After the success of Creature in the Well, the genre-bending "pinball hack-and-slash" adventure, developer Flight School Studio is back with a new title, Stonefly. The innovative new title takes elements from MOBA games and sumo wrestling, with combat that makes use of mechs, wind, and physics to have players blow their enemies off of the stage. It's a unique gameplay mechanic, and it's made even more creative by the unique setting and shrunken down scale.

Players control a character named Anika, who pilots an upgradable large mech... Well, "large" is a relative term, since the characters are tiny, and battles are set on tree branches and arenas take the form of leaves. The story follows Anika, who is on a quest to recover her father's prized mech, after her own accidental carelessness caused it to be stolen. On her journey, she meets up with a colorful group of mercenaries who aid her on her way.

Related: Stonefly Preview: Exploring The Endless Treetops

Screen Rant spoke with Adam Volker, Creative Director at Flight School Studio, about his work on Stonefly. He talks about the setting, story, characters, and gameplay of Stonefly, and how the studio learned lessons from their work on Creature in the Well that influenced their work on the new title. He talks about how the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic influenced Stonefly's development, and explains how one particular line from Star Wars has influenced his career as someone who taps into the audience's own imagination to make worlds that are fantastical and believable.

Stonefly is published by MWM and is scheduled for release on PC, Switch, and cross-gen on Xbox and PlayStation in Summer 2021.

Stonefly hub

How's it going in the wild world of game development?

Oh my goodness, what a question!

Thank you, we ask the tough questions here.

Well, releasing a game during a pandemic is weird. Doing it all digitally, moving my entire social life to a computer screen, is weird. But I'm proud of what we made.

You need to follow my example and have no social life. Then it's not that different.

Just go cold turkey on people!

Sometimes, I wish! Okay, so this is your first quarantine release. First pandemic release.

I hope it's the only one! But that's a correct statement, yes.

How far along were you into the game when the edict came down that everyone had to stay home?

So, I'd been drawing on Stonefly, doodling, sketching, thinking about Stonefly, for maybe a year. But we were maybe about five or six months into development. I think, officially, we started in September of 2019. In Canada, in Montreal, the shelter-in-place order came in around March, so that gave us about six or seven months of prototyping and concept art and stuff. Actually, right when the team ramped up and we started to add people!

So this really is a full-on pandemic baby.

For sure.

Maybe it's an impossible question to ask, but is Stonefly a different game than if you had made it in the office?

That is a great question. I think, yes. One of the things I miss about development, pre-pandemic, is the convention circuit as a tool for review of the game. On the last title we made, Creature in the Well, we brought it to PAX East and PAX West or PAX Prime, whatever they're calling it, and GDC... And when people would play the game, we would get such good impressions on stuff, on what comparisons players were making, on what things were easy to pick up and what things weren't. Development is a bit of a "black box." The team gets really used to looking at the title and playing the title. So, knowing what's working and what's not working becomes difficult to parse, especially late in the game. The simple answer is, it's absolutely different. But in what specific ways? That's much more difficult to answer.

I guess this is apples to oranges, but I'm thinking about movies and TV shows and they have preview screenings and stuff like that. Sometimes the general audiences can butt up against the "filmmaker's vision." I don't know if it's quite the same relationship with games, because you've gotta play it, you've gotta get in the hands of the people!

In gaming, I would politely say we have a weird relationship between players and developers.

(Laughs) Yeah, I'll say!

There's a lot of... Conversation, (Laughs) on how a game is supposed to look like when they're done. But I think it's healthy. I think it keeps us honest, and I think it's much more collaborative that way. I enjoy showing and sharing the work we do with players. It's the reason we do it!

You've got to have a particular mindset when you ship a game and then go, "Let me check Reddit!"

You have to be a particular type of masochist if you really want to know! That's a slippery slope. Sometimes it's like, "Oh man, what a great idea, I never thought of that!" But sometimes it's like... "Ouch."

Let's jump into Stonefly. Isometric. It's like a giant mech game, but with little bugs.

Giant mechs, but minuscule, yes.

That sounds like a fun scale to play with, right?

Oh, it absolutely is. Stonefly is our action-adventure magical forest darling of a game, set at a miniature scale where you play as Anika Stonefly, the namesake of the title, on an adventure to retrieve her father's stolen heirloom, which is also one of these mech robot rigs. We got to build this world of bugs and kingdoms and fighter pilot mercenary groups, bands of pseudo-military corps that roam around the world and do things... It's been an absolute blast to build that world and build a game inside that world.

Stonefly Anika

I imagine that, after Creature in the Well... Do you always have carte blanche to do the kind of game you want to do next? Is it all on you, as Creative Director, to go, "This is the game we're doing now!" What's the process like?

