Interview with Lillymo Games, the Developers of Saint Slayer: Spear of Sacrilige

Lillymo Games has been quite the studio in recent years, making very ambitious indie games that have a charm and heart to them. The team began work on games like the indie spaceship shooter Habroxia and the platformer Perils of Baking. In recent years, the team ramped up development, delivering solid titles such as Habroxia II, Twin Breaker, and Super Perils of Breaking.

Now, the team is set to make their mark again with Saint Slayer: Spear of Sacrilige. The Castlevania franchise inspires this ambitious title and features a stirring story with gothic action. I had a moment to sit down with the team and ask some questions about the game’s imminent release, as it launches on April 20th. 

Contributors:

Barry M. Johnson - Programming, Game Design, Level Design, Co-Owner of Lillymo 

Joshua Gossage - Art, Game Design, Level Design 

Colin Moriarty - Writing, Co-Owner of Lillymo 

Josh Davis - Music & Sound Design

For those who are unaware, what is Saint Slayer?

Barry Johnson

Saint Slayer is our NES-style action game. We fully embrace elements you may remember from Classicvania titles, like knockback, committed jump momentum, etc. You play as Rudiger as he investigates the actions of a corrupt priest named Father Pacer. Over the 21 stages in the game, you will navigate a series of unique environments, enemies, and mechanics. You will need to slay the 7 bosses to claim their stolen relics and put a stop to Father Pacer’s evil plot.

Saint Slayer looks like a love letter to the Castlevania games. Tell us more about your time with the Castlevania titles. Any favorite memories?

Barry Johnson

My first Castlevania titles were some of the GBA entries and Symphony of the Night, so that formula was what I knew Castlevania to be for a while. I love that style of game; however, after going back to some of the early action-style titles, I realized I had been missing out. The NES games have grown to be some of my favourite titles from that era. I especially have a lot of fondness for 1, and that was the game that inspired Saint Slayer the most. We took inspiration from many different titles for Saint Slayer, but certainly the original Castlevania was something that was always on my mind when making choices for the game.

Colin Moriarty

Other than Classic Mega Man (so, Mega Man 1-11), Castlevania is my favorite gaming franchise ever. It's been a touchstone for me ever since I first encountered the original game with my older brother in the late '80s. By the early '90s, I was completely hooked. And while I love the original, I'm especially fond of Castlevania II: Simon's Quest, as well as Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse. By the time the Igavania movement began with Symphony of the Night in '97, we were well and truly off to the races, with bangers like Super Castlevania, Bloodlines, and Dracula X (or Rondo of Blood) then behind us. The six GBA and DS games in the Igavania format that followed are amongst that genre's absolute best. 

A funny Castlevania-related story is that, back in the fall of 1990, my brother was watching me while my mom and one of my sisters were at her soccer game. I'm not entirely sure why -- perhaps it was because my mom was really late or busy that day or something, I don't remember -- she came home with a brand new NES game for us. But from afar, I was aghast. You may recall that Konami boxes from that era all shared the same silver hue, and I was afraid that she bought us Track and Field, for whatever reason. But when she handed it over, it was Dracula's Curse, and my brother and I ran at the speed of light up into his room so we could put it into the NES and get to work. And honestly, who could forget that insanely frightening Nintendo Power cover for Simon's Quest?

Joshua Gossage

The original Castlevania trilogy was a formative experience for me as a child in that era. I played them on repeat, and really, my idea of Dracula was formed more by those games than other pop culture elements like film and books for a long, long time. Castlevania 2 is actually my personal favorite in the series as a whole, and I have a lot of memories of sitting up late nights into the wee hours farming hearts and playing that game over and over again.

Josh Davis

For me, Castlevania has always been a mainstay in my gaming life. My earliest memory with Castlevania actually comes from a Castlevania VS arcade cabinet our local Pizza Hut had. I'd say my favorite memory was playing Super Castlevania 4 as a kid and seeing the rotating room for the first time. Blew my adolescent mind. Oh, and Simon's Theme....what a banger.

I really enjoyed my time with Habroxia II and Twin Breaker. Tell me of some of the lessons that you have learned from those games and are taking into Saint Slayer. 

