Rusted Mossis a refreshing entry in the popular Metroidvania genre thanks to its unique grappling hook traversal that makes exploring its beautiful, sprawling map an exercise in both skill and creativity. Created by an all-female team of passionateindie gamedevelopers, fans of the genre will feel right at home while also being faced with some new challenges that aren’t found in other similar titles.
Game Rant sat down withRusted Mossdevelopers Faxdoc, Happysquared, and Sunnydaze to talk about their creative process, their thoughts on Metroidvania gameplay, and their unique perspective as an all-female team of developers.The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
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Q:Rusted Mossdiffers from other Metroidvanias in a few ways. What design decisions did you feel were important for establishing the game’s identity?
Happysquared:A lot of it is based on personal tastes in games. Faxdoc is actually not a fan of the memorization gameplay that you see in most Metroidvanias, which is whyRusted Mossdoesn’t have any dodge rolls or parries. She’s always described it as reminding her ofrhythm games. When you play those games, you just learn the boss attacks and the timings. It’s like, “Okay, this boss is doing this animation,” so now you have to press parry within half a second. If they do that, or another animation comes out, then you have to press jump when you see that animation.
She doesn’t find that’s really thinking about what you’re doing, it’s just kind of reacting to whatever frame of animation that boss is in. She feels like she’s hardwiring her brain to memorize these timings, and she personally didn’t think that was fun.
Another part that influenced the design was obviously the unusual grappling hook. The movement is physics-based, it’s not as predictable as double jumps or dashes, and it’s a lot more fluid. So this also lent itself to Faxdoc’s taste inboss fights. It’s more about thinking on your feet and improvising your movement. Outside of combat, we wanted to make sure that the grappling hook was relevant and prioritized level design that emphasized it, so a lot of the design was improvised and iterative. As an example, when we first made the game, which is basically what the demo shows, most of the boss fights didn’t use a ton of the grappling hook except for Maya’s fight, in which in her last phase you have to dangle a little bit.
Then we thought, “Okay, but what if the grappling hook was more dynamic during boss fights?” and then that moved on to how Freia’s fight ended up being, which is extremely dynamic and moving. It was kind of iterative that way.
Q: One thing I liked about the game is that it doesn’t have contact damage when you touch enemies. What made you go with that design?
Happysquared:It makes sense in some games, but in a lot of games it really doesn’t. Maybe people just stick with that because it’s kind of a standard for some stuff to have contact damage. At least forRusted Moss, because of how the grappling hook behaves, it’s a lot of muscle memory to figure stuff out, so I think it’d be overly punishing if most enemies gave contact damage, too. Faxdoc, I know you were also talking about how the level design was intended to be more open-ended.
Faxdoc:We wanted to give you more options to overcome a problem instead of designing gaps with the intent of “Oh, they have to do this certain option.” We attempt to place more grass or ledges around in some random places, so people could be more creative and come up with their own solutions. We don’t always know what tools players will have when they enter a certain room.
Happysquared:The level design inRusted Mossis very much like a playground. Instead of seeing a ledge that’s super high and knowing that I need to get double-jump in order to unlock this next portion of the map, it’s more like “What can I do to the physics or what have I learned from the physics that allows me to do that?”
You could wait to get an upgrade that helps you out with it more, but honestly, the level design ofRusted Mossis actually really open, maybe more open than what newer players realize until they replay the game again and realize with the knowledge that they gathered from their playthrough that they can actually get to certain areas way faster than others. There’s this one platforming challenge in the game, and we’ve seen four different players come up with four different ways to get across. You don’t often see that in other games where there’s a set solution to some things. We just want to really emphasize that things are more like skill gates and creativity gates, rather than ability-gated, likein other Metroidvanias.
Q: Most modern Metroidvanias are focused on melee combat, whileRusted Mossuses guns. What was the thought process behind going with ranged combat, and what were the challenges in balancing around ranged weaponry?
Faxdoc: The project started as an experiment in taking some top-down code to automate aiming animations and converting it into 2D. Since we’ve already made a character with the ability to aim 360 degrees with weapons, we just kind of had to build the game around that.
