Dungeons of Hinterberg launched earlier today, an event both its fans and developers have been long looking forward to. You can read my review of the game here, but before jumping into the titular attractions, I sat down with Microbird Games’ co-founders Regina Reisinger and Philipp Seifried to get a one-of-a-kind tour.
First of all, how are you feeling? You’re getting ready for release soon. You’ve been working on this game for about four years. Does it feel real that it’s about to release?
Philipp: It’s quite surreal. We checked our private Xbox yesterday and saw the game in the “coming soon on Game Pass” section and seeing it there made it made it feel really, really real. It’s been four exciting years. It’s been a joy working on the game, but it’s also been a very intense time for us. And it’s going to take us a little bit to come back to the surface after this, I think. We’re looking forward to that it’s going to be such a big event in our lives.
So, it sounds like perhaps after all of this you would enjoy taking a Slaycation of your own. If you were going to Hinterberg — speaking of dungeons which is going to be our main topic — which dungeon would you absolutely just crush and which ones would crush you?
Regina: I would love, I think, the ice cave dungeons. I’m not a snowboarder in real life, but I learned to ski as a child. I would really love a magic snowboard and surfing around.
Philipp: I would definitely go to the to the forest biome. The overworld itself there was inspired by a real place where you have all these boardwalks that lead you up a forest. The water is flowing, and the air is clear and clean and it just smells fantastic. When I think of the of the dungeons in that forest biome, I kind of imagined them smelling really interesting – with tons of mushrooms and, like, old wood. I think that would be the place for me.
Which dungeons do you think you would absolutely get destroyed in?
Philipp: None of them — I’m very strong. [Laughs]
Regina: I know for Philipp — we have these mine-themed dungeons where you can go in minecarts on these rails with ups and downs, and [Philipp] with your fear of heights and fear of roller coasters…
Philipp: I am terrified of heights and also roller coasters – so, yeah, okay. Those would crush me.
Regina: I would also be a bit afraid of the mines because I’m a bit claustrophobic. So, if I were to really go adventuring, then I would have to be very brave to go through those.
Did that affect how you designed to those dungeons? Were you thinking your head, “Oh, this is going to freak people out.”
Philipp: We were a little bit worried that it might — not freak people out — but that they might get a touch of motion sickness in some of these areas. So, we experimented quite a bit. We have a level designer who is a very good canary in the mine for that sort of thing because he gets motion sick quite easily. When we designed the ice cave dungeons with the little planets that have these Mario Galaxy-like traversal elements, we absolutely thought this is going to freak people a little bit. But it’s also going to excite them because you don’t see that a lot in games.
I think it’s all a balance. If you think about the minecarts — there’s a very old-school Zelda that has minecarts in it where you jump in and then it goes at breakneck speed, then it pops you out again. It’s been probably twenty years since I played that. We did not actually look at those sequences, they just stayed in my head, and I think that was a bit of an inspiration. So, we were kind of going for that — for this, “What was that? I want to go again!” moment. But it’s a bit tricky to balance that.
Regina: It’s a bit like going on a roller coaster — not just literally. You want to be a bit excited, and a bit freaked out, but in the fun way.
Speaking of balance, all of your dungeons go back and forth between combat and puzzles. How do you work out what that correct balance is? When do you say, “Okay, they’ve used their brain too much here. So, now we need to throw some baddies at them.”
Regina: We always say we have dungeons that are a bit more puzzles focused, and some that are a bit more combat focused. But we always wanted to have somewhat of a balance — that you can find both in a dungeon. The only exception, I guess, is the boss dungeons. But even our bosses have kind of a puzzle-y aspect of having to use your skills.
We kind of experiment first with puzzles, like, we call it a puzzle playground. Basically, we just make a bunch of different puzzles in a big room and try them out and see what’s fun. Only when we feel we have a good feeling for puzzles, then we approach level choreography and move forward with the environment.
Philipp: It’s also — we did not invent this term but — postcard moments. What kind of postcard would I send home from that game? We often have a phase where we almost arrange those on paper where we shuffle things around, and we say, “Okay, this puzzle would go really well in this dungeon, but it’s like a big one, and it’s going to leave players a little bit exhausted. So, let’s give them something lighter after that. Maybe not, you know, put them right into combat, but make them traverse somewhere where something unexpected happens for them.” And oftentimes, you can rearrange those parts on a paper prototype quite well, before you go into grey boxing, before you go into blocking out the actual dungeon and playing it for yourself.
