Death of a Wish Interview: Developers Detail Randomizer Update and Future Support (2024)

Developer melessthanthree's action RPG, Death of a Wish, tells a tale of religious rebellion with stylish combat reminiscent of character-action titles like Devil May Cry. The indie game recently received a randomizer update with further support planned.

Game Rant recently spoke with melessthanthree, also known as Colin Horgan, and producer Kevin Wong about Death of a Wish's influences, intentions, and emphasis on impact, among other topics. The following transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Death of a Wish's Narrative Core

Q: Could you briefly introduce yourselves and describe Death of a Wish for those who have yet to hear about the title?

Horgan: My name is Colin, I also go by “melessthanthree” on the internet. I am the lead developer of Death of a Wish, which is a Nightmarish action RPG about a kid striking out against the strange religious institution that he was raised in, and his journey of revenge in a surreal nightmare world.

Wong: My name’s Kevin. I’m the producer on Death of a Wish. I previously worked with melessthanthree on their previous game, Born of a Dream. My role in the project has largely centered around publishing operations and project management.

Q: melessthanthree recently had a showing at LudoNarraCon. How did that go, and what was discussed?

Wong: LudoNarraCon is a digital online games festival hosted by the indie publisher Fellow Traveler. As part of our participation there, we were selected as part of the curated festival selection board. We had the opportunity to run a panel where we talked about meaningful combat design in action RPGs, alongside a range of other game designers: Specifically, Lily Valeen (Bossgame), Marina Ayano Kittaka (Sephonie, Anondyne), and Sherveen Uduwana (Midautum).

Q: Death of a Wish deals with lots of serious issues and dark content. Which subject was the hardest to examine and convey effectively?

Horgan: I think one thing that was difficult to navigate, since the game has been out for a couple of months now, was how we presented some of the more organized religious aspects of the game’s influence and thematic background. The way we summed it up when we were pitching it to people, and on our Steam page, is that we used “cult” as a kind of shorthand, and I think that acted as a kind of double-edged sword, as “cult” is a very loaded word.

It brings to mind a lot of other associations. Real-life allusions, and in fiction, especially horror fiction, you usually imagine imagery of folk horror or people in hoods gathered around doing weird rituals. There are definitely some elements of that in the game, but I think that led people to focus more on the occult angle and less so on the grounding of somebody’s upbringing: the suppression of things that maybe aren’t accepted about themselves in a wider group, and how that could influence or damage someone and change the course of their life, probably for the worst. How someone grapples with that trauma, gets over it, or tries to improve their circ*mstances and those of the people around them.

It was certainly something that we tried to handle with a delicate hand, but from a creative aspect, we didn’t shy away from some of the more messed up elements of how organized spirituality could potentially hurt someone. It can hurt many people, or it can be wielded by leaders or an upper class as a tool against a lower class.

Wong: The biggest and most significant aspect of Death of a Wish is the social core of religious trauma and spiritual abuse. That is very central to the game’s story and its themes. I do think the choice of the word “cult” may have been misleading. I think that the more personal element of social commentary is more unique about the game, something that I would be thrilled to see people analyze.

Q: Death of a Wish is the sequel/spiritual successor to Lucah: Born of A Dream. What new themes and ideas did you want to capture in the sequel?

Horgan: Both Lucah and Death of a Wish take place in the same dream logic world. They share a lot of the same characters, a lot of the same villains, but Death of a Wish is a recontextualization of the events of Lucah. I wouldn’t say they are necessarily two stories that happen one after another, though there are certain elements of that.

Lucah was a more dreamy, introverted, abstract, and poetic experience, reflected in the silence and characterization of the player character. Death of a Wish stars Chris, the rival character of the first game, and he is definitely not silent. He is very loud and opinionated and will tell you to your face what he thinks. By the end of Lucah and the starting point of Death of a Wish, he sees how the world is broken, and he has a plan to fix it.

He’s also a lot stronger of a main character than you were at the start of Lucah. You get a lot of combat abilities really quickly. In the demo, we throw five or six combat abilities at you within 10 minutes. There’s no stamina bar in Death of a Wish. Lucah had a more Soulsy-vibe with a stamina bar, and every action depleting a resource, whereas Christian can just go-go-go.

