As mentioned in our recent review, The Legend of Bum-Bo had some trouble getting out the door. It’s hard to imagine that its complicated launch will persist as the game’s legacy, however, as the new prequel to the pioneering roguelike The Binding of Isaac is a genuinely addictive and smartly-designed tactical puzzler oozing with designer Edmund McMillen’s signatures: beautifully design, puerile humor, pick-up-and-play ease, and macabre charm.
It may be odd to consider, but a lot’s happened between Super Meat Boy and Bum-Bo. Ed’s continued to work on game jams and release new stuff besides the ones featuring biblical references and poop, like tough apocalyptic platformer The End is Nigh (which most recently popped up as a timed freebie on the Epic Games Store) or the bizarre Guess Who-esque police sim Fingered.
That latter game seems to have been his first collaboration with James Id, who joined Ed again for this return to the Isaac-verse. With The Legend of Bum-Bo, the team left the familiar world of platformers and action-oriented titles for something more strategic, slower-paced, and accessible…so long as newcomers to McMillen’s game can deal with boogers and poop.
Screen Rant wants to thank Ed for taking some time to chat with us about the recent rocky road through Bum-Bo’s release and working up the Steam charts, one review at a time.
Leo Faierman, for Screen Rant: The Legend of Bum-Bo is currently in a fantastically stable state, but what was going at team headquarters on launch day? Would you mind walking us through it?
Oh, that’s the missing executable thing that people were talking about.
Edmund McMillen: I’ll try to paint a good picture of what the last month or so felt like. So, we had two months at this point, where it was like, “Okay, let’s lock this down. When can we have this done by?” And James and I talked to Steam about what would be a good launch date to live with, to not double up with any popular game coming up around that time, so we could get a good amount of attention, etc., etc. And it was two months out, it looked totally doable, we’re totally doing it, let’s do it. We nailed it down.
And then, last month of development, I don’t know if you live in California, but we had mass power outages. Two power outages hit our area, one of which wasn’t super-bad. We basically lost seven days of internet and power, but also my daughter spilled sh*t all over my laptop. And I didn’t want to post a bunch of excuses online, for the most part, because, either way, we made a decision.
So we lost that amount of time. It wasn’t looking that great, but it still looked doable. By that point and time, Steam had already put up pre-orders, and we already had like, 12,000 pre-orders. I just made the executive decision of like, “Okay, the game is going to launch without one major feature,” which was the options menu stuff. Because, actually, that was bugged. We had that in, it was just bugged, still. We didn’t want to launch with that [bugged feature included].
We actually cleared all of the soft-lock bugs right before launch, from our 20 testers and whoever else. Somehow they didn’t run into any of the bugs that existed on launch day. So we were like, confident. We were like, “Okay, well, we know the soft-lock bugs are finished.” We knocked those out. We removed the sound-balancing bug, which caused another bug that made it so the sound effects didn’t play in certain areas.
And then the most disastrous was, when we set it live, there’s this internal thing, there are these different branches when you publish a game on Steam. And we just published our current build live, because it was gonna be the same as our test build, but it just went up as an empty folder for like the first half hour of launch, which made people lose their minds.
I know. I was actually watching this go down.
Yes. Yes. So it was a bunch of bad, bad sh*t that happened, but then it was just like…oh my god. But, we can fix these bugs! Like, we instantly knew what the majority of the soft-locks were when people posted the screenshots. Within 24 hours we had at least 75% of the soft-locks finished, completely done. And then, within the next update, within 48 hours we had…we’re up to 99% today. There’s one that we can’t nail down, but sometimes we’ll kill a bug and it’ll kill a bunch of other bugs.
For the most part, we didn’t know most of those bugs were there. My wife has 66 hours in the game from launch. She never ran into any crashes. It was confusing initially, but I actually have a feeling that some of the bugs that people were running into that were more common were caused by last-minute edits. It was just one of those, how do we cram two weeks [of planned development] into one week? Let’s try to do it. And then James had no sleep, he went without sleep for multiple days. I’m trying to accomplish what I can, because, as you know, the game’s really good. And it just…I hate to think that it would be totally tainted by its launch.
But things are looking up, [even though] we got review-bombed on Steam.
SR: The irony of this is that you’re clearly not some triple-A company or mega-game corporation. I know that Ed is sitting here stressed out for his awesome game that he wants everyone to play. It’s not something like, “I’ve got all your money, and now I can run off!” Obviously that’s not what’s going on.