Happysquared:Faxdoc mentioned the top-down thing. The 360-degree aiming thing started off more like a tutorial experiment for her. It wasn’t even part ofRusted MossbecauseRusted Mosswasn’t even a game or even a concept back then. By converting the top-down thing to 2D, it just kind of made sense. If you have 360-degree aim and it’s very flexible, then having a gun that can aim in all those ways rather than a melee weapon as well as a grappling hook that has range just works out really well together.
Q: It seems like the goal was to make traversal skill-based, rather than simply unlocking an upgrade that opens up new areas.
Happysquared:Yeah, exactly. Some players have called it a nostalgic game for that reason. I know with games in the past, some of the difficulty was more artificial to keep you playing the arcade games longer or to make sure that when you rent a game likethatLion Kinggame, you wouldn’t be able to finish in a weekend before you had to return it.
There’s that feeling you get when you play a game and you’re actually getting better. You feel like you as the player are getting better, rather than the player character that is getting better. You really get that feeling insideRusted Moss. A lot of people when they start off with a grappling hook, they say, “Oh, I really suck at it.”
But by the end of the game, you realize that the earlier challenges you’re doing have suddenly become trivially easy as you keep expanding your own player skills, which isn’t something that you see very often because in other Metroidvanias you carry over skills from other games you’ve played. Most people have done a double jump, they’ve experienced that before. They’ve experienced a dash. This is something new that you have to train your muscle memory on.
Q: Are there any games, even outside of the Metroidvania sphere, that you looked to for inspiration?
Faxdoc:Games likeQuakeare a big inspiration on how I balanced the weapons, in terms of trying to have different weapons that were used in different situations and asking the players to figure out which to use and where. Specifically with Metroidvania,Rabi-Ribiand how that came to the level design on connecting the levels, as well as how you progress through the game.
Happysquared:AlsoDark Souls,Trench Run, and especially Rain World. Some people considerRain Worlda Metroidvania and some don’t, but that was a huge inspiration forRusted Moss. Unlike a lot of other Metroidvanias, inRabi-Ribi,the world structure is a lot more open.
Faxdoc:Yeah, it’s very open in terms of what order you want to do things as well as the game only requires you to do a certain percentage of the objectives before you can finish the game. I always liked that the game gave you so much agency in terms of what you wanted to do, like what order you wanted to do stuff. ForRusted Moss, which has exploration based on physics and learning how to get around the world better, something similar would be a good fit.
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Happysquared:Because inRusted Moss, you can pick basically which bosses and what areas you want to beat to proceed. Practically everything inRusted Mossis optional. It depends on what you want to do to go to the next part. I don’t want to give too many spoilers, but normally, a lot of Metroidvanias are actually linear. They just have more backtracking. Technically, you have a set order of areas that are typically done, and you do backtracking to find out where you have to go next. Like with an ability, you can unlock two more areas, and then you can pick what area you want to do next from there.
ButRusted Mossis actuallya truly nonlinear gamefor those players that are creative enough and determined enough to understand how the areas are connected. There are suggestions for the path of least resistance, but if you look at speedrunners, you’ll notice that there’s a lot of stuff that they don’t actually have to do that a lot of new players would think that they have to do.
Q: Was it challenging designingRusted Mossso that players don’t have to follow a specific path?
Happysquared:It’s a double-edged sword because there is no linear pathway. Sometimes you might get to an area that might be higher in difficulty, rather than the next area that would technically be easiest for what upgrades you have. Some players would prefer to have a more guided experience.
But then at the same time, on the plus side of it, you get to really exercise this creativity and skill-based exploration that we’ve been emphasizing, and some players say that they really feel that the game is respecting what they want to do. We basically say, “Sure, if you want to do this, we will let you do this.” It’s up to you to decide what kind of game experience you want to have.
Q: What promptedRusted Moss’ setting and theme as opposed to more typical Gothic and High Fantasy Metroidvania settings?
Faxdoc:I used to do a lot of art before game dev, and it’s the type of things I drew back then, so it was just a comfort zone thing. It’s just what I enjoy drawing.