The enemies needed to be more aggressive and cover more distance much quicker than they did in Lucah, much more of a fight to the death from moment to moment. Whereas the fighting in Lucah is more calculating, Death of a Wish is angrier and more primal.

There were some small tweaks we made to the game to contextualize Chris vs. Lucah in the first game. There are dialogue portraits in this game because, while Lucah was less likely to look you in the eye, Chris is definitely staring straight at you as he talks. There’s a greater focus on dialogue and character interaction because Death of a Wish is Chris’ game and not Lucah’s game.

Death of a Wish: Hallowed Be Thy Game

Q: Death of a Wish features lots of Christian iconography and dogmatic terminology, calling combat combos “Arias” and power-ups “Virtues.” What inspired the pairing with the hack-and-slash genre?

Horgan: The gameplay came first. When we were working on Lucah, the first title, I also had this big idea for the visual presentation based on the sprite work for a previous project I worked on. However, we needed a narrative trapping to contextualize everything, especially since the original prototype of this title was more roguelike-like and less story-focused. It was like an arena wave fighter. That ended up being not very compelling, so we moved to a more linear area-to-area design.

Both myself and Kev had childhood experiences with Catholic school and religious education, which seemed like an interesting basis for worldbuilding. That paired well with the nightmarish presentation of the game.

Q: How did the theming influence Death of a Wish’s striking, “slashed-in lines against negative space” art style?

Horgan: That came almost out of necessity. First, I specifically came into game development as an aspiring game designer. Not even doing the programming or anything like that, but at the start, I also had trouble finding collaborators to work with. I said, “Alright, I’m going to learn how to program.” That will be my first step towards doing things.

I dipped my toes into sprite art. I literally started with a single-color background with an outline. Gravitated toward this high-contrast on-black style, because I thought it looked neat, and I was able to create the sprites at a level that conveyed what they needed to. Lucah was the first project where people responded in a visceral way. It got more of a response than I was used to, which made me think “Okay, maybe we’re onto something.” That’s when Kev came on. We kickstarted it and we pushed that style further. Then, with Death of a Wish, we pushed that style as far as it could go.

It all came from this perfect marriage of what we can produce, what the story could use, what the atmosphere could use, and a reasonable way to create the 8000 frames of animation an action game requires.

Wong: I also think that one benefit of having the game designer do the sprite art and animation is that there are none of the communication barriers that can sometimes exist in a larger team with more collaboration. Having the combat designer do the animations allows us to tune the gameplay to a really intricate degree, and that allows combat to feel really good and really punchy.

Q: The game’s title art features a very different style of art that is almost anime-esque. Did the same artist do both? Why use two approaches?

Horgan: No, I wish I did. The key arts were done by Brianna Lei, the developer of the Butterfly Soup VN games.

Q: The in-game animations are all very aggressive. What went into designing the attacks of the game?

Horgan: It’s funny. I think what propelled these projects into being was that from a very early point, we wanted to make a really visceral action game, something that you feel in your gut even though you are just pressing the buttons or clicking a mouse. We want it to have a sense of physicality, and this is something that years ago, in the indie dev space, people used to love to talk about like putting “juice” in your game or art-house screen-shake. People still talk about it, I feel like it’s not as prevalent anymore, but it’s something we were in conversation with in Lucah and that definitely continued with Death of a Wish.

What we specifically focused on was impact. There’s a ton of “work” going on when an attack hits: the camera response, particle spawns, and small stoppages in time and movement on the screen, so it really feels like two huge forces are colliding. Somebody said that “every attack is like a crack of a whip,” and I think that captures the huge focus on impact that we had.

I wanted to make sure the movements of all the on-screen actors had to be legible. Even if you can’t see what the enemy you're fighting is, it needs to be clear when it is attacking you. If it’s going to slash the player across the face with an appendage or a claw or something, there’s a huge streak across the screen of red with blood sprites spattering around the battlefield. It feels violent.