Edmund McMillen: We first had like a 5.9, right? Oh my god. What can we do about this? And I know it’s like, I understand being upset about bugs. Especially if they’re flying in, running into a crash at the very end of a good run. That sucks. We had that a lot with Isaac as well.
I think people know that if they get really angry and post stuff online like that, that most developers will then be forced to edit the game. I want to be like, “No we’re already gonna do it! Like, I really like this game!”
It’s a weird sort of claim to how good this game is, the fact that I myself soft-locked so many times on launch day. I shut the game down, I was legitimately angry about…but then I’m sitting at my computer and starting it up again.
[note: Ed’s developed several games with Nicalis but is ceasing future partnership, following recent allegations of workplace conditions and conduct]
Edmund McMillen: A similar thing happened with my sister-in-law and my brother-in-law, who don’t really play video games. My brother-in-law plays Grand Turismo, Last of Us, triple-A stuff. I gave my nephew a code and they started playing, and they just played almost competitively back and forth. On day one, of course, we had the issues. I sent out review codes before then. I probably shouldn’t have sent out review codes before launch, but I sent them out because I thought people would be able to play the game, get an idea of what the game’s like, then I’ll fix whatever’s broken.
But a lot of people got pissed, review-code-wise, because the saves got wiped before launch. When we wiped the saves, my brother-in-law was f*cking pissed. They were pretty rabid about it…but they’re still playing it!
I think a lot of people think that we’re a large company, where we’ll just say, “I already have your money, fck you.” Or they’ve had that experience with Nicalis when it comes to console updates and stuff like that. And I want people to know that we’re two guys, so there’s a higher probability of bad sht happening…but there’s a higher probability of us updating as much as f*cking possible.
I would personally love to see and can’t wait for the save-and-exit option.
So, the review scores went from a 5.9 to a 6.9. So it’s going back up to 7! [note: as of this writing, 77% of Steam reviews are positive] We’re making our way back up. It’s been so weird to see the reviews that are like, “I love this game so much, it’s so great, but I don’t like that it has bugs on launch, so I’m gonna give it a 7.5 or whatever.” Well, I can’t fight you about that, but it’s just one of those situations where I guess I have to prove the game’s design.
I need to polish the game up as high as the design of the game [deserves], and that’s the current goal. We’re basically almost bug-free, with the exception of visual glitching and stuff like that, which we’re still working on. I’m basically saying, “Hey, what are your features that you’d like to see added to the game? We’re gonna add as much of these features as possible.”
I’m really glad that you’ve been so open about the launch and the bugs, but I do want to talk about a few other things, and not make this whole thing about a buggy launch! This whole interview’s been about that.
Edmund McMillen: My laptop’s dead, but my wife’s laptop is what I’ve been working on when she’s not playing. And you always hear that music. And if I pick up her laptop she’s like, “Don’t close the game! I’m working on that!” So it’s like, yeah. If the laptop’s closed, Bum-Bo’s open.
But of course. That’s something we always wanted to have, just like Isaac. For some reason I thought that that wouldn’t be as big of an issue, but then knowing how long people play and how long playthroughs actually take, that’s of course something we’re going to add. But we gotta make sure we get—it’s a priority at this point, soft-locks need to be 100% gone. Once soft-locks are gone then we can start adding in features.
James is working on Cloud Save and Achievements, that’ll be early next week. A lot of people were saying that the game feels quiet in some places. We got a really great professional sound effects guy, Jay [Fernandes], to do all the puzzle sounds, so they sound really lush and thick, but some of the other parts of the game don’t. So I’m commissioning more sound effects so we can pad that stuff out, because people felt like that stuff was unfinished.
Then in the next month I hope we will do another polish-pass, because I guess people were like, certain games like Bejeweled—I was trying to not look like Bejeweled. I concede to the fact that I should be representing Bejeweled in some ways when it comes to the visual polish, so we’re gonna do another visual polish-pass.
We’ll definitely do a lot of mouse-over stuff, people have requested like, tooltips.
That’s sort of actually related to one of the questions that I had. After Super Meat Boy and into Isaac, I felt like Isaac was the first, if not one of the first, games I played where it felt like a developer was living in their game. There were even updates for it recently. In my head, this was such a weird way to develop games, because it felt like, before Isaac, the standard was: a developer comes out with a game, possibly makes some DLC…but they don’t just work on it for years and years, adding DLC, adding free content, adding paid content. Dead Cells is comparable, as Motion Twin have just continued to funnel time and attention into evolving their game.