Bohdon Sayre and I, we work really collaboratively as far as "our next idea," but it never really takes until we can get money to make it. There's a humility of, "This is what I want to make," but then somebody goes, "Hmm, not interested." So then you have to try again. But we do our best to propose our next thing and make sure it checks all of our boxes for what we would like to make, but you can't always get what you want.

Can you say, at all, how the ideas and gameplay and concept of Stonefly evolved from its earliest nugget into entering full development?

Absolutely. I'll start by saying that Boh and I represent creative and technical. So, as we build our new games, it's kind of "one brick at a time," and each of us are adding all the time to create the wall in this metaphor. Uh, the house of the video game! (Laughs) For Stonefly, we picked up an old prototype we made, actually. It was maybe about a year old at the time, and it was a very different mechanic, but it was based on this ball that was bouncing. And we were like, "Well, that's cool... What do we want to do with that?" And I started drawing and thinking, "What could that ball turn into?" So I drew a robot. Then it was, "What if that robot had wings?" So now there's a mechanic on top of the bouncing, where it's gliding. And then it's kind of like, "Well, what would be interesting?" It's very Socratic. The method is very Socratic. It's just posing questions to what we have and then adding things we find interesting. We wanted to make a story game, we wanted to tell a story since we felt Creature in the Well was a little bit barebones. We thought, "Wouldn't it be cool if it was tiny?" Cool! Yeah! Now the robots are small, so let's make them look like bugs. It has to be about art and play together, since gameplay is obviously the heart of what games are about. But visuals and storytelling and all of that is really important to us, as well. So we try to make them even players in the development process.

Makes sense to me! Speaking of the gameplay, from what I've seen in the dev diaries you've released, you're pushing bugs off of leaves. When you bring in physics on top of an animation system, is that a technical nightmare? My mind is still boggled by intricate physics, it's just... It's like catnip for my imagination, it's like magic.

Well, a bit of that is beyond my ability to speak to, because that's all Boh's department. But from a design point of view, we wanted something that felt action-y, but that was non-violent. So we thought, "What if we use wind?" And then, as we started to reference games with crowds, we talked a lot about MOBAs and "creep camps" and stuff like that, about what's fun about coming up on a group of enemies. We built abilities that the bugs could use and that the player could use. There's a bug that charges through the other ones, and there's one that blows wind like the player's mech does. And smart, strategic players can use all of those things to overlap, and bugs can fight themselves. And you can complete an encounter without killing all the bugs, without shooting them off the ledge and stuff like that. It definitely is the part of the game that received the most iteration.

I love that. It looks really fun to play. Okay, let's bring it back to the world. Who is your main character? Who is Anika Stonefly, and who is her overbearing father?

She has one of those dads who is never "mad," but he's "disappointed." It's even worse, right? It's even worse to let him down than it is to get yelled at. Anika is an inventor by blood. Her dad is a very famous, sort of secretly famous, mechanic/inventor of technology in this world. She grew up working with him in their small town mechanic shop. She is booksmart. She is super well-read, but she hasn't really been out of her small town. So, much like Cameron and Ferris do in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, she takes her dad's rig out one night. She's like, "Why is this thing so special? This thing he keeps in the shed behind the house, what makes it so cool?" And she has a really great time piloting it at night, but when she returns home, she forgets to lock the door, and somebody sees her and takes the rig from the backyard. And dad... He loses it. As we would say while we were in development, she "Mulans." She just runs away in the middle of the night, and goes off to take back her father's rig. And that's how the journey begins! She learns about who she can become on her own, all the talent she has inside of her, the challenges she's up against, and she grows as a person.

Is she always by herself? Is there a companion? Does she return to base between missions?

The Acorn Corp is the band of B-Team misfit pilots that she teams up with. They are not the best bunch. They're the bad batch, if you will. Each of them teaches Anika something about herself. She helps them improve their rigs, and they build a really strong bond throughout the story. Their campsite, their base of operations, is kind of the hub that the player returns to, to retool their rig or just talk to the different members. She travels through the story with them.

Voices?

I wish. (Laughs) No, no, that was an early decision. We decided to use dialogue and we did some text bubble comic-book style development for that, but there's no VO.

Remember when Zelda added voice acting? We didn't really need it.

I go back and forth on whether I love or dislike the noises the characters give you in a game like Zelda, where when you talk to them. They do add a ton of personality.

Maybe a little too much in Beedle's case.

Sometimes it's a little... Extra.

Stonefly mech

Does that impact the tone at all? Tell me about striking a balance of having characters who you want to be believable and who you want players to relate to, but who can inhabit this heightened world?

