When Canadian game studio Mongoose Rodeo set out to launch a Kickstarter campaign for its Hollow Knight-inspired Metroidvana, Crowsworn, it had a fundraising goal of $125,000 CAD. By the end of that 30-day campaign, 19,695 backers had contributed more than $1.25 million.
Crowsworn amassed a legion of fans far before it ever made its way to the hands of the public, but it’s not like Mongoose Rodeo had an established reputation. In fact, while the team that makes up the company is comprised of developers with proven experience from across the industry, Crowsworn will be the studio’s first major release. What fans have fallen in love with is Crowsworn’s promise to evolve and refine the Metroidvania sub-genre with hand-drawn animation and relentless style. Included in this package are demanding combat, dynamic enemy attack patterns, animated cartoon cutscenes, and more, with all of it set in an original, labyrinthian world. Two years removed from the Kickstarter campaign’s success, Mongoose Rodeo is still diligently working to deliver the action-platformer it’s promised all this time.
We caught up with Mongoose Rodeo founder Aleksandar Kuzmanovic to learn more about the birth of Crowsworn, its bosses, animated cutscenes, and how the team plans to live up to the Kickstarter hype.
The Escapist: Tell me about Mongoose Rodeo. How did the team come together?
Aleksandar Kuzmanovic: The team originally started with myself and Alexander Duarte Laudon. We originally met during our engineering graduate studies at the University of Toronto. We became friends through our studies and then proceeded to acquire post-graduate degrees in the field of Civil Engineering. After spending some time in the industry, we were kind of dissatisfied with how real-world engineering was. I suppose we both had an idea that it would be more creative than the real-world experience turned out to be. After working in the industry for a little bit more than a year it was my wife (girlfriend at the time) that inspired me to take the plunge into developing video games. I suppose she noticed all the time I spent playing after a long workday and thought it might be better to turn my passions into something more productive.
At that time, I reached out to Alex and somehow managed to convince him to take the plunge with me. Our first studio attempt was called DLK Studios (Duarte Laudon Kuzmanovic) and we attempted to make an MMORPG TCG. Ez money! Yeah, even with all of our engineering knowledge we fundamentally had no idea what it took to make a video game. We sunk about $30,000 CAD of our own savings just to learn it was harder than we thought. Honestly, though, the experience was like an accelerate degree, I have no regrets. Eventually, Alex and I parted ways temporarily. I proceeded to make Unworthy in the next 3 years (a minimalist pixel Soulslike Metroidvania) and Alex worked for another indie game company in Toronto (Alientrap). After launching Unworthy, I reached out to Alex again to see if we could work on something more manageable. Given my experience with making a Metroidvania, it seemed like a waste of knowledge to not make something in that department. We reformed the team again, this time rebranding as Mongoose Rodeo.
What did the early days of Crowsworn look like? I’d love to hear the story of how the game came to be.
Aleksandar Kuzmanovic: So… the first version of Crowsworn was actually a demo build we had to submit for a grant obligation. One thing a lot of people don’t know is that Crowsworn actually received $50k CAD worth of funding from Ontario Creates (a government funding program) to build a prototype. The first version of the game was actually a lot worse… the art was a lot more juvenile and cuter. This was primarily a consequence of trying to prototype something to meet the grant requirements in a timely manner.
In terms of how Crowsworn came to be. It’s really no secret that Crowsworn is heavily inspired by Hollow Knight, but what people might not know is that, in some way, it’s more inspired by Team Cherry’s methodology than anything else. Shortly after Hollow Knight launched, I had launched Unworthy. I remember being completely mesmerized by the fact that such a small team could make such a game in such a short period of time. I remember reading articles and interviews with Ari discussing the decisions behind the art direction and implications that it has in terms of efficiency. Like the idea that bugs were an attractive subject because of their round shapes and how that ultimately made it way easier to animate. At this time, I was just amazed at how much better Hollow Knight looked than Unworthy (to me anyway) with what appeared to be very minimal effort. The art style was super attractive in that regard.
After making Unworthy, I thought, ‘OK… you struggled to make a Metroidvania, you made mistakes and learned a lot. It’s time to put all you’ve learned into practice to make something great, and why not employ an art style like Hollow Knight’s.
Crowsworn has a really impressive death animation that I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of seeing. What are some of the other ways animation like this has been incorporated into the game?
Aleksandar Kuzmanovic: First of all, thank you! I’ll relay the information to the Vulture Head Studios folks who are responsible for all of those cinematics. The animations will be incorporated for cut scenes and Corvian Ultimates. The Corvian Ultimates are kind of like overpowered signature moves that you can use at the expense of all your Malice (the mana resource in Crowsworn) to deliver a powerful blow. Most of the cinematics can also be turned off in the menu setting for those who don’t want to see it every time.
Speaking of dying, most of my deaths in the demo were at the hands of just one of Crowsworn’s bosses. How many bosses does the team expect the final game to have?
Aleksandar Kuzmanovic: It’s hard to say at this stage, but likely between 30 and 40 bosses, probably closer to the 40 range to be honest.