Sunnydaze:I think a lot of Metroidvanias draw inspiration from within the genre. You have a lot ofHollow Knight-like settings where there’s a decaying city or a plague, but I think story-wise, setting wise, my sister and I got a lot of inspiration from novels we enjoyed or a lot of folklore with fairies.
Happysquared:It’s a lot of sources from outside of games. Faxdoc’s previous game that she made, published on Steam,TWWWR(pronounced “tower”) has a lot of desolate landscape civilizations overtaken by nature as well. Since a lot of it is her personal art style, rather than us wanting to see what other Metroidvanias are doing and what the current Metroidvania trend is. I mean, like, none of usfinishedHollow Knight.
Q:Rusted Mossquickly gathered an impressive speedrunning community. How was speedrunning accounted for during development, and are you surprised by some of the things that speedrunners have been pulling off?
Faxdoc:We did make a lot of small mechanics that you could use to boost up as you go. We made a lot of shortcuts on the map that are hard to do, but if you’re good enough, you can get through areas really quickly. I think the skill ceiling of the grapple hook just naturally makes it agood speedrunning game. Learning how to use it to navigate is engaging on its own.
Happysquared:During our QA process, someone on the QA team actually reported a bug that we thought was really funny that would help speedrunners, so we just decided to leave the bug in. The only thing we changed about it was we added some visual flair to it to make it look funny when people found that bug.
The game has its quirks that we just left in that aren’t explicitly taught to players that speedrunners have found, and that also leads into the idea that we wanted our gameplay to be very exploratory and creative where players can just do funny things with the game that might not be told to them. That feeling of exploration comes when the game doesn’t explicitly tell you to do something, but you feel smart to have discovered it on your own. So back to the double-edged sword, some players prefer a more guided experience, but the less guided something is, the more you’re able to express yourself and discover things on your own.
I think one of the most fun things about speedrunning is finding those bugs and incorporating them creatively into the run, so it’s cool that the team went as far as dressing up one of the bugs with visual effects.
Happysquared:It’s been really cool to see people beat records. You mentioned the TAS runs before, and I thought that was really cool. We found a speedrunner who was spending hours on the same run, just so they could beat the TAS score, they ended up doing it, and it was just insane. When you see some platformers you know that there’s an intended solution on how you want to approach it, you know that “Okay, I should jump at this point, I should do a dash at this point, and I just have to optimize that.”
But becauseRusted Mossis physics-based, there are so many solutions to that same run that the person who does a TAS run might not have programmed a certain solution in. I know that the person who did it said that she felt like that was a pretty rough first go at it, but because of that, someone else could find a more efficient solution to do it in order to beat that run.
Q: What was the process like developingRusted Moss’ physics-based grappling hook movement? It must have been difficult to balance.
Faxdoc:It took a lot of time. It was a lot of iteration just experimenting with all the variables and how slow and how fast to make the grapple. A lot of effort went into making the player work well with a grapple because the player has to have very tight, responsive movement. To make it so you’re able to smoothly transition from that movement to the grapple movement without it feeling jarring took a lot of effort.
Q: Some of the bosses are very unique, like the witch that only indirectly harms the player through the environment. What are your goals when designing boss encounters? Are you looking for those kinds of interesting twists?
Faxdoc:I think with the grapple having little bursts of momentum, we can’t really do traditional bosses. With having boss fights that require you to use the grapple, we found that we had to design around the player moving around like a big arena and not punishing a lack of twitch reflexes. So just trying to find different incentives for the player to move around was I would say the inspiration for a lot of the bosses.
Happysquared:You mentioned the witch boss, that one is I would consider one of the early bosses, so she doesn’t follow the same pattern that a lot of the later bosses do. Faxdoc mentioned how design has been pretty iterative, so the earlier ones we felt didn’t use the grapple as much and then we tried to expand it a lot more as the game went on.
It’s like what Faxdoc said about how a lot of the bosses – but not all of them – eventually ended up becoming more like arena-ish fights, in which the usage of the grapple to outmaneuver the boss is more of a theme rather than looking at a boss animation and then thinking “Okay, I have to dodge or parry or something like that,” which are mechanics thatRusted Mossdoesn’t have. So boss fights began revolving more around navigating to keep the grapple usage more relevant.
