An Interview with PantDev
Or, an edited down version of a feature-length conversation!
What’s up, gamers.
Today we have for you an interview with PantDev!
PantDev is a developer on Twitter who’s creating a game where you play as, you guessed it, a pair of sentient pants! The game is in its early stages of development, but shows a lot of promise for a few key reasons: the overall quality of animations, the game feel (or game juice), and the game mechanics. I’ll be delving into all of these subjects below as you read along with the interview. If you want to follow the developer, be sure to check out @PantDevOfficial for updates and videos!
Now let’s jump into it:
“Firstly, what would you say your favourite video game is?”
“That’s a tough one, it’s a lot easier for me to pick a favourite within a genre. In regards to platformers, because you know, obvious influence there, the 3D Mario’s are all collectively under the same umbrella [...] Portal 1 and 2 in regards to puzzle games, The Witness too. Yeah, I’ve got a laundry list.”
“What’s your most favourite recent video game?”
“... man. I’m just giving this one a lot of thought [...] I guess I didn’t mention any of the Myst games. I grew up with those games so they’re deeply rooted in my love of video games, which, there might actually be some inspiration in my game from them.”
“Where would you say that inspiration is? What do you think from that series bleeds over into your project?”
“Have you seen the mechanic where you’re able to click and move stuff around? [...] I’m still kind of finding the limitations of what that mechanic is going to be. The main inspiration there is that one of your windows into the world is going to be a mouse cursor. I don’t know how much that’s going to be affecting 3D platforming elements. [...] On paper it seems backwards because you’re introducing a control scheme that works traditionally best with, obviously, a mouse, into a 3D platforming space, which is kind of a hard sell.”
“One of the things I’m struggling with in my own game is [...] finding something you can do that’s unique, and that’s what drew me to what you’re making, especially the character design. That mechanic of ‘reaching into the world’ is unique and really interesting.”
“It’s just a matter of finding where limitations are needed. It’s going to make it into the final game in some regard, I just don’t know how free-form it’s going to be.”
“Have you encountered any fun or weird bugs while testing?”
“Offhand I can’t really think of bugs, but a recent feature, (if you can really call it a feature) is being able to land upside-down and jump out of that. It just was bugging me so much during testing and logically it would look so off just switching to a running animation when you land at the apex of your jump, so I just decided to make a special case that increases your jump height when you land upside-down at the apex of your jump and flip out of it.”
“How important are bouncy animations to making a game feel good?”
“Honestly very, and a lot of developers seem to miss that. Everyone loves to say that ‘Gameplay is King’ but I think a lot of people don’t recognize the extent of polish and how good an animation looks can directly play into how a game controls/sounds/feels. I can pull out all the animations, but then the game wouldn’t feel right. In regards to everything feeling bouncy, I kind of cheat. In addition to the animations being as bouncy as I can make them, I also scale the player model along a timeline, I think it’s called like ‘bounce.anim’ and I call it whenever you land or jump and it accentuates the animations that are already there. [...] I don’t know if people do this very often, but it’s a very cheap way to apply squash and stretch to an animation.”
“I wouldn’t say it’s cheap, I think it’s smart. You can get really technical with animations and it can be kind of a nightmare.”
“Yeah, [...] it always seemed like a good solution. Beyond the bounciness of the player model, scaling objects is also just one of those polish-things. I have a mushroom you can bounce on, and the bounce on that is just scaling. When you grab an object and place it, it briefly scales a little above it’s default scale to give it a little ‘pop’, whenever you click the mouse the cursor scales down just to give it a little tactile ‘click’.”
“I remember seeing a tweet about a system to spend the in-game currency (dust-motes) on things. Can you elaborate on that?”
“I mean, it’s basically a concept built on a pun.”
“Can you elaborate on that?”
“Y’know, you’re a sentient pair of pants. What other sentient objects are there in this world, and how many of them are just sitting around collecting dust?”
(I don’t know about you, but I laughed quite a bit at that. What a charming explanation!)
“The pants were born from a pun too honestly. I would always joke with a coworker awhile back, and we would always just make stupid puns to make each other laugh, [...] and we sold games and people were always buying Just Dance, and I was like ‘Hey, what if someone, uh, made a game called Just Pants’. ”
“That’s actually awesome. One of my questions was ‘How did you come up with the idea for this platformer?’ and that’s kind of a perfect answer. Is Just Pants the working title?”
“It was early on, then for awhile it was called ‘Denim’, and right now, this might be the final title (so a reveal) I’m leaning very heavily towards ‘Pant & Click’.”
“When it comes to level design specifically, what do you think you lean towards? Like what type of level design do you lean towards?”
“I think the better fit, at least on paper, is like Mario Sunshine with open environments but every now and then it has those floating block challenge levels. I do have to acknowledge that that is a much ‘bigger’ thing to bite off. So I might be trying to find some sort of middle ground where there is linearity but with wide open spaces occupying that. Something else I haven’t touched on is that [...] I want someone to comfortably play through this as a 3D platformer, and if there are these other elements, I want you to be able to ignore them, which is why I’m focusing so heavily on the movement polish. Like with Fez, the novelty of its mechanics will start to wear off, and then you’re just left with busywork between platforms.”
“For this project, and this is kind of a loaded question, do you think you’ll finish it? Or is it more of a ‘We’ll see where it goes?’”
“Full disclosure, I haven’t shipped a game. [...] But this is a project I care about enough that I would love to finish. It’s just hard to say because I don’t know trajectory of life and all that, but that’s definitely the intent, I’m not just trying to play around, I would like to have a product at the end of this, and if that means scaling back the mechanics or doing away with certain things then so be it.”
And that wraps up the edited-down interview I had with the wonderful PantDev, and if you want to catch the rest of it, you can find a full unedited version on YouTube here:
And if you want to follow PantDev for updates on Twitter, you can find them here:
(and while you’re at it, feel free to join The CGV’s socials here: Twitter, Instagram, Discord)
Ciao!