Most of your puzzles involve using the unique skills that you gain in each overworld. How did you go about deciding which biome would pair with which powers? Did you have a lot of back and forth with that? Or was it almost immediate?
Regina: We always knew we wanted to have this place where it’s always snowy — kind of the Alps. Having this snowboarding-inspired [power] was for us — we had it in our head from the beginning. But then for some, we knew about the environment first. For example, for the forest, we knew we wanted this forest and we thought, “Okay, wind magic fits really well.” But then [we’d say], “Okay, you have this whirlwind, what can you do? Can you pick yourself up? Can you carry other things? Can you just send it somewhere?” These things were often fleshed out a bit later.
Philipp: We started off with an initial idea of what the skill could and could not do. And then often, when we made the first couple of levels, we figured out if we tweak this, then that opens up a lot of room for new types of puzzles. So, there was a bit of back and forth between this the initial idea, and this is what we can build with that.
Regina: For us, we don’t only have the skills in combat. So, you can’t just think of a skill that would look cool in your mind without thinking, “How do you solve puzzles with it?” Like, it’s nice if I can push an enemy back in combat or something, but what’s the puzzle implication for that? Sometimes we thought, “This is a cool idea!” Then our level designer would sit down and just, on paper, think about what kinds of puzzles can you do. How versatile are they? Sometimes we would find out that [power idea] is a bit too limited to fill five to seven dungeons. We should tweak how the skill works. So, it’s really a back and forth to make them, not just fun, but meaningful.
Do you have an example of one of those skills that you had to tweak?
Regina: I remember that quite well that in the ice cave in the snowy biome the hoverboard was kind of an easy one. It easily comes to you what you can do with it. The second skill [players get in the game] is this light ray kind of skill – it’s a bit like a laser. We started out thinking, “Okay, you’re surrounded by ice. What if it reflects off ice and you can do reflection puzzles with it?” But the more we thought about it, we [realized] it doesn’t gel well with a 3D third-person game. It’s more fun, maybe, for top down puzzles in other games, but it wasn’t such a joy [in ours]. We tweaked it by implementing these little switches that, when you shoot at them, they do something else. That suddenly made much more sense and that’s how we use it now in game.
Moving from puzzles to combat: What was your favorite dungeon bad guy?
Regina: I know my favorite.
Philipp: I think we have the same one but, yeah, you go.
Regina: All our enemies are somewhat inspired by Austrian mythology or Alpine mythology. There’s this one creature…
Philipp: … it’s the same one [Laughs]
Regina: There’s this creature the Hobangoas that’s like a goat and — actually in December in Austria and parts of Bavaria, people dress up as these traditional monsters and they roam through the street and it’s kind of this fun thing you can go to — but it’s a goat with an unnaturally long neck and it just looks so weird. Like, it’s not necessarily scary in a threatening way but scary because it’s so strange and so quirky and weird. We put it into the game and, in our interpretation, it can put its head into the ground like an ostrich, and then it comes out somewhere else and it swings at you twice. It’s so silly and so funny, and I think it worked so well with the gameplay. Usually, people who encounter this creature the first time go, “Ah! What was that?!” So, yeah. I love that guy.
I don’t even need to ask how players feel about the Hobangoas because I know how I feel about that creature. And uh… thanks. Thanks for that.
Regina: That’s nice that you remember it [Laughing].
So, let’s talk about players’ experiences. You’ve had a play test. You’ve had the Steam Next Fest demo. What are some of your favorite memories from that? Has there been any surprising feedback or anything that you’ve had to go back and change that you weren’t expecting?
Philipp: I mean, the demo went really quite well. You’re obviously anxious when you show your game off to a big audience for the first time. We had tons of lovely moments watching random streamers, or reading through the through the media coverage. Or just, you know, reading through comments, on our own Discord. There’s always some feedback that you need to take a close look at and think about, “Can we change this this late in the development cycle? How, how big of an impact will it have on how many players experience?” For example, target locking onto an enemy was such a thing where we received tons of feedback. And it was it was quite a self-contained change that we could fit into our schedule. So thankfully, we got a lot of what people did not enjoy about that and changed it.
Regina: It was really good and productive for us that there were a few points of negative feedback that kept coming up – not just from one person where it’s just not their taste, but where it was repeated. Luckily, [they were] somewhat small things that we kind of already knew about. I think that luckily it wasn’t a big surprise. Like, “Oh, my God. Now we would have to change, like the whole pace of it!” But it was more, “Okay, yeah, people would really like a sprint button.” We knew some people would miss it and we could implement it. So, I think it was actually a perfect time for us to get that feedback because we could still change it.