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The boss fights seem to be a good way to help players develop their grapple skills and prepare for more challenging parts of the game later on.
Happysquared:As the tool’s got such a learning curve and high skill ceiling, you have to make situations where the player uses it more. The initial demo forRusted Mossdidn’t have that tutorial level that you get after you defeat Bonnie, the boss that gives you the grapple upgrade, and players were really struggling with the grapple. They would stand on the ground, they would shoot, and then they would just walk off into spikes.
We asked them why they did that, and they said, “I feel like as soon as you shoot the grapple, I expect it to work in a way that it’s an arc, it should move you to that place, or it should pull you towards this thing.” A lot of games in the past that they’ve played don’t really condition you for this need to think about your player’s own momentum and your player’s weight and how it interacts with the grapple.
Sunnydaze:The grapple is more of a bungee cord.
Happysquared:it’s hard to describe. The tutorial gives you an overview of its characteristics and tells you that it’s important sometimes to jump before you grapple instead of having your feet on the ground where it wouldn’t give you much movement.
In both the environments and boss fights, players have said that those are what made them learn how to use the grapple, not the beginning tutorial area. Practically using it in a boss fight or discovering a challenging area and trying to climb it, that’s what made it click, and when it clicks, that’s the point where you can start enjoying the game.
Q:Rusted Mosshas had a really solid reception since launch. Has there been any feedback, positive or negative, that has particularly stood out to you?
Happysquared:We were expecting the reception toRusted Mossto be a lot more mixed and controversial because of the grappling hook’s high skill ceiling and non-traditional gameplay. We knew we weren’t making a game for everybody, but for those that enjoy it, wow, they really love it.
We have our share of negative reviews, too. I’m excited and a little bit surprised we reached Very Positive on Steam, which is really awesome. The positive ones are really positive. I think Faxdoc had some experience with that withTWWWRas well.
Faxdoc:Yeah, the other games I’ve made I’ve gotten more percentage of positive reviews, but they read like, “It’s okay” or “Worth the money.” The reviews forRusted Mosshave been super positive.
Sunnydaze:It’s always nice to read positive reviews. One thing that I liked was that even though naturally the audienceRusted Mossappeals to is very gameplay focused, I was pleasantly surprised by some of the reviews that really liked the story as well because I think it’s also a more unusual story that we’re telling.
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There’s even a ton of fan art featuring your protagonist, which must feel very special.
Happysquared:It’s insane when people make stuff for your game. Every time there’s fan art or when someone does a speed run or creates a TAS run of it, too.
Sunnydaze:Someone discovered that we have something in our code that allows you to change the colors of the player character’s sprite.
Happysquared:That was crazy! We have a secret thing in the code. It’s not really a secret anymore. It’s a feature we never fully developed. But if you look into our game’s local files, there’s a folder that says “custom Fern” and inside “custom Fern” you can see these instructions in a text file that tells you how to change your character’s palette, and we never advertised that anywhere. Some player went into the game’s files, found it, and started messing around with that.
Sunnydaze:We have a channel on our Discord for people to show off their custom Ferns, and they all look so cool. I love it.
Happysquared:Yeah, just the fact that someone was messing with the game code because they love your game is very flattering.
We hada level editorin the game, and we had always wondered “Are people actually going to make levels in the game?” And it’s just crazy to be like, “Oh, wow! People are actually spending time with this and doing their own challenges and stuff like that, too.”
Q: You’ve mentioned some features that weren’t fully developed or were tucked away in the files. Were there any other interesting features you tried during development that ended up not working out or are hidden away for players to find?
Happysquared:There’s some stuff. Fern used to have a knife as a melee weapon in the first version, but that was phased out becauseRusted Mosshas a lot of buttons to press. We were thinking about “What would a controller user press? What would a melee weapon’s use be?” So that’s no longer there.
We also wanted there to be boss fights where you could tear parts of the boss out with the grapple, like hooking onto a boss and pulling off some guns or an arm. But in practice, it just wasn’t fun. We weren’t able to make it fun, so it’s one of those cool ideas, but we couldn’t make it work.