Edmund McMillen: My whole life’s been about this bug-launch!
What does that feel like, to literally live with a game for so long, after it’s already out? What do you think that’s contributed to people’s perception of indie game development?
Oh yeah. I’ve beaten the game honestly like ten times by now.
Edmund McMillen: I’m sure it’s probably not a good thing. People might have expectations now of like, “Okay, well, you’re gonna continue to update the game for ten years?” I wouldn’t be updating this game for almost ten years…but I do it because I like it. I do it because I am living with it. I choose and accept the fact that I enjoy working on it, I have more ideas that I want to put into it, I enjoy the fanfare, I enjoy the fans in general—even the bad ones!
[Isaac] is the most honest representation of who I am as a person, for the most part. It’s one of the most pure and honest designs that I’ve ever come up with. It feels like me, it feels like when I was young, and it’s hard for me to not wanna explore it. And that’s why I re-explored it with Bum-Bo. I got to re-explore even more honest childhood memories. I’m assuming that you beat the game?
Like your pre-Meat Boy, Newgrounds-y stuff?
Edmund McMillen: I got to do more and more precursor Isaac stuff. I got to paint a picture of what led to how The Binding of Isaac started. You know, paint a better picture of who Isaac is, maybe who his dad is or who his dad was. And that was super-interesting to me thematically, and it really worked well with James, because we had similar childhoods. Split families and growing up really poor, and making a lot of cardboard diorama arts and crafts stuff, because we didn’t really have a lot of toys.
We had that similarity going on, so it seemed so appropriate. And I try to do that as much as possible: finding odd coincidences and going with them. Like, “Oh, it’s kind of interesting that we shared this exact childhood visual, of drawing inside a cardboard box.” It seems special to me, it seems untapped, it seems honest, it seems authentic. I want to jump into that. Like, let’s explore what that means, because we both have this in common.
I try to do that as much as possible, it depends on the person that I’m working with. I tend to write around what we have in common, and I think that’s one of the reasons Meat Boy came off as more funny, because the one thing that Tommy [Refenes] and I really had in common that I was riffing off of was our sense of humor. So I tried to make it more goofy, more light, and funny, and hopeful, it felt more hopeful than a lot of the other stuff that I’ve been working on. And I try to do that with anyone that I work with.
Super Meat Boy was more guarded. Way more allegorical and non-direct. They kind of exposed me in the movie [Indie Game: The Movie] a bit, they compared stuff that I would say to the game and showed things, drew a correlation between it. There’s definitely stuff about Meat Boy that’s super-personal, because I can’t be fully invested in a project if I don’t put a piece of myself in it. And I usually put some dark piece, some piece that I’m not really comfortable with talking about openly, but I guess like, write about or abstract it, I can explore it. I can’t not do that, or I’m usually not invested in the project.
But, with Meat Boy, it didn’t feel appropriate to be more direct than I was. It was supposed to be, it was supposed to have more mass appeal, be more easy-going. I didn’t want to risk my career on something that would turn people off, visually and thematically.
Yeah. There are still friends of mine who I know in my heart would totally love the game, but they won’t play it. There are still people I haven’t gotten to play it for those specific reasons.
Edmund McMillen: Or even Isaac, you know? Isaac, you try to pitch that game to someone who doesn’t know what Isaac is or has never heard of it, you’re not going to be able to explain how that game works. Why a naked kid crying on sh*t is a good game.
Since Super Meat Boy and definitely on into Bum-Bo, there’s something about your games I’ve noticed is that they’re extremely hypnotic. Super Meat Boy was like that to me to me. I was working a 9-to-5 and waking up two hours early to chase people up the level leaderboards on Xbox Live. And there’s something about a Match-4 puzzler that’s more straightforward about that sensibility, that Bejeweled is more about hypnotizing a person into wiling the hours away.
So what are your thoughts and your relationship to—not specifically a casual game, per se, but a game that engulfs you? Is that sort of a tenet of the games you develop?
Really?