Barry Johnson

Something I really wanted to focus on for Saint Slayer was having every stage feel different and unique. With some of our older titles, I wish I had spent more time establishing an identity for every area and level in the game; that is something we have accomplished with Saint Slayer. A lesson from Tri Breaker, with our Arcade-inspired stages, was that having different controls for new mechanics and ideas can be too much for some players. Instead, with this game, I tried to keep all new mechanics and ideas contained within the same basic control structure that the player uses across the whole game.

Tell me more about the art and music direction. How did you nail the gothic art style?

Joshua Gossage

We are not true NES with colors or hard restrictions like that, but the imitation of it is something I'm quite versed in. We worked on the first several stages several times in the first few months while determining a style that I felt was what we wanted to see. Imitative but not copy-catting anything directly or too bluntly. Establishing a self-imposed ruleset to create the environment and sprites is quite helpful. I toyed around with the "cubes" style floors of the original games and found that this was one place Saint Slayer would stand out heavily from the original games.

Josh Davis

As for the music direction, once Barry and the Boys landed on the setting and timeline, I knew exactly the direction I was going. Of course, we went chiptune... mostly 8-bit (with a couple of 16-bit strings and choir sounds). Castlevania’s music is known for its blend of rock and baroque era classical, so I tried to keep a similar philosophy in the front of my mind when writing the tunes for SS, while still giving it its own unique sound. We don't want "hey, that sounds just like Castlevania!" so we hope it stands out.

Tell me more about co-op. What made you decide to incorporate that into the game? 

Barry Johnson

For co-op, it was something we discussed early on, whether it would work. So we tried it out, and it seemed to work pretty cleanly and was a lot of fun. We had a lot of fun adding small touches that add to the co-op fun. As an example, you can vomit in the game, and if you happen to vomit on your co-op partner, they will also vomit. We also added optional friendly fire in the options, so that you can harm each other. There are many surprises to find if you are playing the game in co-op.

Is there a story to Saint Slayer? Tell us how it was written. I liked the simple narratives of Twin Breaker and Habroxia II. 

Colin Moriarty

When Saint Slayer was still in its infancy, we referred to it as Spear Game, and the guys had envisioned a Greek-era or Roman-era vibe to it. I was totally fine with that, as I originally wasn't involved with the project (we have lots of games going at any given time, and not all of them are in my wheelhouse). But when I was asked to write it, I of course gladly accepted, yet asked if we could go in a very different direction with the world, characters, and plot. I simply didn't feel (and still don't feel) any true creative affinity for those ancient eras, am not steeped in its history or vibe, and didn't think I could do it justice. (This makes me a weirdo, I know. But with the surprise release of God of War: Sons of Sparta in recent months, it's perhaps also a blessing for us when it comes to market differentiation.) 

Instead—truer to the Classicvania vibe we're obviously aiming for—I wanted to go with early modern Europe, something far more familiar and interesting to me. But to differentiate Saint Slayer from Castlevania, I decided to set it in the Holy Roman Empire (Central Europe) instead of Castlevania's traditional Romanian, Transylvanian (Eastern European) setting. As far as timing, I went with 1698 to set it directly after the Nine Years' War, as I envisioned our protagonist as, for whatever reason, being a reluctant farmer-turned-soldier that's finally returning from the battlefield, only to be sucked back into an even greater crisis. I also wanted to set it in the 17th century because the Holy Roman Empire was still going through immense religious upheaval. Remember: This is ground zero for the Protestant Reformation beginning in the 15th century, and I wanted that religious tension to be present in the background, even if it's largely unspoken. 

To that end, Catholicism is specifically central to Saint Slayer. I was born and raised Catholic, and consider myself "culturally Catholic," though I'm not a believer in the truest sense. One of the things I've always been fascinated by with Catholicism, however, is its reliance on a sense of mysticism, often to an eerie degree. For instance, if you're a by-the-book believer, you think saints can intercede in your daily life, you can pray to Mary to cajole Jesus to help you, and—importantly for our game—physical relics have spiritual and supernatural significance, whether they be bodies of saints, pieces of armor or weapons, purported crucifixion nails or pieces of the cross, and so on. There's so much (for lack of a better term) lore in Catholicism. What if we could delve into that a little bit, with the idea that, at least in our world, a lot of this stuff is actually real and true? And we center it all on the Spear of Longinus, the weapon that was purported to stab Jesus in the ribs when he was hanging on the cross. A spear that so happened to be kept in the Holy Roman Empire beginning in the 15th century, if you believe the history....

