Take Down Crime, One Yoyo Trick At A Time! - An Interview with Pipistrello creators Pocket Trap

Built from a passion for the Game Boy Advance (GBA), Pipistrello and The Cursed Yoyo looks as though it’s shaping up to be a modern day classic for those wanting to scratch that retro gaming itch. I was lucky enough to catch up with Henrique Caprino, the producer and co-founder at Pocket Trap, to talk a little about the team and the upcoming game.

Hi all, introduce yourselves! 

Hi there! We are Pocket Trap, a small indie studio from São Paulo, Brazil. We’ve been making games for quite a while, almost 12 years already! You might know us from our previous games like Dodgeball Academia or Ninjin: Clash of Carrots… or maybe you’re getting to know us now, the creators of Pipistrello! We love to create authentic and fun experiences inspired by the things we love and grew up with, like Nintendo, cartoons and anime.

It’s a pleasure to meet you! Your art style really calls back to cartoons and animation. Why this particular direction?

I think it’s a natural choice and a reflection of what inspires us. We all love silly humour, animes, cartoons and classic games from Nintendo and other publishers. Specifically talking about the Art Direction, most of the style of our projects comes from our artist, Rodrigo Zangelmi. He has a very distinct artstyle and is an amazing character designer who’s very involved with cartoons and animation as well. So much so that one of our games and characters, Ninjin, became a real Cartoon Network show here in Latin America! 

Speaking of…how was it co-creating/co-producing a show for Cartoon Network?!

It was a crazy unexpected opportunity and a dream-come-true story for sure! I think this was one of our biggest accomplishments so far, especially coming from a small studio like ours.  As a studio, we are always aiming to create great IPs that people can relate to and have the potential to be transported to other media beyond games. Sometimes, we feel constrained by the limitations of what we can explore, show and tell just by our video-games. Expanding to other media enables us to go further with the characters and universes we create.

We are Cartoon Network fans ourselves, so we worked really hard to make the Ninjin animation project come to life. It was very challenging too, adapting an “arcade-action” game into a full fledged animated series is no joke… we had to redesign a lot of the characters and create a story from scratch, in a different time period so it wouldn’t conflict with the game.

Thankfully, we were fortunate enough to work with two amazing partners to help create the show, Roger Keesse and Birdo Studio. Animated shows are huge projects on their own and involve a lot of work from a lot of people, so we wouldn’t have been able to develop it on our own.

There’s so much to talk about this experience that I think it would need an interview just on this topic! Haha.

But what an opportunity for you all, and the rest of the team around you! 

So, tell us all a bit about Pipistrello and The Cursed Yoyo. 

I think we can summarize Pipistrello by calling it a “Zelda-like Yoyovania”, haha. For those unfamiliar with these terms, it’s a top-down action/platform/puzzle game, inspired heavily by the Game Boy Advance era. Different from our usual inspirations, though, is its setting: Pipistrello takes place in an urban-fantasy world where you play as Pippit, a spoiled kid that comes from a family of very rich bats who runs Pipistrello Industries, a company that serves electricity to the entire city. Pippit doesn’t care much about the family business though, all he cares about is his favorite yoyo and learning some new tricks!

The game starts when other “crime bosses” grow tired of the abuses by the Pipistrellos and decide to join forces to take them down. Pippit was just visiting his auntie, who runs the Pipistrello businesses, when they show up at the mansion to put their nefarious plot to work. I’ll leave the rest for you to uncover when you play the game!

Players can expect a lot of exploration, exciting unlockables like new yoyo moves, skill upgrades, and more as they progress through the city to defeat all crime-bosses!

So how did you land on a yoyo as the weapon of choice?

Part of our creative process is to think about cool gadgets, gizmos and objects that can serve as game mechanics for our games, being it the main weapon for the player or part of the obstacles and challenges. Going back to our childhood for inspiration, or stuff that we feel like a lot of people can relate to is also important to us. We did a very similar thing with dodgeball to co-create Dodgeball Academia.

For Pipistrello, we knew we wanted to make a game loosely inspired by Castlevania. Some key elements of classic Castlevanias are the whip, the vampire theme, etc. So we started thinking of cool objects that could work like a whip but expand upon the concept. The yoyo was a perfect fit, as we all grew up playing with it and it’s an object that opens a ton of gameplay possibilities which can work well in a “explor-action” game!

Pipistrello leans much more into a pixel art style than your other titles. What was it that drove this decision?  

Coming from Dodgeball Academia, a 3D game featuring 2D hand-drawn traditional animation, we wanted to make a “smaller” game inspired by what brings us a lot of joy and that could be a bit more practical from a development standpoint. We’re big Game Boy nerds here, and we are especially fond of the GBA era. We felt like we had a lot of games in pixel-art on the market but not so many that worked within the specific GBA spectrum. We wanted to scratch this itch of making a game that resembled the GBA classics with its pixel-art and proportions, but felt modernized at the same time.

The game just didn’t end up “smaller” like we had hoped, haha! It’s bigger than Dodgeball. And I think that was for the best. The lighter art load enabled us to focus more on gameplay mechanics and level design.

And that explains the plentiful comparisons to the Game Boy Advance era of top- down The Legend of Zelda, and Metroidvanias!

Haha, being recognized for this is something that makes us super happy! As I mentioned, we grew up playing a lot of GBA, and if it weren't for that, perhaps some of us in the team wouldn’t even be making games today. It really was a defining era, which has brought us games we’re very passionate about. So we thought it would bring us and the players joy if we tried to make a game that approached the style of these classics and people could relate to it like we do, while also feeling like a fresh take.

We also feel like this genre-blend of Zelda and Metroidvanias still wasn’t fully explored by their developers, so it was super exciting to tackle this challenge! Zelda games from that era were usually very “grounded” and didn't offer a lot of variation when it came to combat or even platforming. We thought it would be fun to try and explore this opportunity to make a game that looked similar to the classics, but offers more mechanics that are similar to modern games. 

There’s so much to explore, and we’re always aiming to develop games we want to play and see more.

And is that what you want us to take from Pipistrello? Joy and Fun?

Having fun is our most important goal for sure. We hope it becomes a game that people can relate with, whether because of the art-style, characters, narrative or gameplay. Whether you are a yoyo fan or a Zelda fan. My personal dream is for it to become a game that can connect generations – a game parents that grew up with Game Boys feel happy to share with their children. A game that enables younger audiences to experience a similar joy to what we had back in the glorious days of The Minish Cap, Metroid: Fusion and so many others.

As Brazilian developers, we also hope people can catch small snippets of our culture, architecture and overall personality in the game too!

I love that, and with Pipistrello being such a love letter in its own way, I’m sure you’ll achieve that. 

To finish us off, pixel art really has been an emerging trend in gaming recently. In your opinion, what is it about this art style that’s making it a popular direction in game design?

I think there are lots of possible reasons. It’s a versatile art-style that can fit a lot of genres and has many different approaches depending on the proportions and dimensions you want to work with. In our case, we wanted to come as close as possible to a game that resembled the GBA era.

It’s also a very practical artstyle for developers to work with!

Always helps! Thanks so much for answering my questions! Any closing comments?

Thanks for the opportunity and for allowing us to talk more about our beloved game! We hope everyone is excited and looking forward to feeling like a kid again, playing the full game when it comes out on May 28th!