Second, there’s anAssassin rabbitwho backstabs people. It’s a very fast character.
There’s aHeavy Blade rabbit, which, I guess, is kind of a stretch to say it is based on Dark Knight. The one thing I wanted to carry over was Dark Knight inFinal Fantasy 14has this plunge, and that’s like a really cool thing that they can do. It’s very iconic to their character, and I wanted to have that gap closer. The Heavy Blade has a gap closer, that’s her special, and then you know, she can just swing her sword. She’s also a very simple character to play.
There’s aDancerwho has this very rhythmic way of playing. She has a lot of random procs and all of her global cooldowns are equal so that you don’t ever get really out of rhythm. It’s just this constant rhythm. It’s very fun to play her for that reason.
Then there’s theDruid. One of the things I couldn’t include inRabbit and Steelthat some people wantedwas a healer class. It doesn’t really make sense with the design of the game where HP is a very precious resource that cannot be recovered easily, so there isn’t a proper healer. However, Druid has a lot of really good defensive skills, so if you want to be the mage that saves her allies, that sort of aesthetic and feeling is there. She’s mostly damage-over-time class, so that’s sort of an interesting thing.
So next isSpellsword.I guess you could kind of call her the Red Mage parallel. The game composer, by the way, Hogmanay, also playsFinal Fantasy 14quite a lot, and he is much better at the game than me. He clears Ultimates in the first two weeks, that kind of thing. He mains Red Mage, so I definitely wanted to include something similar to that for him. I got his feedback on it a little bit, to focus on what’s important to the class. She’s like a melee caster, where she has to keep up Darkspell, and that enhances her attacks. So that’s a really fun one.
Next is theSniper rabbit, which is like an archer. One of the things I wanted to do with her was she has a debuff to start with. Some of the items in the demo interacted with debuffs, but a lot of characters couldn’t really capitalize on that very well. One thing I wanted to have was a character that just has a debuff to start, so she’s kind of like an archer class. She has this vibe of aiming and shooting, but also being very mobile is something that I wanted to capture with her.
There is aBruiser rabbitwho is punchy. She’s sort of like a combination between a Monk and Warrior inFinal Fantasyterms, I’d say, so she has Berserk where she can hit things over and over and over again. Normally, her primary skill is very, very slow, but when she goes berserk, it becomes very, very fast. There are a lot of interesting item combinations you can do, but at the same time, a lot of focus is on character specials–the super powerful move–and for her, it just gets her a buff. That makes it so that a lot of items that normally buff the special aren’t quite as good for her, which I think plays into her aesthetic of being the brawler, the sort who just hits the problem.
The ninth class isDefender rabbit. She’s the classic sword and shield class, except it’s a spear in her case. I guess it’s somewhat between Dragoon and Paladin? She doesn’t have a jump but does have 1-2-3 combos. I think that the 1-2-3 nature of her attacks makes her feel very sturdy. It’s very consistent, and you slow down a little bit when you use your primary, you take your shield out and poke with your spear, and it just makes you feel like a very tanky class even though you have the same HP as everyone else. She has a few extra defensive options and she’s good at AoE, but that’s with the weakness that her DPS is ever so slightly lower than most of the other classes in the game–in fact, all the other classes in the game! She has low DPS against training dummies.
The last one is theAncient rabbitwho is a Summoner analog. I’ve played Summoner sinceFinal Fantasy 11and this is the class that I wanted to make while making this game. You command a pet and tell it to do things, and it kills things for you instead of you killing them yourself. There are different palette swaps in the game, so every single pallet swap of the Ancient rabbit has a different creature. It’s basically Egi glamorous. I have a glam system. Final Fantasy 14, where’s my Shiva-egi!?
The summons are actually based on the characters from my previous game,Maiden and Spell. It’s a little cute reference, so if anyone’s played that they’ll recognize all the playable characters within the palette swaps. It’s just a little bit of extra effort that I wanted to put in because it’s my favorite class and also it’s a reference to my previous game.
