Gunbrella Preview: It’s Raining Bullets

Doinksoft’s first game, Gato Roboto, told players quite a lot with just its cutesy name: It’s a cat in a mech suit. Gunbrella, one of Doinksoft’s upcoming titles, follows that tradition by giving the player an umbrella that, unsurprisingly, doubles as a gun. And while the portmanteau is initially captivating, the game itself is shaping up reasonably well, too.

The wordplay almost seems like a mission statement for the game’s ubiquity, which is a big part of its appeal. The umbrella lets players glide like Mary Poppins, but also dash, block, parry, use zip lines, and more. These moves can link into each other and give the game a respectable platforming base to work with. The gun half (which has multiple ammo types) of the instrument can be used in conjunction with the traversal abilities, meaning that blasting hapless souls is a natural extension of the platforming. It’s a rather straightforward platformer, but the gunbrella gives it more utility.

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It’s a manifestation of a famous Shigeru Miyamoto quote where he notes that a “good idea is something that does not solve just one single problem, but rather can solve multiple problems at once.” The gunbrella is able to aid combat and traversal with one tool, but that’s not something that took too long for Doinksoft to figure out. Britt Brady, pixel artist and sound designer for the game, talked about how it naturally built from the mechanics the team was adding in.

“It happened pretty quick in the prototyping phase because that was all that we were worried about at that point,” he said. “Like what are the player’s mechanics? How does it move? Does it feel good? At one point somebody added in slamming into enemies and that would kill them. And it was like, ‘It’s a cool idea, but might be even cooler if it didn’t kill them and just knocked them on their butt because you have short-range shotgun, so you can kind of just like dive into them, disable them, and then blow them to shreds and that adds more layers.’ And then [Gameplay Designer Cullen Dwyer] one day was like, ‘I added zip lines,’ and we were like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s great. Why not?’ It was just a lot of stuff like that and we were pretty quickly trying and prototyping stuff and seeing what was good.”

“Gunbrella” rolls off the tongue and there’s a seamless quality in being able to go from dashing to parrying bullets to shooting them. It remains to be seen how much more it can be fleshed out, but it’s a solid enough hook in these early stages. Gradually building out the titular tool was the central idea for the game and this meant the team had to return to levels and add more nuance to match all the ideas it kept coming up with.

“The idea of having a tool that is so diverse mechanically is really cool and that was the base idea,” he said. “Once we had it feeling good and we had good action combat, we did want to figure out ways to make it a little bit more than just an action game. Now we have to go back to some of the later sections of the game and add more action because because we focused on getting those in in time trying not to fall behind. We’re making sure that we know the purpose of everything we’re doing and now we’re really in the face of polishing up level design and combat.”

Gunbrella is more mechanically dense than Gato Roboto, but it’s still not a search action platformer; Brady noted that players are “pretty darn powerful right away” and said it was still a more traditional platformer rather than a game in the vein of Super Metroid. However, it is a bigger game that Doinksoft wanted to push itself on, which nudges the game slightly into adventure and RPG territory. There are towns to visit and characters to talk to, which is more ambitious than the aforementioned cat game. 

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Branching out was a conscious choice as Brady said that the team wants to keep challenging itself and likes to experiment, as evidenced by its upcoming physical-only game Demon Throttle. Those smaller games can be “fun, fast, and rewarding” to make, but going bigger with Gunbrella has its challenges, especially since the studio isn’t following an established blueprint as closely as it was with Gato Roboto. 

“We found a little bit of what it was [while making the game],” he said. “The early parts of developing the game was us not knowing what it was. That presented some struggles because when you’re making a Metroidvania like Gato Roboto, we’re basically making a Metroid game and there’s plenty of reference there. There’s a structure and a setup that’s proven and experienced that people are familiar with and that we’re familiar with. So Gunbrella is a little bit new for us. We weren’t exactly sure what it was, but it had so many great things and we’ve developed what it is just over time through work and trial and error.”

Gato Roboto stuck perhaps a bit too closely to genre traditions, so even though it was charming, it wasn’t the most ambitious title. It’s not yet clear how ambitious Gunbrella will be and it still looks to be a relatively safe platformer, but the ubiquity of its central gadget is enticing. Even though Doinksoft more or less worked backwards from the name, it’s a decent idea to base a game around. It just depends on if the gunbrella itself is sturdy enough to support that idea over the course of a full game.

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