Is there a particular boss the team is proud of that you could tease?
Aleksandar Kuzmanovic: Yeah, the big gun-wielding guy that’s shown in our recent trailer. He’s kind of cool!
Crowsworn obviously shares a lot in common with Hollow Knight. Can you talk to me about how it is different from that game and the other games that inspired it?
Aleksandar Kuzmanovic: Well as mentioned earlier, the game’s artistic DNA is really rooted in Hollow Knight’s, and the team ultimately embraces that. In terms of differences, the art style I would say is different enough in a lot of ways. Ultimately we had to make the art assets a lot more detailed to achieve a more realistic look. We really didn’t want to create a cute experience but rather something a bit closer to the Bloodborne aesthetic, and getting those details in certainly takes a lot of time and effort. In terms of gameplay similarities to Hollow Knight, I think the biggest similarity is the pogo mechanic. The rest of the experience should feel familiar to Hollow Knight, but also it’s fundamentally very different. The combat is designed to be a lot more visceral. The movement is a tiny bit floatier because we decided to lean into realism a little bit more at the expense of slightly less tight controls. The enemy AI is more complex so it kind of forces you to approach combat differently. I remember watching a Fireb0rn stream talking about the Crowsworn demo, and he noticed that you couldn’t really approach combat the same way as you would in Hollow Knight. Again, the goal was to make something that feels familiar but at the same time very different.
The other inspirations for the game are Bloodborne and Devil May Cry. I think being a Metroidvania, the game is sufficiently different enough than these two games that it kind of doesn’t even need to be addressed as to how it’s different. What I can say though is Bloodborne inspires the overall mood of the game and some technical design sensibilities whereas DMC just kind of inspires us to make a larger-than-life badass character. We want you to feel like you’re totally stylin’ on the enemies in the game… even if they kill you a bunch of times.
The scythe-wielding crow character we play as seems to have a better fashion sense than other Metroidvania heroes. Will we be able to change their outfit or its colors at all?
Aleksandar Kuzmanovic: Unfortunately not. Being hand-drawn at a ridiculously high-fidelity frame rate means that this is something that would be a huge expense for us to do. We could use shaders or something to target sprite colors, but given that this wasn’t something that we planned on from the get-go it would look exceptionally cheap. This would stick out like a sore thumb relative to the quality standard of the rest of the game. Also… we really don’t want to destroy the iconic look we’ve grown fond of haha.
Is there any part of Mongoose Rodeo that expected the Kickstarter campaign to be such an overwhelming success? What was it like for the team to see its funding numbers skyrocket?
Aleksandar Kuzmanovic: Honestly… we didn’t expect it to be this big… that being said we were cautiously optimistic. I remember one thing we did is we had this pre-launch subscribe thing that Kickstarter now offers and we had something like 13,500 people subscribing to it. I remember comparing this to what other Kickstarters at the time had and telling the team… guys… this might be big. That’s about all we had.
Mongoose Rodeo recently said that Crowsworn is going to be about 10x bigger than what was initially planned. Can you speak more in detail about what that means? I’d love to hear about what the team envisioned the project to look like at first and how that vision has changed.
Aleksandar Kuzmanovic: So yeah… I think the 10x was a bit miscommunicated. A lot of people were under the impression that this means 10x the size. So… like if we promised 20 bosses, this now means 200 bosses. This isn’t what we meant, we were just trying to say that we can now polish the game more than we wanted, spend some time making it bigger, creating higher quality assets, afford to scrap more content that doesn’t quite meet the quality standard, etc. Ultimately, we just have a higher standard for quality than we initially planned for. That’s the biggest takeaway I’d say.
With my last question in mind, how long do you think it will take the average player to reach the end of Crowsworn’s story mode?
Aleksandar Kuzmanovic: We had a talk about this today… after watching folks play the demo, kind of starting to feel it’ll be longer than we expected. Don’t hold me at gun-point over this, but I think it might be reasonable to expect a 15-20 hour experience to complete the main story, and likely around 50-60 hours to 100% the game. Just guessing though.
Obviously, a lot of Crowsworn’s stretch goal content is outlined on the Kickstarter page, but are there any other new surprises that the team has come up with since its crowdfunding success? If so, can you tell us a little bit about what to expect?
Aleksandar Kuzmanovic: Unfortunately can’t comment much on this ☹.
Mongoose Rodeo has, in the past, expressed a desire to bring Crowsworn to PlayStation, Nintendo, and Xbox platforms. With the incredible success the team has seen, are you ready to reveal which console versions players can look forward to?
Aleksandar Kuzmanovic: Our goal is to release on all of the main platforms you’ve listed, given that we don’t have a confirmed release date yet it’s hard to commit to any specific console version.
Is there anything else you’d like to add about Crowsworn, Mongoose Rodeo, or Kickstarter?
Aleksandar Kuzmanovic: Kickstarter was fun!
This interview with Mongoose Rodeo for Crowsworn has been edited for clarity.
