- Hashem Habibian
- 2022-08-31
- 6:42 am
My Interview with Julian Wilton, the Creative diroctor of Massive Monster, The Company behind Cult of the Lamb during Gamescom 2022:
1. There are not so many games focused on religious themes such as Binding of Isaac. I wanted to know your inspirations for making a game about a religious cult?
To be honest we didn’t go in within engender about like exploring religion or anything too much. I think a lot for us was kind of like even just looking at the cult as an idea of how religions start and how does even come about.
It’s just usually through things like people getting together and have similar beliefs and share those belief systems. It is actually really wholesome but often like what can happen is people become leaders and they take advantage of these people and exploit them.
I found it very interesting and it is an interesting thing to explore in games because that power the player has over the followers, can make an interesting gameplay.
2. Cult of the Lamb is mainly rogue-like but also has a management aspect to it. How did you manage to balance the game on both sides?
Actually it took ages that actually get it working. It was not working properly for 6 months before launch. I think a lot of it was about using the followers.
They were kind of like the glue between both of the connections because you need to look after them, keep them fed so you can get stronger in the dungeons so basically just one thing will lead to the other thing kind of show that all the loops are connected that way.
I think a lot of it we found once we originally didn’t really want to make the player stronger so that kind of was some of the step back but once we just were like you know what stuff that let’s just make the player stronger it kind of worked a lot better.
3. Cult of the Lamb is a very short game in comparison to longer games like Hades and Dead Cells, but not too short. During the development, weren’t you afraid that it may not appeal to some of the hardcore players of this genre?
It is definitely a concern like kind of trying to please the hades crowd and the dead cells people that really love hardcore roguelike experiences but then also kind of this other audience that sees all the happy little animals that see animal crossing kind of vibe and that might not have even played a roguelike before dungeon crawler and make sure that they also have an enjoyable time with it so for me.
I actually suck at games so because it’s just like we want everyone be able to play through it and have a good time but it does mean that it kind of makes experience for those players a little work. What we always wanted to do, was to make sure we are supporting that so we want new game plus, we want to give harder experiences for those players. For launch we had to push that back to update it.
Hopefully as we kind of continue to work on it, we can add that depth it needs on the road like end to get to a similar level. I don’t think it’ll ever be like hades or something like that but we are doing our own thing.
4. We’re so happy to know that Cult of the Lamb sold over one million copies in less than a month. Do you have any post-launch content that we’re going to see soon?
We definitely want to update the game. It was always a plan to continue to update it similar to other games. Just continue update it giving new content.
It’ll definitely be happening. We don’t have too much more so say about yet because we haven’t done it and we don’t know if it’s gonna work so we’ll see. First one will be much more quality of life more depth, more being able to replay it a lot more and then the second will be more themed and kind of have more fun new items.