There used to bean inventory system. So instead of the trinket system there is now, we used to be able to have an inventory with aTetris-style system. Instead of equipping a trinket, you would haveTetrispieces, and if a piece gave you like five heals and you equipped it, then you could use the healing ability, rather than the current game where you shoot to gain mana to heal. The system was abandoned because we didn’t want to bloat the game more, and it killed the pacing of the game to have to fiddle with the inventory every time you reach a save point.
We’re also a super small team, like Faxdoc does the programming and like 99% of the art. We ended up having to call someone in to help out with parts of the level editor bits too. There’s so much work to be done and every single system you add in requires that much more work on top of it .
Q: How did the team initially get together to work on this game?
Sunnydaze:During COVID we startedparticipating in Game Jams, my sister (Happysquared) and I and different friends. We did this Game Jam, gm(48), which was basically 48 hours to make a game in GameMaker – which is the program we use to makeRusted Moss– and we liked each other’s games.
Happysquared:We basically connected through there. I think we all commented on each other’s games and then we decided to keep doing Game Jams together. Eventually, we had a small Game Dev group that was kind of like a knitting circle. Every month we would do “Show and Tells” and show each other what we’ve all been working on. All three of us are a part of that larger group.
Q: Are there any games from your “knitting circle” that have stood out to you?
Sunnydaze:In this group is Bonte Avond, which is a group where everyone is a musician. Playing their games is like playing through a concept album. They have these two games,Everybody Wham Wham, andOnce Upon a Jester, and they’re very different games from ours.
Happysquared:Something cool about the indie devs we know is their diversity of backgrounds. Like all of Bonte Avond are musicians, so when they write stuff for the games and dialogue and songs, it’s like they improvised as well for the game. So they have these improvisational sessions of music, and then that eventually makes it into the game. The game has a ton of great musical numbers that they sing and stuff like that. But you don’t often see that. It’s hard to describe because again, you don’t really see a lot of other games that are like that.
And then another one that’s not out yet isAnts Took My Eyeball. That one’sa roguelike gamethat is also really cool.
Sunnydaze:If you like platforming games,Sproutis another one. There are a lot of games that people are making in our group.
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Q: Women face a lot of challenges in this industry. As an all-female dev team, have you encountered these problems?
But outside of that, mostly no. It’s more because we’re very insular. We built a safe space for ourselves and just haven’t interacted much outside of our community that I was just telling you about. We basically just talk to people that we know are chill, cool, and supportive. So we’re lucky that they are supportive and that we haven’t had to deal with the horror stories that other female devs encounter when they need to go outside of their own group. But for us, we’ve been a very insular group.
Q: Do you think being an all-female team has given you a unique perspective when it comes to the game’s narrative?
Sunnydaze:Yeah, there are a few ways in which that has impacted the narrative ofRusted Moss. I think one theme in the game is that Fern as the main character – and a lot of children in the game – are thought to be changelings, and are put into the oven by their families because they’re thought to be imposters, changelings, pretending to be human.
Happysquared:A bit of folklore: changelings in Fae lore are basically when a human baby is replaced by a Fae instead. It’s part of traditional English faerie folklore and some Nordic as well. People in the past would blame a child that is overly melancholic or misbehaving for being a changeling, and folklore would say to throw the child into the fire or mistreat it.
If you mistreat that child enough, the Fae parents will take the child away and give you back your real child. So we were using that as a bit of a trope to represent those in society that are mistreated for not conforming to a certain role. And that made sense in the game.
Sunnydaze:Most of the characters in the game are female and some of them have been suspected of being changelings because they’re melancholic. Or they’ve shown irritation. They’re not perfect children all the time. They show more emotions than a girl is “supposed” to show, so I think that that’s part of it.
Part of it is also having lots of female characters in a non-sexualized way talking to each other, even if the narrative of the game is totally not related to gender. Since the default in a lot of games and media is male, just having lots of female characters going through a story just being normal and having adventures is something I enjoy.
