Full disclosure, I got a key for this from Evolved PR. Additionally, I had been waiting for Sparklite to come out since I saw early GIFs on it on /r/indiegaming.

Sparklite is an Action RPG Roguelike created by Red Blue games, and published by Merge Games. In this you play a young mechanic named Ada, accompanied by a robo friend as you try to help save the world by defeating the 5 Titans of Industry and their evil Baron. Was this game worth my hype leading up to it? Well, lets find out.

Sparklite on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/943140/Sparklite/

Sparklite on Switch: https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/sparklite-switch/

Also thanks to Evolve PR, I was able to ask the Developers of Sparklite a few questions. Here are my questions their responses:

Me: What are some features you wish you could have added to it that you did not have time for?

Red Blue Games: I love this question. Cutting features is one of the hardest things to do. We had a cool NPC planned that would send you a photo of a location in the world with hidden buried treasure. You’d have to match that photo with where it is in the game world to find the treasure. There are so many little things like that. As for major features, we had second phases for bosses planned but did the first phase first and realized that it would just take too much time to put in a second phase for everyone

Me: What are some features that were added that you did not expect to originally implement?

Red Blue Games: The coolest example of this is the robot companion’s role. Originally all of the gadgets were controlled by Ada. But one of our level designers suggested that some of those things could be done by the robot. We had our artist Rafael do some mockups and it was just so cool to see the robot with his own set of tools to use. So we were able to fairly cleanly repurpose some gadgets as Wingut gadgets which also gave the second player a lot more to do than we originally expected.

Me: Any plans for post-launch support in the way of DLC or Free updates?

Red Blue Games: We’d love to shoot for a content patch soon, but it largely depends on the reception of the game. In the meantime, we’re hanging tight during launch to see if we need to address any hotfixes or UX improvements for things that our players might find unintuitive, but over the course of development, we’ve had a lot of ideas for features that would make for great content updates, so hopefully we’ll get a chance to make them happen.

Me: What games did you draw inspiration from for this title? Visually, mechanically, or thematically?

Red Blue Games: Visually: SNES games in general were a huge inspiration. One of our early artists quotes Secret of Mana as his favorite game and people say they get a ton of those vibes from our art. But we also didn’t want to be totally retro so we break plenty of rules regarding our color palettes, particle effects, and even motion blur on the camera.

Mechanically: Well Bastion was a big influence for top-down combat, though we decided not to do any z-targeting. SNES gameplay was great at the time and still has its place but we didn’t draw a ton from those on gameplay mechanics since we wanted to feel more modern. Thematically: Well Zelda has to be mentioned at some point in this list. The themes of adventure, exploration, and the whimsical tone all are inspired by Zelda. But the game world itself is worth its own explanation too. We wanted the world of Geodia to also serve as a commentary on real life that would help shape people’s opinions. Maybe that comes from pressures from our family to be doctors instead of gamedevs haha. But we do hope that some of the celebration of science and caution against greed will resonate with players.

Me: What is your favorite creature or boss in the game and why?

Red Blue Games: My favorite boss is Timbert, who’s the Boss in the forest. He was the first we developed and he just set a great bar for the other bosses. I think his gameplay is solid and I love his personality – he’s so mad at his machine malfunctioning!

Me: How long do you expect a normal playthrough to take?

Red Blue Games: We’re getting reports of 12-15 hours or so, and we expect that to vary some based on player skill level. We have additional content for completionists that should take longer than that (getting all of the Beats, for example), and we’d like to do more to highlight the completionist aspects of the game in the future.

TN’s Indie Impressions – Sparklite

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