Not in an “Oh, video games cause violence” sort of way, but more like, it is striking out at the player. Hopefully not in a way that makes the game feel uncomfortable, because we know the art style can certainly cause that, but Death of a Wish is a game that is entirely made of impact frames. Getting you to those impact frames in the most efficient way possible is the goal, both from the art design decisions we made to the physics of the attacks feeling weighty without being sluggish.

Wong: Impact frames are those moments that condense the impact of a hit in an anime or similar, but this all also extends to monster design. A lot of Death of a Wish and Lucah monsters are very abstract and don’t have clear real-life analogs, but we wanted them to be readable in key frames as they attack you. That legibility is how we maintain that surreal abstractness, while still remaining viscerally playable.

Horgan: The art style allowed us to really play with colors and fills, so whatever is “the thing that will hurt you” almost always flashes red or another color that works with the enemy design. It stays filled and matches the color of the slash covering the screen, which is also the hitbox doing damage on screen. It’s a very literal translation of things that are going on under the game’s hood, and it subconsciously teaches them, when they need to dodge, when they need to parry, and so on.

Q: What went into designing Christian and the Faiths?

Horgan: Chris was a character in Lucah and needed to contrast against the main character of that game. Lucah had more rope-like clothing and a parted hairstyle that looked a little more subdued. Chris has spikey yellow hair, which is a sharp contrast to Lucah. His outfit is more subdivided in sprite form.

Funny thing, because it is rendered in such a small and abstract pixel style, I usually imagine the characters as they appear in the game. I had some funny conversations with Brianna about what the key art should look like. Despite some very vague ideas and obvious distinctions—like the yellow color of Chris’ sprite—I kind of left the characters’ appearance up to her interpretation. We did bring in some of the pseudo-Christian elements into certain characters. A lot of them have the Priest collars, which is subtly shown in Death of a Wish, but Christian’s sprite before his neck is covered by the scarf.

Another gameplay-to-character design topic is his scarf. We wanted a change in the character to distinguish him from his role as an antagonistic rival in Lucah, to signify that Chris was going on a journey of change. We needed some way to show what Aria, or weapon you were using, so we had Chris’ scarf change color, whereas in Lucah, your entire sprite changed colors.

The Faiths only show up in the game and aren’t portrayed in the Key Art. They lean more toward the nightmare enemy sort of design. They are more abstract, designed like a kid’s view of an authority figure. Most of their sprites are twice as tall as the main character, though that’s true of many of the enemies as well as the psychologically imposing profile; long arms, big hands. Father, the first Faith that you meet, is a little closer to Chris in regards to his backstory, but most of his features are cloaked by his outfit, to show there is some barrier between those two.

We had a lot of fun with the second Faith you encounter, Sister, who you encounter in a turn-based JRPG genre break sequence. She is portrayed with a Dragon Quest-style first-person portrait of a nightmare monster.

Varied Influences for Death of a Wish

Q: Aside from early 90s anime, the biblical homages—and, presumably, Dante’s Inferno—did any other media influence the design of Paradiso and Neo-Sanctum?

Horgan:Bayonetta for one. It was a huge influence on the game’s design and its turn more toward character action, like Devil May Cry-style fights. Even the name Paradiso is taken from an aspect of Bayonetta’s world. The angelic enemy faction of that game exists in an alternate reality layered on top of the real world called Paradiso. That seemed too perfect not to crib.

Another thing that I hope comes across for players, even though the world is rendered in this abstract style and this dreamy sort of connectedness or lack thereof, there’s nothing that fantastical about the world, aside from the nightmares and the characters' seemingly supernatural abilities. A lot of the environments are very mundane. One is a trailer park and another subway.

It’s not that different from what we currently exist in. Some aspects of the narrative kind of hint that this is maybe an alternate reality that broke from a very new future point in history. Maybe this is a slow apocalypse of some kind, but it is not a magic fantasy world.

To aid that, we included reference photos from places we lived. Lucah uses reference photos for backgrounds in a certain part of the game. Even in Death of a Wish, there is a narrative visual novel section that uses photos that I took from my high school because there is a part that takes place in a high school. I hope that puts a more personal connection in the narrative, but also a story that layers the extraordinary on top of the mundane, and what that might mean for somebody who is playing and reflecting on the game.

