I have thought about it Bugsnax so much so that it feels like I’ve eaten one of the suspiciously addictive critters myself. It’s been a week since I’ve finished the game and I still catch myself mumbling ‘bunger bunger bunger’ while going about my day. To satisfy my hunger for more Bugsnax without actually consuming bugsnax, I decided to send an email to Kevin Zuhn, senior creative director and writer of Bugsnax, some of my burning questions.
(This interview has been slightly edited for clarity.)
Kotaku: Can you tell me what your vision was for the Bugsnax? How did you come up with this idea? How was your design process?
Kevin Zuhn: The first seed came from an old drawing I made in college of a wafer mixed with a caterpillar (the Wafflepillar), which I turned into a pitch about collecting insects made from food. That was combined with [gameplay designer] John Murphy’s pitch about muppets that are mutated by what they eat, and [CFO, programmer, webmaster] Devon Scott-Tunkin’s pitch about screaming bananas, and at the end of our pitching process it had become Bugsnax!
When we started making the creatures ourselves, we made a big list of iconic dishes (hamburger, fries, cake) and iconic critters (ant, dragonfly, scorpion), and looked for ways to connect them. We wanted to make sure we had a wide variety of tastes, temperatures, body shapes, abilities, etc. Sometimes we built a bugsnak based on a very strong visual design, sometimes to meet a mechanical need, and sometimes just for the sake of a joke! You could say that our design process was a controlled chaos.
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Kotaku: Did you hire professionals to pronounce the bugsnax? For some reason I have a grand fantasy that the bugsnax is voiced by normal non-voice acting people who work for your studio and you put everyone in a box one day and said “give me your best bugnax impression” and the best were picked.
Zuhn: I wish each of us at Young Horses had the talent to make that happen, but the bugsnax is all voiced by professionals! The good folks at Brightskull turned to Robbie Daymond [the voice of Sailor Moon’s Tuxedo Mask] and Cristina Valenzuela [Sailor Mars from the same show], and they were each assigned six bugs. In the recording booth, our voice director, Michael Csurics, said to them, “You’re a hot dog, you crawl around like a worm, you can only say your own name, that’s Weenyworm. How does that sound? and they would improvise hilarious voices until we found one we liked. The scripts were the funniest in the world because the whole page would say ‘Scoopy Banoopy’ over and over. The whole process was bananas starting to end and I enjoyed of every step.
Kotaku: The grumpuses are also all unique characters. They all have desires and fears and insecurities, which makes them remarkably complex as NPCs go. What was your thought process for them?
Zuhn: We wanted Bugsnax to be an ensemble story, so my first goal was to determine what role each character played in Snaxburg’s society. I started with very broad archetypes: the mayor, the farmer, the archaeologist. Once we got that sorted out, the next question was why each of them wanted bugsnax. What is the hole in their life they are trying to fill? I wanted to make sure they all had different answers so they would have different perspectives on what bugsnax is and what is important in life. That helped me work out more details on how they act!
From there my favorite part: what do they think of each other? I drew large charts to keep track of who friends, partners or enemies would be and why. How does the problem affect their relationships in their lives, both good and bad? With all those questions answered, I was able to build quests and in-game scenes around the characters’ greatest sources of conflict! I really wanted to make sure this all felt grounded and organic because absolutely everything else about the game is ridiculous.
Kotaku: If you were to take an internal survey to find out who everyone’s favorite bugsnak would be, which one would it be (and why is it Bunger)? Do you have a favorite Grumpus in the same way?
When I complete an internal survey, I get ten different answers! The Young Horses do not agree on anything. My personal favorite is actually Preying Picantis, but Bunger has a special shelf in my heart. There’s just something magnetic about Tom Taylorson’s cheeseburger-like-dog performance. As for my favorite grumpus, that’s Chandlo Funkbun (because he’s by far the most fun to write).
(Kotaku: Bunger all day long. But I also love the spicy Sweetiefly.) Were there bugs cut from the finished product?
Zuhn: Oh enough! We had set up bugsnak draft pages and we had a system for voting our favorites. Everything below the voting threshold was cut off. Victims include a grilled cheese crab, a bacon fly, a spaghetti meatball snail, and even the original waffle pillar! There are dozens more unused designs, some of which have even been prototyped, but every bugsnak that actually got a full 3D modeling treatment stayed to the end.
Kotaku: One bug snax that confused me was the Paletoss. I didn’t understand the name until I realized, ‘Duh! It hears one palette! “Do you have anything you can tell about how you came up with the names for your snax?
Zuhn: They are paletas that you throw away: Paletoss!
Every few months, the young horses would gather for a namestorming gathering where we would go bugsnak to bugsnak and discard names until we found one we could agree on. At best, we’d make a solid play on words by combining the insect’s name with the snack’s name (Fryder, Scorpenyo, Buffalocust). If we couldn’t do that, we would try to use their taste or behavior (Paletoss, Sweetiefly). And if all else failed, we’d just twist the words into adorable nonsense (Scoopy Banoopy).
The end result of this is that I have an Excel spreadsheet full of hundreds of failed bugsnax names, the one even crazier and desperate than the last.
Kotaku: So the “good” ending to the game implies that Snorpy was always right. Will we face the Grumpunati in DLC or sequels? (Are there any plans for DLC or a sequel?)
Zuhn: You have to take what Snorpy says with a good grain of salt, because like all the characters in this story, he’s only half right. We’re still figuring out what exactly we want to do after release, but we’re definitely not done working yet Bugsnax yet. I know I’d hate to let that thread hang forever!
Kotaku: You always meant before Bugsnax to get as dark as it does, or was it something that just happened? If you’ve caught bugsnax and fed them to your friends – something they encourage you to do – set yourself up for a pretty grim ending.
Zuhn: Absolutely! We knew from the start that bugsnax were dangerous parasites, and in their earliest designs, they weren’t very cute. At one point there was an even worse ending where the Grumpuses became zombies craving snakes and eating each other and then you. So the game got even lighter and crazier over time!
I wonder what an end that is essentially The walking bugsnax would have worked with the game’s sugar-sweet theme song ‘It’s Bugsnax!Maybe Young Horses would have chosen a more suitable sound, something like death metal? Imagine a version of “It’s Bugsnax!” done by Babymetal. That actually sounds pretty bad.