Do you love Pokémon Snap, but hate waiting 20 years for new installments? Do you wish that Pokémon would lean over Street more on its dark side, like all child-stealing ghost Pokémon? Do you like it
Check out Penko Park, an upcoming Switch game inspired by Pokémon Snap’s animal photography gameplay and Studio Ghibli’s disturbing creature design. It’s full of weird little guys for you to photograph, but if you dig a little deeper, you’ll also discover a sinister secret underneath. And then you can also take pictures.
Penko Park was just announced on September 27, which means you only have a few days to wait until your little gauntlet arrives on the full game on Switch, snapping photos of 140 creatures scary inside. The game has been out for a while on PC, but it’s coming to Switch with the Shiving Crypts expansion, which adds 40 new monsters, a new area, new features, collectibles, and secrets. Wonderful!
We were lucky enough to get an interview with the developers of Penko Park, Ghostbutter, and to talk about their game, their inspiration, and their hopes for Penko Park on Switch. Here are them:
Names and titles of developers who responded to this interview:
Konstantin Kopka [KK] – Programming, Game Design, Music/Sound, Writing
Elenor Kopka [EK] – Art
Philip Feller [PF] – Animation, Level Design, Writing
Read on to learn all about the aesthetic and mechanical inspiration for Penko Park, the developers’ love for Zelda, and why people love “Jim”…
Penko Park is an exploration into a long-forgotten world filled with creatures and secrets, and things aren’t always what they seem at first glance!
How would you describe Penko Park in your own words?
[KK] Inspired by our childhood playing memories Pokémon Snap on the Nintendo 64, Penko Park is our reimagining of the genre. We wanted to capture that old school spirit but also improve things and give it a unique, distinctive look and feel.
It’s all about storytelling and environmental exploration. Penko Park tells the story of an abandoned wildlife park and allows players to find out what caused it to collapse. It can be played in many different ways: players can have fun and relax, take beautiful pictures of strange creatures, or they can focus more on all those details and explore more the park’s (sometimes darker) secret.
[EK] Penko Park is an exploration into a long-forgotten world filled with creatures and secrets, and things aren’t always what they seem at first glance!
[PF] Adventure, weirdness and spooky things are everywhere. It is every kid’s dream after holding a camera for the first time.
What are the steps to create a spooky character design?
[EK] When I pick a spooky character, I usually start by creating a first draft of a character that comes to mind and then I tweak the features until it feels right. For me, the spooky lies in the balance of details, like a cold look or an eerie smile… I never aimed for outright ‘scary’, but rather uncomfortable feeling. or more sophisticated horror.
The collaborative process of creating new creatures and deciding what their quirks will look like?
[PF] Each creature is a team effort. Going back and forth with each repetition, discussing how simple things like color, the shape of the eyes and head, or even something as simple as adding a strand of hair or a tooth, made all the difference. very big. Those adjustments turned a cute little friend into a regretful monstrosity.
What’s your personal favorite creature design, and what’s your favorite name?
[KK] On the surface, I really love them all, but I probably love Dubbel, Citru, and Jim the most. I also love that many monsters have complicated, weird names and that Jim is just… Jim.
[EK] My favorite creature has to be Fropp! This little dancing chestnut makes me so happy every time I see it.
[PF] In addition to Penki (your companion on the journey), Fropp will probably take the cake as my favorite design. When he makes his little purple hat appear out of nowhere and suddenly start dancing, it’s hard not to fall in love with it right away.
When it comes to names, ‘Berlbub’ has to be a clear winner for me. With a little German accent, it’s fun to say it over and over again.
Since [2D animation] technique dictated how I designed the characters, I ended up fully accepting the cutout puppet aesthetic
The artistic style and tone remind us of the children’s illustration I Want My Hat Back. Is this creepy yet childlike style something that has been around since the beginning of its development?
[EK] Animating our characters (i.e. 2D skeleton animation) really requires them to be built like puppets, and I think that’s what creates this childish feeling. We weren’t aiming for this at first, but since the technique dictates how I design the characters, I’ve fully embraced the cutout puppet aesthetic!
What is your aesthetic inspiration for Penko Park?
