Interview with the Team Behind Lil Gator Game About Their Upcoming DLC “In the Dark”

It’s that time of year again! The Six One Indie Showcase is in full swing and that means loads of amazing indies being shown off and, of course, we’ve got more developer interviews for you. We’ve been huge fans of Lil Gator Game since it launched back in 2022 so we were stoked to be able to feature the game’s DLC in our Showcase.

We sent some questions over to the team at MegaWobble who were kind enough to answer them.

A huge thank you to Scott and Connor (and the rest of the team!) for being a part of our September showcase and for allowing us to show off Lil Gator Game: In the Dark.

• Can you tell me a little bit about the team and how you all got started working on Lil Gator Game?

  (Scott Slucher, Lead Dev, Programmer and Sound Engineer): I've been teaching myself Unity since 2013, making a handful of game jams and small prototypes over the years, but no big projects like Lil Gator Game. I really love the design concepts behind open-world exploration games, but they're such a giant time investment, as a player or developer, so I thought, why not a tiny open-world? A tiny open-world needed a tiny hero... and the rest fell into place from there. 

  Robin has a background in both music and programming, and we'd always planned for him to make music for whatever I made, but as the project got bigger, Robin stepped in to help with the project itself.

  Connor has a background in art, and also happens to run a lot of D&D, so he wound up being a pretty great fit to help round out the team, having both 2D art skills and a good sense of storytelling.

• We absolutely fell in love with Lil Gator Game when it was released back in 2022. What made the team decide to go back to this adorable world for the “In the Dark” DLC? Was this something that was planned from the very beginning of development?

  (Connor P Quinn, Writer, Animator and Sprite & Character Artist): From the beginning? Absolutely not. Not seriously anyway. When you're in the middle of a big project there's always the joke of “can’t wait for the sequel”, but this was a first major project for all of us. We were excited to finish it at all.

  Toward the end though, amidst all the positive feedback, we knew we wanted to do *something*.

  At first it was going to be item skins or redecorating the island, but eventually we wanted a post game challenge, and a new area, and new toys, and so on until we decided it was worthy of being called a DLC.

• What inspired the idea of having the DLC take place in a cave network? This will be a big change from the main game’s atmosphere!

  (Connor P Quinn, Writer, Animator and Sprite & Character Artist): I pushed for caves so hard. I freaking LOVE caves. I am the #1 cave enjoyer.

  I love the feeling of stepping into uncertainty, I love twisty passages, I love the way that little motes of light cut through the darkness. As soon as we started talking about what was next I was putting caves on the table.

  (Scott Slucher, Lead Dev, Programmer and Sound Engineer): I was resistant to it at first, given the difference in lighting environment. The original game runs at 60fps on the Nintendo Switch, and any expansion would need to run the same, so any sorts of computationally-intensive lighting systems just wouldn't work. It took a lot of messing around with shaders, but I'm pretty happy with this solution.

  (Connor P Quinn, Writer, Animator and Sprite & Character Artist): He’s done tremendous work to make the underground feel new and spooky, but also just as colorful and lively as the island above it!

• Other than the obvious change in setting and the new story elements, how will the “In the Dark” DLC differ from the main game? What’s new? 

  (Scott Slucher, Lead Dev, Programmer and Sound Engineer): As a result of the new setting, a lot of the open-world design  had to change with it. The original game relies a lot on sightlines and far-away landmarks to get your bearings, but in a cave you don't have that, so the player has to navigate the underground with nearby environmental hints instead. Things like vines, minecart tracks, and stalagmites help clue the player in on where they are and where they're going.

  Plus, given that it's a cave system now, it implies a lot of verticality, and we wanted to take advantage of that, so there's a new suite of special items that enhance your move set with aerial abilities. On top of your items and abilities from the original game, it's quite a lot of movement tech players can take advantage of.

  The quest structure got a rework too. We wanted fewer main quests, but for each of them to still feel substantial, so each main quest has some kind of minigame associated with them.

• If your team found a secret cave system, who would be the first in line to explore it and who might be a little scared?

  (Connor P Quinn, Writer, Animator and Sprite & Character Artist): The keen eyed reader may already know the answer.

  I charge giggling into the unknown. Scott and Robin go home to file the missing person report.

• What does “indie” mean to you?

  I feel that the core of indie is not knowing if there's going to be a check in the mail.

  Like, I HOPE you're getting a check! You can have a publisher or a bigger team or a following or play to the trends and still be indie to me.

  But like… if I can trade your publisher’s stock?

  If you're winning awards off of your marketing budget?...

  In the end, it sort of doesn't matter what is and isn't “indie”, we can agree to disagree… until it comes to something like an award show. Then it really can be someone’s livelihood.

  If the definition shifts, that's fine, but there should always be space to spotlight excellent projects which struggled the most to exist at all.

Lil Gator Game is available now. It’s DLC “In the Dark” does not yet have a release date but you can wishlist it on Steam to stay up to date on future news.