A Foddian game, named after Bennett Foddy who created Getting Over It, is a genre of extremely challenging platformer that involves using simple – yet difficult to master – controls to navigate an unforgiving environment. These games are popular, despite their obvious sadomasochism, because they give players a heightened sense of achievement when they overcome adversity. The genre is also a magnet for speedrunners and content creators because the sheer difficulty attracts viewers.
We spoke to Isaac and Martin of Canberra-based Oppolyon Studios about their upcoming Foddian-inspired rage game, Ascending Inferno, just before its appearance in the PAX Aus 2024 Indie Showcase. Isaac is one of the co-founders and acts as the main narrative designer while Martin, who joined the team later, is a technical artist.
The original concept for Ascending Inferno came from a game jam, with the simple premise of a deceased soccer player starting in front of a hospital and climbing up. “When we were first deciding on what we wanted to do, we did a game jam every week. We did four different ones [but] we went back to this concept,” Isaac said. As for the finer details, it was somewhat more randomly generated. “We just happened to have a Dante’s Inferno book in our office, on our little bookshelf, and we kind of just picked it up and went like ‘what if we split it up as each layer of hell’ and it just snowballed from there.”
That concept lent itself not just to the level design, but to Oppolyon’s desire to include a narrative in the game – something that isn’t necessarily the norm for rage games. “This genre is pretty saturated already. There’s a lot of Foddian games now…and we wanted to stand out as much as we could,” said Isaac. “At first there wasn’t much but…I think the story now is like almost two-thousand-and-something lines of dialogue.”
Ascending Inferno’s opening sequence shows Dani, a “really cool ex-soccer player” with hot pink hair, tattoos and a skeleton corset, taking a soccer ball from the bedroom of her recently deceased younger brother, Vincent, and heading to an under-construction soccer stadium. The tutorial level has you mastering the techniques of dribbling, kicking and jumping with the ball throughout the stadium as Dani attempts to work through (or perhaps escape) her grief. It ends with Dani falling off some loose scaffolding and meeting her own untimely death.
Dani suddenly finds herself in an unfamiliar environment with a blue glowing orb in front of her. As it so happens, that’s Vincent and they’re in Hell. Starting from Limbo and working her way through the layers of Inferno, Dani needs to kick the ball – Vincent’s soul – all the way up and out of there. There’s an array of challenges and obstacles, as well as dialogue and cutscenes between the two, as they make their way to the surface.
“We wanted to put that in for [the] newer audience without it being to the detriment of the existing audience of people who just want to speedrun the game,” Isaac said. The team integrated this by infusing the gameplay with casual sibling dialogue that would add to the frustration of a rage gamer without impeding them, and then hiding the meat of the story in optional story rooms. “[It’s] an opt-in system where if [they’re] interested in the story, the player has to choose to go out of their way to interact with it.”
Lust, to us, was naturally going to be a nightclub…it’s kind of a place where you go out, you hook up with people, and then you leave, right?
Speaking on the narrative’s path, Isaac shared some insight into where it leads players who are willing to follow:
“The story…explores the dynamics between an older and younger sibling. The older sibling caring for the younger one and feeling that responsibility. There’s a lot of interesting dynamics between the two. Vincent is like that sarcastic, annoyingly obnoxious younger sibling – I can say that because I have a younger sibling.
“[It’s] Dani trying to process through her feelings. She feels guilty about Vincent’s death but doesn’t know why…One of the story rooms is her regaining some of her memories back…and also you get Vincent’s perspective of seeing it from her perspective. So he thinks things went a different way whilst Dani thought they went this way.
“There is definitely a branching point in the story, where it’s like, at a certain point in their lives when they’re going through their memories, they kind of drift apart – as siblings tend to do when they get older – and it’s Dani coming to terms with that.”
Depending on how players engage with the story, whether they seek out all of those secret rooms or not, the ending will differ. Oppolyon hope that this, along with their carefully curated art style, will help to attract a wide audience to Ascending Inferno.
“We go to a monthly event, Pizza & Pixels, and each month we would bring [the game] along and just get the public to test it for us,” Martin said. Oppolyon found throughout this play testing process that players who weren’t typically interested in Foddian games were being drawn to their game because of its aesthetic appeal. It uses a voxel art style to render the layers of Inferno as distinct biomes, utilising completely different colour palettes and assets for each one.
“Lust, to us, was naturally going to be a nightclub…it’s kind of a place where you go out, you hook up with people, and then you leave, right?” said Martin. “Some of the levels were a little bit trickier to nail down. I think Limbo was especially one of those. It’s a desolate place where, in the tales, there’s millions of people. But for performance reasons we can’t show that many.” They eventually settled on trying to capture the emotion in the scene, instead of interpreting the idea literally. The result is a dark and claustrophobic dungeon crawl.
When we asked Martin about the challenges of creating a unique aesthetic for a location that has been represented in media so many times, he said:
“I think a lot of it came down to stereotypes and what people are expecting, more than trying to stray away from what’s been done a million times. There’s a level of new that people appreciate but then there’s equally an amount where it’s just too far. So it was a balance of ‘this is what the player wants to see, this is what the player is getting and how we can gel those together’.”
On the notion of player expectations, Oppolyon had a keen focus on balance when creating the mechanics, too. Rage gamers would be coming into the experience with a set of existing ideas of how things should operate, so it was important to the team that Ascending Inferno could hold its own in the genre.
Isaac spoke on the team’s attitude towards this:
“Foddian/rage games are always gonna make people upset, so one of the main things we really wanted to nail down was ‘okay, why are people getting upset?’ and trying to balance that. They’re upset but they’re still having fun – hopefully, fingers crossed.
“A lot of Foddian games are really known for their janky physics, which can be quite frustrating at times … so we spent a ton of time on making sure the character felt really nice to move around.
“Trying to balance that so then we could direct the player’s frustrations to other things – that was kind of the main challenge that was throughout the entirety of the project when we’re designing all the levels, the mechanics, even just the art. Making sure it’s clear to the player where to go and just never making it feel like the player was tricked, essentially.”
As one of the winners of the PAX Aus 2024 Indie Showcase, Oppolyon Studios will have a booth in the Indie Showcase area of the Expo Hall. The Ascending Inferno demo will be playable during Expo Hall hours, 10am to 6pm, October 11-13.