As far as the nitty-gritty concerning our characters—Rudiger, Father Pacer, Lavinia, and the like—I'll leave all of that to the game itself. While I couldn't shove everything I wanted into the end product (perhaps a good thing, ultimately), I think the setting, the world-building, the characters, and the story will all pleasantly contribute to folks' enjoyment with our game. And perhaps most importantly, we have so many threads to pull from, should we hopefully choose to do a sequel in the future. But I think once people really get into it, they'll see just how un-Castlevania it is in so many ways, and if anything leans a whole lot more into the religious ethos that typically only sits in the background of that great franchise, but that we’re putting more in the lead with what we're doing. 

21 stages are a lot of levels and a lot of work. Tell us more about designing them. 

Barry Johnson

The stage design was a collaboration between Joshua Gossage and me. Josh did all of the art on the game and also worked with me on all of the game design and stage design. So we spent a lot of time talking about the concepts for stages and layouts, as well as all of the fine-tuning. Josh is a big retro guy like me; it was great to be working with someone who I know is like-minded and who has instincts that I can trust.

Joshua Gossage

I personally feel like games like this are almost entirely built on their level design. The difficulty will depend on the layouts. It's important to get that feeling of immersion, progression, and action all in the right spot. Momentum is a big part of the original Castlevania, and I wanted to make sure we kept the stages feeling like momentum was a big factor here. Sometimes, if you stop moving, you may get pummeled by enemies, or the timing of interactions becomes harder because you are out of step with the flow of things. There's a rhythm to be found there. It's part of the essence of the games, and I hope we captured that feeling mostly for Saint Slayer.

I know the Castlevania games were no cakewalk when it came to difficulty. How are you balancing making Saint Slayer a reachable experience but still providing that challenge that players come to expect? 

Barry Johnson

There are a few ways we have gone about this. We offer a difficult selection ranging from 'Easy' to 'Classic'. Easy mode will have no knockback, you will start with additional HP and Faith, and have more lives. Classic mode will be true to old-school sensibilities and provide much more of a challenge. For difficulties outside of Classic, you can also spend orbs in the shop to unlock more power-ups and healing items. You will also be able to buy your way out of a game over using these orbs, which can be found across the game. 

Joshua Gossage

The difficulty is especially challenging to get right, I think. There comes a point in any game where you develop a certain level of muscle memory and awareness of what's coming and figure out little tricks and timings that pierce the veil of difficulty. When you reach that point, having played the stages through a hundred or more times, you begin to doubt your capability of truly judging the difficulty for fresh players. Beyond that, true fans of this style of game will find it much more comfortable than a fresh player taking their first steps into something like this. We have had lengthy discussions about the difficulty through these lenses. The difficulty levels are our attempt at balancing the stages and general difficulty around those determinations. We don't want people to feel discouraged by the difficulty. But we also want people seeking a challenge to find it.

What do you hope players experience when they play Saint Slayer?

Barry Johnson

I hope they have a fun and exciting experience that challenges and surprises them. We have added loads of content and things to do beyond a regular playthrough, so I hope that players will play the game many times and experience all of the different password modes and hidden things we have set up for them.

Joshua Gossage

As we worked on this, we were constantly spinning up new ideas and ways to make this fun. Not just gameplay, but little bits of extra flair and ways to make it unique. Stuff you won't see much in games like this. There are tons of little animations and mechanics. Watch the coins spin when they hit the ground. The boxes shatter into splinters, or feathers falling from the air after you kill a bird. Slide through some blood and watch it smear. There are loads of secrets in Saint Slayer, but I really just wanted people to have fun with it and enjoy their time playing it.

Anything you want to say to our audience?

Barry Johnson

If you are looking for some retro action, we have what you need. Saint Slayer is full of bad ass NES-style fun that you can jump straight into with no BS getting in the way. We are launching the game on April 20th for $9.99 on Steam, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S.

Joshua Gossage

Saint Slayer: Spear of Sacrilege aims pretty pointedly at a Castlevania vibe. There are inspirations from other places, and we worked hard to make this game its own experience. We wanted it to feel familiar and unique at the same time. I hope you enjoy it.

Saint Slayer: Spear of Sacrilige launches on April 20th for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, and PC via Steam.