Derek Yu's vision for a human-driven games industry in the story of UFO 50's development

When booting up a game like UFO 50, a collection of 50 titles whose 80s-inspired roots belie the modern design sensibilities that make them special, it's easy to feel overwhelmed.

The collection was released on September 18, 2024 to critical and commercial acclaim in spite of how unusual it is in the indie landscape, and it's hard to imagine how one would go about tackling the development process of such a vast homage to gaming and its history. So, we sat down with Derek Yu to do just that.

Yu, the rockstar indie developer behind Spelunky and Spelunky 2, worked on UFO 50 with a team of five other indie developers for over eight years.

"Everyone on the team enjoyed the excitement and freedom of 80s gaming – when game design was less established and less dissected"

Jon Perry, a childhood friend of Yu's, is known for board game design, but turned to video games for this project. Composer Eirik Suhrke has collaborated with Yu in the past, doing the music for Spelunky and Spelunky 2. Paul Hubans is a pixel artist and indie game dev known for Madhouse, Ojiro Fumoto is known for the smash mobile hit Downwell, and Tyriq Plummer is a pixel artist and animator also working on Catacomb Kids.

We begin our discussion with Yu by diving into how this team managed to wrangle the scope and perspective of such a massive project while dealing with the usual exigencies of making one game, much less 50.

"When you're working on a game, it's important to zoom out regularly to make sure you're not getting too lost in one small part of the project," he says. "That's even more crucial when it's a collection of 50 games! What helped us zoom out was setting regular deadlines where we'd try to bring each game to a certain level of completeness."

As far as collection-wide design principles went, it was important to Yu and his team to connect games together when they could. However, the first priority from which everything else flowed was making sure that each game could generate its own unique appeal.

"The most important thing for us was that the games were fun and interesting to work on, so that's where we started when it came to design. But we were always looking for opportunities to connect the games together and reuse connections we'd already made."

Connections between finished games is one thing, but how did the team go about structuring their collaborative efforts to create connective tissue between developers while UFO 50 was a work in progress? Yu says it all came down to setting expectations.

While he and John Perry directed most of the games in the collection, Ojiro Fumoto specialized in one title: Sunset Drive. Even Suhrke, who did music for the game, has a few credits to his name, as do Hubans and Plummer. This kind of collaboration underscores the team's ability to work together and respect one another's ideas.

"The understanding was that a director of a game would have final say on its design, but everyone was open to collaborating and sharing their work," Yu explains. "By release, every game had gone through multiple passes by different people."

He continues: "Everyone on the UFO 50 team has a broad set of skills, but we each have our individual strengths and areas of special interest, too. We leveraged those unique skills in a very organic way – there was a lot of encouragement to just take the initiative if you had a good idea."

Several projects were scrapped during development, but Yu points out the underappreciated advantage indie game developers have: flexibility.

"I recall only around a half dozen games that were scrapped, and they were all scrapped early on in their development. So we didn't leave too much on the cutting room floor, in the end. I think that's an area where indies can really take advantage of their flexibility to work efficiently – you don't have to make it difficult to implement an idea or to cut one."

According to Yu, this flexibility extended into UFO 50's 80s-inspired design. When we ask why the UFO 50 team chose the era, Yu emphasizes the DIY-spirit of games at the time and how their gameplay and interfaces often brought out creativity in players and designers alike. Basing UFO 50's lore on a fictional video game company that published titles from 1982 through 1989 felt like the natural choice then for such an ambitious celebration of what games can be.

"I think everyone on the team enjoyed the excitement and freedom of 80s gaming – when game design was less established and less dissected," Yu says. "And even accounting for instruction manuals, I feel like games were less handholdy, sometimes for the worse but often for the better. There was a raw energy that was very adventurous and the technical limitations didn't get in the way – if anything, it bred a lot of creativity. We wanted to capture some of that feeling while also applying the good lessons we've learned since then."

Capturing such a feeling in 50 games, though, took longer than expected. Yu had originally envisioned the project launching in 2018. He says a number of factors led to the game taking much longer to come out than he originally planned, part of which being the release of Spelunky 2 in 2020.