[KK] There are so many influences and it’s hard to name them all. A big part is probably old-fashioned N64 games in general (something we grew up playing) and Studio Ghibli’s Japanese Anime films (Totoro my neighbor, Princess Mononoke). The whole spirit/ghost aspect is definitely inspired by Japanese culture.
[EK] I feel like much of the character design in Penko Park is a continuation of my years of illustration and animation practice, which has always been character-driven. I have been fascinated by creatures from traditional and folk tales (like Japanese Yokai or drawings of mythical creatures in medieval European books) for a very long time, and this is something I’ve repeated throughout the design process a lot!
Have any other titles for the game been dropped in the process? Why did you settle in Penko Park?
[KK] There are literally hundreds, maybe even thousands, of titles removed. For a long time, the game was actually very, very different from what it eventually became: it was open world at first, but that didn’t work out well for game reasons. Then it becomes a weird collage game where you end up hanging pictures on the wall and displaying them at an exhibition, so we’ve got a lot of names that reflect that in a time.
Penko Park is just a really quirky name that sounds unique but perfectly encapsulates what the game is about in terms of style as well as from a story perspective. As soon as we had it on paper, we were all certain that “it is it”.
In many ways, Penko Park really exceeded our team size, resulting in us taking longer than expected to complete it.
The Ghostbutter team is very small – only three people! What are the challenges of working with so few people and what is the best part?
[KK] Lots and lots of challenges, that’s for sure. In many ways, Penko Park really exceeded our team size, resulting in us taking longer than expected to complete it. It’s just me doing all the programming tasks and it’s really stressful because coding is often the bottleneck of production.
One great thing about a small team is that you have the ability to communicate instantly, on a daily basis with people, with little to no management, and constant feedback. Everyone has a lot of responsibility and creative control, which I find very rewarding.
Has anyone run the Penko Park super speed yet? If so… how do you view it?
[KK] Yes, we do have a small Discord community, and some of those people have started racing at Penko Park for fun. It became quite tense once the strategies were discussed. Personally, I really enjoy seeing the speed of the games (eg: Great game completed quickly) and would love to see Penko Park play at AGDQ someday.
[PF] That’s right, there was a small community of dedicated speed runners beating the game in seemingly impossible time. Watching their efforts go from pretty fast to super fast is an amazing journey, and we’d love to see every new record by the time they’re uploaded.
For me, Spooky-cute is about something cute and adorable that takes a weird twist and surprises you with a side that could be a bit darker and unexpected.
If you could play any video game and make it spooky-cute, what game would it be, and how would you change it?
[KK] To me, Spooky-cute is about something cute and adorable that weirdly changes and surprises you with a side that could be a little darker and unexpected. I always like when it happens in some Nintendo games for example “Link Shell” in Majora’s mask. Personally I’d love to see what a more ‘Horror’ Pokémon spin-off would look like, that’s sure to be interesting to explore.
[PF] Mule always had that spooky cute feeling to me without ever really taking the spooky side. So maybe really add some more spooky elements to it New horizons can be great fun.
In your opinion, what is the most perfect game ever made?
[KK] On the Nintendo console, I have to play with “most Zelda games”, especially Ocarina of Time and Wind Waker. Those were my favorite games growing up. On PC: maybe Portal and Bioshockthose are just absolute masterpieces.
[EF] This is a tough game, but I think my favorite game of all time has to be The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. It’s beautiful and quaint in many ways and full of mysterious scenes and locations. I don’t know about perfection, but from an aesthetic point of view, this game inspired me a lot!
[PF] The perfect game for me is Banjo-Kazooie on N64. It has the most memorable soundtrack of all time, the characters are incredibly captivating and creative, and the way the character voices have inspired us to create the voices of so many in-game characters of our own. me. I replay it from time to time and it still stands the test of time.
What inspirations are you absorbing ready for your next project?
[KK] We are currently in the process of finalizing a version of Penko Park for the Nintendo Switch, which is a lot of work. Then… still nothing is certain. However, it will probably involve strange and spooky things in some way.
Penko Park will launch on the Nintendo Switch eShop with all of its DLC on September 27.
Let us know in the comments below what you think of this creepy-cute shot in the genre of rail photography!
