Cellar Door Games’ Teddy Lee talks about everything
[Sup Holmes is a weekly talk show for people that make great videogames. It airs live every Sunday at 4pm EST on Youtube, and can be found in Podcast form on Libsyn and iTunes.]
Last week on Sup Holmes we welcomed Teddy Lee, designer of Rogue Legacy to the program. Normally we try to grab a clip from the most recent episode to share with you here on Destructoid, but this week there were too many clip-worthy moments to choose just one. So here’s the whole thing instead!
One of the highlights here can from learning about Teddy’s game design inspirations. Surprisingly, they are often times born from frustration. When Teddy plays a game that he feels is poorly designed, it annoys him. The design flaws turn over and over in his head. Instead of just complaining about them, he uses that frustration as inspiration. He does his best to make the games he wish others would have made. That’s part of how Rogue Legacy came to be, though due to practical reasons, they couldn’t make it a Metroid-style game like original planned.
Hopefully Cellar Door Games’ Metroidvania will become a real thing someday. In the meantime, you could always check out Gucamelee, a game that Teddy helped to design. We also talked about Teddy’s prior plans to become a teacher, his bad grades, the David and Goliath problem of launching on PSN against The Last of Us Remastered, what he’d do with the Zelda series, the little competitive shooting game he recently made with his brother (nicknamed The Last of Me), the idea of a Shovel Knight crossover, the best game he ever made (Pizza Palace), the potential for a sequel to Don’t Sh*t Your Pants, the most fair way to design a boss fight, and a whole lot more. It was a fantastic conversation!
Thanks again to Teddy for coming on the show with us, and if you’re around at 4pm EST today, stop by the live stream where we’ll be talking to Chad and Jared Moldenhauer of Studio MDHR, creators of Cuphead. We’re going to try eating those weird new potato chips. They look terrible.