Happysquared:Even though in lots of games, having this main female cast is considered unusual, it isn’t considered unusual if it’s an anime game, and our game sort of has a bit of that anime appeal. It depends also on how those female characters are presented in games. I think they tend to differ fromRusted Mossas well.
Sunnydaze:We’ve had forum posts on Steam asking where all the men in the game are and if they’re dead.
Happysquared:That was kind of funny because I feel like with a lot of games that have an all-male cast, you don’t see as much of that, like “Where are all the women?”
Fern is written to be kind of spiteful and rude and has trouble understanding social cues that demand a person react in a certain way in a world where a lot of girls are conditioned to be very empathetic and nice. She’s kind of written to vent a bit in an exaggerated cathartic way. She’s kind of like a power fantasy, which I guess sounds bad when you see how callously she acts toward others, but it’s in a venting kind of way.
She wasn’t written to be an instruction. It’s very much in a venting way after being told maybe one too many times, “Hey you should smile, you’d be pretty if you smiled.” It’s more from that angle. Reactions to the character have been interesting. Some players feel like they absolutely hate her and they call her a callous monster, but other players actually find her relatable as well. So I think that’s been an interesting reaction from the players towards her.
Q: What do you hope people will take away from their experience after playingRusted Moss?
Happysquared:We just hope that they enjoy it overall, that they just enjoy themselves with the game. Yeah, I guess there are very specific things that I hope that people can take from it, but overall, because our game is really open, I hope people enjoy the novelty and uniqueness of it. Just have a good time learning about the game and the physics-based movement, seeing it as a learning process and having fun.
Faxdoc:Yeah, I just hope people enjoy the game.
Q: Do you have any plans or ideas for post-launch content or updates?
Happysquared:We have way too many ideas. So lots of ideas for post-launch content that we’d love to do. We can’t say if they’re coming at this point in time, because we’re still working on patches and quality-of-life stuff. So it’s more like “Yeah, we want to, but no idea if we can yet.” But at least we know that it’s not a “no” answer. So always the chance.
Q: Does the team have plans to work on projects together in the future? Do you have any ideas for something that’s not related toRusted Moss?
Happysquared:It’s still up in the air. You’ll notice on our game’s Steam page, we don’t have a studio name. And it’s because we’re not a studio. It literally just came from Faxdocmaking a grappling hookand during our Show and Tell, she’s like, “Oh, this is cool. Now, I think I’m going to throw this away forever because nobody’s ever going to want to learn how to use this thing.” And we’re all like, “No, please don’t do that!”
So we ended up helping her out with the game. So we’re just thinking “Are we a studio?” No, we’re just friends that decided to make this very specific game, but the experience has been good so far. It’d be cool if we could work on projects together in the future.
But there are a lot of things to think about with indie dev rather than just “We want to make a game,” like salary and business things that we don’t have to worry about now because I have a full-time job, my sister has a full-time job and Faxdoc is very frugal, basically living off her life savings to makeRusted Moss, which obviously isn’t a sustainable thing to do for the next game.
Q: What has been each of your favorite things to work on withRusted Moss?
Sunnydaze:I do the music and sound in the game and story as well, so for me, my favorite part has been writing thefinal boss musicand writing “unhappy endings.”
Faxdoc:I think just the polish of the game, like trying to add a lot of detail to the player characters, and the basic game feel, I think that’s the most fun to work on.
Happysquared:I liked working on level design and world-building.
Q: Any last thoughts before we call it a day?
Happysquared:Rusted Mossin general really came together very accidentally, and none of us were actually even trying to set out to make a game, like Faxdoc wasn’t sure how many people were going to want to learn how to use this grappling hook. We knew that if someone learned how to use it, they would unlock a lot of really fun movement and power that you don’t often see in other platformers.
Like a lot of indie dev stuff, this has very much been a work of passion that even though we didn’t know the answer to the question if other players would have fun with it, it was something that the three of us decided to go on and attempt to do anyway.
So it’s been really exciting and encouraging to see that we have found other players that have understood what we were going for and are also really, really enjoying it too. We were lucky that we found an audience for this rather unusual mechanic.
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Rusted Mossis available on PC.
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