Right, who can make it feel real. I will say that I've always subscribed to... Forgive my small digression, but I've always subscribed to the theory of the old illustrator, N. C. Wyeth. He illustrated novels like Treasure Island. He's one of my favorite painters. His philosophy for illustrating books like Treasure Island and Robin Hood, classics, is never to illustrate the moments that are the climax of the story, because people love to imagine those moments. So he would pick moments in between to fill the world with extra detail and stuff. I feel like my segue is that we can accomplish the same thing by not giving them voices, by letting people imagine what they might sound like. They can see the character designs and imagine what the character is, in their mind... And let players fill in the details.

That makes sense.

I'm so glad it does! (Laughs)

I grew up in the late 90s, in the PS1 era, where voice acting was very hit-or-miss. I mean, it still is in a lot of cases, but back then, hoo-boy. But I don't think I would be the reader that I am if I didn't play games like Final Fantasy VII or Legend of Legaia, those big old JRPGs, where a key part of the experience is reading, basically, a novel.

It happens when books get adapted to movies, as well. You've read about Frodo and Bilbo, so you're like, "Is that right? Is that what Gandalf actually looks like? Okay." Maybe we're just leaving the right amount of space for people to participate.

Just in talking to you, I'm kind of seeing that you are a storyteller, and if it's not too presumptuous of me to say, I believe you were always going to be a storyteller.

No, I think that's high praise, thank you!

For you, when you were a kid, did you always know that it was going to be video games? Did you want to write books or movies, or was it always going to be this path? Err, if that's not too personal of me to ask.

No, it's not, it's fine! I think it was definitely going to be video games and art. In my high school, I was "the art kid." I went to a high school of about 200, and I was "the kid who drew." And a lot of what I would draw in my notebooks were these skateboarding levels that had jumps and you had to collect keys. I think I was playing a ton of Super Mario World back then. But you had to go collect the key and go back to the door... It was a drawn map where you could pretend to do tricks and stuff. They were basically mazes, but I drew a skateboarding game in my notebook. Those two things... If I went back in time and met myself, I'd probably go, "Yeah, this was inevitable." (Laughs) That's what I'm doing now! I'm just doing it and getting paid. It's great.

Living the dream!

Absolutely.

What were the games that you came up on? Even if the player might not see them in Stonefly, what are the games that allowed you to make this game?

I feel like the answers are super expected. Zelda is one, for sure. The first one I played was A Link to the Past. And then, of course, when Ocarina of Time came out, it was all over for me. When I was a kid, those were some of those early game experiences. I played a ton of Pokemon Red on my Game Boy, and I played Halo a lot in high school. For Stonefly, specifically, we talked about MOBAs and things like that, but we also talked a lot about Dynasty Warriors in early development, because we were like, it's really fun to just roll up on a group of, like, 50 guys and hit them all at once with the sword and they all fall over... It's just really fun to have that pulpy gameplay. I also reference Super Smash Bros. a lot because Smash is about pushing other players off the ledge. And we're doing sort of a 3D version of that. This is a bit of a reach, but we were also talking about sumo wrestling, which has two competitors pushing each other out of a ring. We talked about things that were less video game related, but still play-related. We try to see gameplay as abstractly as possible.

Stonefly Art

Tell me about writing for a game where you're returning to a base and where you can only go out so far because you have to regroup at the end, and progressing the character, as well the narrative.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention Belinda Garcia, who we brought on to write the game with us. She did a ton, as far as helping us find the characters and the plot structure. She and I did the heavy lifting with the writing, together. And we kind of built the structure first. We talked about, what's Ann's journey from an outline perspective? Where do we want her to end up? What does her character need to go through? What does she need? Basic storytelling structure stuff. And we tried to cleverly hide milestones inside the game's progression to allow us to make that feel as natural as possible. After that, I think it's just a sleight-of-hand exercise. Like, make the reason you can't progress believable. Then you get to write the really juicy stuff, like... I have a line written above my desk, "The Millennium Falcon did the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs." It doesn't make any sense. But as soon as you hear Han say it, you're like, "Woah. That ship is fast. It's awesome!" But it doesn't mean anything!

It's so fast! Or slow! Or, uh, I don't know, but it's impressive.

It's such a powerful tool for writers, to just be like, I don't know what we wrote... Like, rainwire alloy is used in this rig's fabrication for the wings..." We just make up words and it's real all of a sudden! It's kind of like order of operations. Big to small, in terms of writing.

Does Anika have all the tools and abilities in the beginning that she has later on, and it's up to the player to get better as they play, or are there skill trees? How does she grow from a gameplay perspective?

The player does not have everything to start out with. But they do have a basic toolkit. Then, as you play, Ann is always thinking. So we tried to tie the mechanics into the narrative. She's coming up with ideas, and those ideas are literally blueprints for players to upgrade their rig. So, at the beginning of the game, you inherit a junker. And that junker is barely jumping off the ground. But by the end of the game, you have a souped-up, super-powerful, augmented rig. There's a combination of statistic-based abilities, like extra health, jump height, push strength... And there are functional upgrades as well, like a bubble, a lift, a spark, different things that change the battlefield in a pretty significant way.