Q: Death of a Wish is an intense game. Everything from the heavy content, to the art style, to the mechanics seem like they are designed to test or stress the player. What was the design process like? Did you ever reach a point in development where you felt “Okay, this is too much; we need to pull back”?

Horgan: I even think that—now that the game is out—I think that we probably could have pulled back a little more. I know that the game does get called “edgy” sometimes and I can’t…really disagree, but I want people to know it’s a very sincere game, even in its intensity. We are not trying to shock and offend people for the purpose of shocking and offending.

From a gameplay standpoint, we even did some things in Death of a Wish that made it a little more accessible in ways we felt were appropriate for the story we were trying to tell, like the AI-controlled allies you can summon for certain boss fights. That dovetails nicely with Christian’s arc, which is to learn to trust people and work with others to build a better world rather than burning it all down. The final sequence of the game leans into that really hard, where you are fighting with a whole JRPG team of allies. Though it’s funny that I bring that up, because that entire final chapter is extremely difficult, and it was even more difficult until our playtesters told us to scale it back.

Wong: Visual accessibility was one of our biggest priorities. A lot of our initial playtesters were confused, specifically by the UI and the menus sometimes felt overwhelming to navigate. We cleared those up in subsequent user-play tests, made them simpler to navigate. We also added features like high contrast mode and reduced screen shake to make it more accessible.

We also gave players difficulty options and built-in cheats to disable parts of the combat or progress past certain points if they were more invested in the story. With regard to content, we provide a very in-depth set of content warnings, but I don’t think we made that many content adjustments based on my memory.

Horgan: Despite the game being dark and intense, there are some character moments that are a little more lighthearted and fun. There are a lot more of them than there were in Lucah. I had a lot of fun with Lily. She is Chris’ guide through the beginning. A literal tutorial character, in that she teaches you how to switch your Aria in the game.

I had a lot of fun writing a more fourth-wall-ish breaking character, even though there aren’t any particular jokes she says—I’m not a particularly funny person and I don’t see the need to plug bad jokes into a game—but just having a character who is approaching Chris’s dead-serious journey with a little more light-heartedness is refreshing. In future games that we do, I want to balance that even better because I don’t think we did it perfectly here, but it was definitely a step in the right direction.

Q: What can you tell us about the new Randomizer Update? How much does it change Death of a Wish’s core formula?

Horgan: The randomizer update is pretty fun if I say so myself. It unlocks a mode to change things around if you’ve already beat the game once. There’s an option you can set to randomize all the enemies, so all the encounters that you were used to from your first playthrough have been entirely shuffled. The bosses are replaced with different bosses. End-game enemies can show up during the early game. It also has an option to randomize your starting equipment and different item picks, ao you will have different Arias, and the passives and virtues will show up in random places.

It really tests your knowledge of the game world and how the levels are set up, if you want to seek out specific things. Especially when you don’t know if a random pick-up will be experience points or a brand-new ability that changes how you go through the world and prioritize exploring versus progressing.

The enemy randomizer allows bosses to show up as regular enemies, but unlike most randomizers, the enemies are scaled. If you encounter the final boss in the tutorial, you won’t be walled from progress because their health and damage will be reduced significantly, but it’s still a final boss moveset. It really tests both your execution and knowledge of the game’s combat.

Wong: Our goal with the randomizer update is to provide ways to make the game engaging on repeat playthroughs. The combat is extremely deep, and not everyone is going to experience every weapon, moveset, or kit. By encouraging players to engage with that more deeply, they can appreciate the combat more thoroughly.

Q: Is there anything else you would like our readers to know?

Horgan: Death of a Wish is out now on PC, Mac, Linux, and Nintendo Switch. We just put out the Mac and Linux ports. It works great on Steam Deck, which is how I tested it myself. We’re looking to provide support for a while now, looking to add little favors and replayability for our big fans that I think they will enjoy.

Wong: We’re going to have more updates to come beyond the randomizer. I encourage folks who are really into this to reach out through our social media channels and sign up for our newsletter.

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Death of a Wish is available now for Linux, Mac, PC, and Switch.