"Partly we just underestimated the work, which is common enough when you're working on one game, let alone 50 at once! Also, for me, that initial release window was based on a slightly different idea of the collection, where the individual games were allowed to be a little more raw. After we passed that date, though, it became clear that this was one of those projects that needed to cook as long as it needed to cook."

So Yu and Suhrke decided to focus on Spelunky 2 and ship that first before turning their full attention back to UFO 50.

In spite of the delay, when asked if he'd do anything differently if he could go back in time, Yu's answer is definitive: "I wouldn't change a thing, since both games [Spelunky 2 and UFO 50] launched and have been well-received. And sometimes you need to miss a deadline to put things in the right perspective."

Yu says that playtesters provided valuable thoughts on how to make the game feel like a fulsome experience in the year leading up to its release.

"We added most of our external playtesters in the last year of development – up until that point we had our hands plenty full just working off of our own thoughts. Once the games were all playable from beginning to end and it felt like a full collection, we started inviting friends to try it out.

"Sometimes you need to miss a deadline to put things in the right perspective"

"For the most part, our testers validated the core principles behind UFO 50. Despite the overwhelming nature of having 50 games available at the start, the overall concept seemed compelling to people, especially as they engaged more and more with the fictional history. The hard part was massaging all of the details into the right places and making sure that everything – the games, the library, the fiction – worked well together and felt coherent. Design-wise, a lot of our discussions around the testing were about balancing different ways to approach the collection."

The team's approach struck us as a refreshing counterpoint to the usual industry story of games being crunched on and launched at the last minute to meet corporate earnings goals.

However, in spite of this fascination and all the fulfillment he found making UFO 50, Yu would caution new indie developers against making such a vast project. While smaller games can still be a powerful vehicle for individuals looking to hone their craft, he says, treating game development as an iterative learning experience is far more rewarding (and sustainable) than banking on one encompassing idea for years on end.

"I don't think UFO 50 is a great example for new developers to follow, because ultimately it's still a single large game that took [over] eight years to make! That requires a lot of experience and runway. But you could plan to release, maybe not 50 games across eight years, but several games across a few years. Treating game development like a craft or discipline that needs to be learned over time, across multiple released projects, is a solid way to minimize your risk."

Hearing Yu's philosophy on games as works of art contextualizes the prospect of future innovation in the indie space and where the craft is going from here. As far as the UFO 50 team is concerned, the game should stand on its own, and post-launch support will only come in to fix bugs and streamline the experience.

"To me the game itself is the main dialogue we're putting out there – as an artwork, UFO 50 wasn't designed to be something that keeps changing too much after release, barring any issues that are preventing players from engaging with it in the first place. Mostly we're enjoying watching the community experience the game together and are trying to make ourselves available to support that as best we can."

Yu lights up while discussing why he makes games. He puts forward a perspective brimming with the kind of empathy that permeates the often zany yet absolutely polished products for which he's known. His audience has only grown since he first released Spelunky, a game that has sold over a million copies and delighted fans across the world. According to Yu, games are a people-driven industry and should be treated as such, especially in the indie space.

"The game itself is the main dialogue we're putting out there – as an artwork, UFO 50 wasn't designed to be something that keeps changing too much after release"

"Games are made by people more than skill sets, so find people you trust and enjoy working with first and foremost," he says.

He continues to espouse this approach when we ask him to elaborate on what he learned during UFO 50's development process.

"I obviously learned a lot from the other members of the team, who sharpened my eyes in pretty much every area of game-making. The experience also validated a lot of lessons I'd learned from previous projects. For example, the importance of working with people you trust and the joy of providing meaningful experiences that aren't necessarily what players expect or find immediately comfortable."

Yu has a radically simple vision for the games industry as informed by his experience working on UFO 50. He created the project with a close group of collaborators and friends, so – when we ask what value continuity has in game making – he quickly replies with the following: "I think continuity can be valuable, for sure, but it shouldn't be forced – developers should work together because they want to."

And, at the end of the day, Yu says the impetus for UFO 50 was born out of a desire to accomplish a simple yet lofty goal: to have fun making games.