Edmund McMillen: I don’t think my intentions are to completely engulf a person. That started more with Isaac, and I just kind of complemented and added to what people liked about that aspect to kind of suck you in. I almost feel a little irresponsible about that in some ways. I remember people showing me their hours in Isaac and thinking like, that’s really cool and everything, but I kind of feel like Isaac is a thing that I unintentionally made more like that. I don’t know, I’m at odds with some aspects of that. I do wanna make a game that’s compelling enough to make people keep coming back. I definitely feel like Bum-Bo for sure has that, in a very different way.
I’m faced with the fact that I’m never gonna be a Jonathan Blow personality-type. The brainpower that he has when it comes to his development. It’s just not gonna happen. The guy walks through stuff that is hyper-advanced. I can only get so far in Baba Is You, and I love that game. Those types of games are so hardcore, but I really wanted to make a puzzle game…so I made a baby version! That’s my attempt.
This is my first puzzle game, you know? I wanted to do something that I think everybody can play, but there’s layers upon layers in that. Like, you can think ten turns ahead in this game, you can plan things out like crazy. And the more you plan, the more reward. And that was a tiny aspect of Isaac, and people really admired and worked with the mechanics of Isaac, to understand that the game, at its core, is a resource-based system where you’re maximizing odds in order to get x, y, z. Like, once you know about the secret rooms, the special rocks, how keys work, like all the little bits and pieces and odds in the game that go on behind the scenes, people feel really rewarded by crunching those numbers subconsciously, even if they don’t know they’re doing that.
I wanted to complement that with an actually-strategic game, which gave you all the rules and gave you all the elements which Binding of Isaac did really well, without holding your hand at all and let’s you do it. Like, I didn’t want to make a Bejeweled game that just chains and chains and chains for you and does whatever it’s gonna do. I wanted to make a really focused, super-strategic turn-based version of that, but make it still appealing. That was the challenge. The challenge going in was, how am I gonna make this work when I never made a puzzle game before? Like, how am I gonna come up with a design that feels fresh, new, and compelling, without feeling dull? And, for a while, it felt quite dull. I had to put a lot of work in it to get it where it is.
At one point we shaved off a year’s worth of work. It’s gnarly. For nine months we worked on exploration, because I felt like it wouldn’t be an Isaac game if there wasn’t exploration. We made NPCs, we made traps, we made ambushes, all these different sub-rooms. There was an in-depth bone puzzle where you had to go to different points in the map to find a glyph on the wall that would show you a number and a bone. And then another room in the same giant—there were giant floors—and there were these hanging bones, and if you pick the wrong one you die, and if you pick the right one you get rewarded.
There was this long-winded exploration thing that we worked for nine months on and we just ripped it out completely, because it did not complement the game’s strategic nature. It felt like you were doing this strategy game turn-based thing and then suddenly you were playing this other game, moving from room to room, and it just broke. That was the roughest part, where it was like, “Okay, well, it’s a lot of work, but we gotta cut it. It’s all gotta go.” And we just kept stripping and stripping it. Like, I initially was like, “Oh, we can add some exploration.”
There used to be hidden coins in the walls and you could click them.
What’s interesting is that, thematically, it also makes a ton more sense. This notion that Isaac is this impoverished lonely young kid. He’s in a small room, he doesn’t have a cardboard castle, he has a box, one little box. It makes sense that he’s filling this one single box with the designs and wonders of the imaginary game world itself. He doesn’t have a pillow fort to explore, he’s just got his box. So it’s interesting how that also makes more sense…despite the fact that the exploration stuff does sound cool. You had a video were you talked a little bit about this stuff, too.
Edmund McMillen: There was so much more, but it just didn’t work. It felt like we were padding out a game, where what it wanted was to just be a strategy game that was on-the-rails, essentially. Just give you the next puzzle, give you the next item, give you the next box. I needed to be honest with myself and honest to the game’s design. We needed to cut it and we did.
Next: Rian Johnson Interview for Knives Out
Edmund McMillen: Yeah, I almost didn’t wanna talk about it as in-depth as I did with you, because I didn’t want to tell people all these cool things. The idea of hunting for coins was cool, because they’d be stuck in the wall, some of them would be up high, some of them would be on the ground. So you’d go around and farm coins…but no. For the most part it didn’t work. It felt way too RNG as well, which I don’t want this game to feel that randomly generated.
Not this game. Maybe some other game in the future, where I can re-use those ideas.
[note: portions of the interview were edited slightly for clarity]
The Legend of Bum-bo is available for PC.
