Relic Hunters Legend’s five playable characters can be likened to several D&D character classes.
Which style of play was your focus?
Leite: It’s mostly a multiplayer-focused game.
But we have everything that we always wanted in multiplayer games.
So we have party management, we have an endgame for multiplayer, grinding, and all that.
What was your design philosophy for the playable characters?
What central theme did you have in mind while designing these five heroes?
Leite: Okay, so gameplay-wise, they are very different in their own way.
Each of them has three skill trees.
They can specialize in different things.
They also play very differently because all of their skills are different.
They all can use the same weapons, but they have very different skills.
Their toolkit is very different.
So there are extra missions that you could play through that are separate from the main campaign?
How big of a focus is the story in this game?
Rapyo:The game is a multiplayer game, but we also love the story.
And you get to fall in love with the characters when you play the game because all of them.
In my opinion and from my perspective, they’re super charismatic.
So story is important, but it isn’t the main thing about the game.
Our version of classes are actually those characters.
They all have their own backstories.
They all have their own personalities.
They all have their different gameplay skills and all that.
And we also intend to build upon that eventually.
We don’t get to be a single person playing things.
So this definitely is a design decision based on how we believe things should be.
So what role does each playable character fulfill?
Or can they fulfill multiple combat roles in a squad?
And how do their abilities inform their characterization, if at all?
Leite: All right, so we are huge fans of D&D.
We’re huge fans.
We’ve played a lot of RPGs and all that.
So Pinkyy is our fearless leader.
So she’s like our warrior I would say.
Seven is our mage.
It’s about manipulating the field like a mage or something.
Jimmy is more of our sniper.
I know there’s no sniper in D&D, but picture that.
That’s kind of the tendency.
So it’s all about damage dealing and being extremely focused on that.
He’s all about precision shots.
And there’s also Ace.
Ace is like our scoundrel or rogue.
He deals more damage when shooting from behind.
He’s got some crazy gadgets that we can use to distract enemies.
He likes to joke around too.
Rapyo: Yeah, he’s our jokester, our pranker.
And there’s also Raff, which is our party engineer as we say.
She’s either into support or into dealing heavy damage.
She has that awesome keytar to blast or heal, to blast enemies or heal friends.
Oh, that’s really cool.
She’s like a Bard in D&D.
I love playing Bards.
Leite: Yeah, pretty much.
So you oughta have two characters to do that.
Let’s say Pinkyy is priming enemies by using a skill.
So there’s this huge combo that appears out of the blue, and this big explosion happens.
And all of the game levels were designed to keep players together as well.
No, it’s not like that.
They were all designed to keep players together.
So it’s going to concentrate enemies all in one place.
So that helps [keep people together].
And you’ve got the option to use this to buy special pieces of clothing paint too.
it’s possible for you to get some cool things by helping other people.
Souza: The original character design came from our first Relic Hunters game, Relic Hunters Zero.
Designing characters for Relic Hunters Legend was a huge challenge since the game’s style was changed.
Relic Hunters Zero was pixel art, and Relic Hunters Legend is more soft brush.
Since I wasn’t under the pressure of a game jam, I could explore more colors and shapes.
In Relic Hunters Legend, I brought more strong, saturated colors and soft shapes.
I tried to run away from the classic stereotypes of character colors.
Jimmy, despite being more calm and collected, has magenta-red hair.
Everything has a sharp corner to make their silhouette different and more menacing.
This interview was edited for both brevity and readability.
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