How Another Crab’s Treasure Breaks a Golden Rule of Game Development

There are developers and games that try to abide by certain unwritten rules of game development, and then there is Aggro Crab and its upcoming Soulslike, Another Crab’s Treasure. By and large, Another Crab’s Treasure is unlike any Soulslike game ever made and will likely be the only one of its kind for quite some time — unless Aggro Crab chooses to develop another.

Despite being one of the most distinctive Soulslike games ever made, Another Crab’s Treasure still shares one arguably necessary similarity to other games in the genre: its difficulty. Game Rant had the opportunity to chat with Another Crab Treasure‘s studio head/art director Nick Kaman and creative director/narrative lead Caelan Pollock about the game’s challenge and how it intentionally breaks a golden rule of game development.

Another Crab’s Treasure is Tough, Even for its Devs

The peak of any Soulslike game is its bosses, as these pose the toughest challenge and therefore typically result in the most rewarding experiences. It seems Another Crab’s Treasure‘s Soulslike bosses will be no different, as Aggro Crab has ensured each fight has plenty of different mechanics to keep players on their toes. When asked about boss design, Kaman laid out some details about how Another Crab’s Treasure‘s focus on pollution factors into each fight’s difficulty.

Most enemy designs in the game, including boss design, are “What’s a funny piece of trash we can give to the sea creature that they can use in an interesting way?” We’ve got the Samurai Crab, who uses a pair of chopsticks. At the start of the cutscene, he unsheathes it like a samurai sword, but a lot of the fun is figuring out how to make that weapon more interesting than just a stick. So, halfway through the fighting, he breaks the chopsticks in half. So now he’s got two sticks. Great! So it was just thinking in terms of: how can we make this character do something unique? And that’s where the difficulty is.

The boss Kaman is referring to was previously introduced in the game’s demo as Heikea, Intimidation Crab — a name obviously derived from Another Crab’s Treasure‘s sense of humor. Aggro Crab has devised a way to make Another Crab’s Treasure more challenging by incorporating its silliness into the mechanics for each boss fight, and it seems this will ultimately be revealed in the uniqueness of each battle. However, despite how normal it might sound for a Soulslike game to have formidable bosses, Another Crab’s Treasure breaks a golden rule of game development, specifically regarding the game’s difficulty. As Kaman explained,

There’s this rule in Game Dev: if it’s hard for the devs, it’s way too hard for the players since the devs are going to be the best at the game. I think that rule doesn’t apply to Soulslikes. The fun here is that we get to just make the bosses as hard as we want them to be, as hard as they need to be to be fun for us, and then the players will also have to deal with that.

According to Kaman, Another Crab’s Treasure is challenging, even for its devs, but this is entirely on purpose. Rather than abiding by the rule that a game shouldn’t be hard for its devs, Aggro Crab lives by the notion that Soulslikes are of a peculiar breed and therefore should be handled differently. This can only mean that players will need to keep their wits about them as they traverse the underwater landscape of Another Crab’s Treasure, as it may throw even the most seasoned Soulslike veterans for a loop.

Another Crab’s Treasure

Aggro Crab’s Another Crab’s Treasure provides a maritime twist on the Souls-like formula. Using the trash around him as armor and weapons, Kril must travel across an underwater kingdom while fighting off all sorts of impressive threats.

Released

April 25, 2024

Developer(s)

Aggro Crab

Publisher(s)

Aggro Crab

Genre(s)

Adventure , Soulslike , RPG

Engine

Unity

ESRB

T For Teen Due To Blood, Crude Humor, Language, Use of Tobacco, Violence