In terms of good feedback we had in the Next Fest demo, a level we touched on before — where you have this nice little planet and you can walk around Mario Galaxy-style — we [demoed] the same level when we were with Microsoft at Gamescom and GDC. People played it at both events, and you can see the level starts on a kind of normal platform. You walk a bit you get onto this planet, and you are just kind of stopped by a stone [in your path] and people often have a second of, “Where can I go?” Then they turn left or right, and they see, “Oh! I can walk around [upside-down on the planet]. It’s just a surprising, fun moment that really works and that was amazing also to see on stream.
Do you have a moment Phillip that you remember sticking in your mind while seeing someone play something?
Regina: [Nudging Philipp slightly] What about the guy who?
Philipp: What? Oh! Yes.
Philipp: So, I wrote the dialogue for the game. One of the people you can hang out with is a German influencer who’s really over the top. And we had this German streamer streaming the game and reading the dialogue out loud in German. He was he had exactly the sort of reaction I wanted. It was kind of a mix of bewilderment and kind of, “This this is fun, though.” He had a really good time with it. It was just a joy watching him voice this crazy character and reacting to him at the same time. And there’s also kind of the meta layer that, you know, you have you have an influencer, who’s reading our dialogue written for another influencer, which kind of added to the fun of it. But I just remember that evening walking away from the stream holding the laptop and saying, “Regina, you have to watch this!”
Did you have a lot of fun with interconnecting the world of the dungeons with the world of the village?
Philipp: In many ways, from a narrative standpoint, the game kind of wrote itself. If you take it at face value — like the characters in the game do — there’s this Alpine tourist hotspot, that’s a tourist hotspot because there’s dungeons there. A lot of the narrative, and a lot of the dialogue just comes from, how would people react to that, right? You will have influencers there. You will have thrill seekers there. You will have, you know, weird people there who want to wear a cape and, and think they’re battling the forces of evil or something like that. Or just, you know, your generic Belgian tourist with a little fanny pack who brings his family.
And so, that’s a really fruitful aspect of the game that you can just dig into. [I can] draw from the different locations that you have in the game, or even the different dungeons and have people discuss that. But also, just the general concept is so…so easy to draw from and to get something funny out of without, you know, being a parody or without trying too hard to be funny. It’s just an absurd situation. And that makes it easy to write something that’s sincere, but still amusing. From that point of view, marrying these two things was quite joyful.
Do you think if, in real life, dungeons just appeared, that they would become this sort of commercial vacation spot?
Philipp: I think it’s one way this could end up, yeah. I mean, we took it a little over the top — these dungeons are, of course, dangerous places. But I would absolutely foresee it. It would probably start with billionaires, right? They would just go to these places with like a huge team and explore them for social media clout or for whatever ego reason. But I could see that opening up. We always like to think about it as similar to space tourism. If there was really magic in the world, and you could go there and interact with it and cast spells it would be a huge moment in the lives of many people. I could see some sort of tourism growing up around that.
Regina: It would be so appealing you kind of couldn’t stop people. In reality, people also ski down crazy slopes and stuff does happen. If you have the opportunity to do something that’s super appealing to you, people just kind of like to go for it — sometimes with the right protection and sometimes not. I think if there were really dungeons, people could not be kept back.
Is there anything about the dungeons, the game, or anything in general we haven’t discussed that you would like to let people know?
Regina: One of the things that I’m looking most forward to when we see a lot of people play after release is you’re on vacation in this game. You can decide yourself if you want to approach it in a very chill and relaxed way and spend a lot of time in the village. If you just want to spend time sitting at the scenic spot in the biomes and looking at nature. Or if you want to do it as a super hardcore vacation experience, where you try to complete a new dungeon every single day and get them all done in a short amount of time. If you just focus more on socializing, all the social relationship rewards, they will help make the dungeon crawling and the combat easier. I’m looking super forward to how people approach it and if there’s a consensus. Or [seeing] if everyone does it differently and what kind of social rewards and characters people go for. I can’t wait to see.
Philipp: I completely agree. It’s a game that was inspired by a lot of different real places in the Alps that we visited. And we kind of like when games have sort of this groundedness in reality — when they feel like there’s a place that you can explore and that you can stay in for a few nights. We really hope that people take that away from Dungeons of Hinterberg — that it feels like they’ve traveled somewhere that’s magical, but is also quite real in many ways.
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