Q: Would you say thatRabbit and Steelis a thematic sequel toMaiden and Spellthe same way theFinal Fantasygames are thematic sequels to one another?
A:It’s actually interesting you say that! One of the big inspirations forMaiden and Spellwas actually a game calledDissidia Final Fantasy. I’m not sure if you’re familiar? TheFinal Fantasyfighting games, specifically the PSP ones. I haven’t played the PS4 ones, but I hear they weren’t very good. But the PSP ones wereexcellent games that were very, very underrated.
In a way,Maiden and Spellis about as linked toRabbit and SteelasFinal Fantasy Dissidiais toFinal Fantasy 14. The world isn’t shared, but certain elements are common between them because they’re in the same series, which sort of gives them this link.
That just feels interesting to me, that there are these different kinds of magic, and those magics are shown in a certain way within the game’s attacks. That’s a prettyTouhouthing too, it’s like one of the guiding principles ofTouhouthat all the characters should tell themselves through their attacks. I have the same goal done in a similar way in both games, but they are both very different games as one is a fighting game and one is a roguelike.
The Future for Mino Dev
Q: So should I read into your pattern that in a few years we can look forward to “Character Noun and Combat Noun” asaFinal Fantasy Tacticspastiche?
A:Yeah, something like that. I think that I’ll continue doing that.
Although I would like to say, they didn’t spellRabbit and Steelquite right. You might notice something very, very slightly different about the Steam pages for it andMaiden and Spell, and that is thatMaiden and Spelluses ampersand (&) andRabbit and Steeljust uses the word and. I have to say that the ampersand was a nightmare. I feel like keeping a list of all the computer systems that ampersands destroy–Steam is one of them!
The first few daysMaiden and Spelldidn’t even show up in Steam search because it had an ampersand. You couldn’t search for the game. I had to fix that by changing some backend things, and then when I made a soundtrack for the game, it defaulted toMaiden &&& Spell Soundtrack. It’s just become this meme within my Discord where you just see a bunch of &&& into everything you say.
The ampersand just breaks everything, so while the official branding ofRabbit and Steelis with an ampersand, everywhere I have to put it into a database is just the word “and.” If you ever write about the game or have to put it into anything, I would recommend the same because, boy, computers do not like that simple &.
Q: What’s next forRabbit and Steel?
A:Well, I think that over the next month or two, I’m going to try to implement some of the things that are extremely easy to make and highly requested. I think one of those things is a toy box where you can try out items freely against a training dummy and see what kind of broken things you can make. What I’m thinking of doing is making it so that you have to clear a raid with an item to unlock it in the toy box or something like that. And then some other things that are kind of easy to do that I’d like to do within the next month or so.
I don’t want to mention anything specific because I might not get around to it because, again,Dawntraildoes come out, and I think a lot of people are looking forward to that. What I think I might try to do is do all the easy stuff in the back end stufflike mod support or work with Steam Workshop, stuff like that, but it won’t be out by Dawntrail. The next timeFinal Fantasy 14falls into a little bit of a lull, maybe between patches or something like that, I can try to have something big, something like new bosses, new classes, that kind of thing, as free DLC. It might be like, you know, “Let’s agree to meet back in the Moonlit Kingdom next time we’re all bored, okay?” That kind of thing.
So yeah, I probably plan to release at some point in the future something very chunky, and you can log back on. I’d like to do that instead of releasing a lot of tiny little updates. Just have you log back intoRabbit and Steeland there’s new stuff, that kind of thing sometime in the future. I think that’d be a lot of fun.
Q: Anything else you’d like to add?
A:I’m overwhelmed by how many people are playing the game right now. A little bit. It’s absolutely wild. I did not expect it to blow up this much.
I was expecting it to be ‘Yeah, I think this will be a little bit more populated thanMaiden and Spell.’ I’ve had some people interested in the game, but this response is absolutely amazing. It’s probably 10 or 20 times what I expected it to be, so all that’s very overwhelming. I’m happy everyone’s enjoying the game and glad that it worked out. Yeah, thanks everyone for playing.
[END]
Rabbit and Steelis available on Steam.