Can you go back to old levels once you've upgraded and just completely steamroll over things that were challenging before?

There's two types of levels. There are missions, which are more story-driven, and you can hop back and forth between them once you've completed them. And then there are larger patrol areas that you unlock as you progress the story. Those are available, too, at any point. So they include different tiers of bugs that you will be able to totally stomp once you're in the late game. You can go back to the original, early areas.

I'm a studio producer. I'm the big boss. I've got a cigar. I want to know, how are we gonna get that MTX money? Skins for your rig? "Time-saver" packs, so instead of playing the game, you can just pay and get get instant upgrades and destroy the game balance. What have you got for me? What's the scheme?

We don't really put that type of stuff in our games. You pay for it, you play it, and you maybe have a great time.

What a concept!

That's our business strategy. That's our approach.

And it's working for you? ...I'm obviously being facetious, of course.

Yes. So, the game doesn't have any in-app purchases, or skins, or anything like that. But you can customize the colors of your rig to a very fine amount of detail. You can put hex codes from photoshop or wherever in there, and you can share that stuff, as well. So if you want to do your high school colors, of your favorite football team's colors, you can. Whatever you're into!

Stonefly screenshot

Kinda related to that, do you have leaderboards or multiplayer or any online component?

There's no online component, no. I think the community aspect will come in by having players share secrets amongst each other, about where they found different cosmetic upgrades. They're in the game, you just have to find them. Officially, there's no multiplayer, no leaderboards or any online content like that.

That's good. When I play my Switch, I'm usually on the train. I live in New York City, so I'm always on the subway. And every once in a while, I'll start a game, and it'll say, "Hey, you need to connect online first." And I'm like, "I'm on the train! I can't do that now! I'm gonna play something else."

Then have I got a game for you, man! Stonefly!

I'm down, I'm in. You've sold it to me, let's rock! Is it an old-fangled idea, is it not really the case anymore, that you have a lead development platform and then port from there, or is everything so scalable that developing for Switch and developing for PS4 and PS5 isn't terribly different?

It's gotten easier, but it's still a significant overhaul. The computing power of the Switch is not the same as that of a PC or a PS4 or PS5. But I think the middleware has improved a lot. We developed the game in Unreal. Boh did a handful of custom shaders and other stuff, so it's not out-of-the-box Unreal, but it is mostly, and we love it! They do a great job of making it as painless as possible to do things like localization and platform-specific stuff, but there's still tons of work to do to get the game that you develop on your computer to the other machines.

I think there's a little bit of a misconception among some enthusiasts that there's a switch you can flip... And now it runs on Switch.

That's good branding. That's Nintendo doing great branding, is what that is.

You just flip the switch! That's it!

You click the "Nintendo button," and the game works on Switch.

Just knock it down to 720p and you're good, right?

(Laughs) It's weird, because we do a lot of LOD, level of detail, on models. Draw distance stuff. Shadows are really big, lighting is a really big thing to work on to make it run on Switch. Those are sort of on the short list. It's not everything. I'm not the most technical person, that's a caveat. But those are on the list of things that come across my eyes. They're very visually related. When we do porting, it's like, "Oh, we had to change the foliage, and the shadow resolution has changed. This rock now has fewer polygons.

Stonefly Canopy Gameplay

I'm thinking about how long it takes to make a game, and how you're swimming blind, or whatever the term is, and you've got the game you're working on, and then other games come out that has... Even if not similar ideas... Say, a game comes out and it's got an isometric camera, but it's pulled out further than the one in your game... You see what I'm getting at? How do you decide to change, or muster up the confidence to stick to your guns and what you set out to do, regardless of knee-jerk market trends?

The short answer is, you just have to push through and be brave about it. But the comforting answer is... I went to college in Florida, at an art school, Ringling College of Art and Design. And we used to run workshops there. We used to do a storytelling workshop. We would give groups of students Frankenstein, and we would ask them to reimagine it. In three days, you would get five groups that would make such wildly different choices with the same seed idea. I've never been scared of someone else releasing a game that was like ours. I think any development team will make different development decisions than the next development team. Just by factor of working on it, paths will diverge. There's obvious comparisons, but I've never really felt like we were going to release something that was the same as something else.

Well, you don't need me to tell you, the game looks so cool, I can't wait to get it in my hands to see for myself how it all shakes out!

Next: The Ten Biggest Games Coming In 2021

Stonefly is published by MWM and is scheduled for release on PC, Switch, and cross-gen on Xbox and PlayStation in Summer 2021.