We recently had the chance to sit down with Paulo Lara and Pavel Lara, the developers of Kulebra and the Souls of Limbo, to discuss the game’s development, how it came about, and future plans for the game. We had a blast with the game, but we wanted to know how it came about and some of the challenges faced during development.
Jeremy Lowe: I’d like to thank you both for taking the time to answer our questions! I’d like to start off by asking about the creation of Galla Games. How did you decide that you wanted to start creating games?
Paulo Lara: Well, that’s a funny question because it all comes down to both an affinity for video games and the fact that we both had talents that covered a lot of the basic needs of video game development, me being an artist with a strong affinity for character design and story elements in general, and Pavel having-
Pavel Lara: A knack for programming, I guess?
Paulo: Yeah. So we came to the realization that we could take advantage of those two qualities and use it to create things that we were happy with, and we wanted to do this, so we decided to give it a try at video game development.
Pavel: Yeah, Kulebra is actually our second, well, actually completed project. We started with a mobile game because when we started, and this was all the way in 2017, I was still in high school, so I wasn’t really too familiar with programming. I only knew a little bit of Game Maker, but I was experimenting with fan games for Zelda in my own time. From there, I decided, “hey, let’s give it a shot, let’s see how we do.” We started with a small mobile game project, and after we did that, we made the jump to what is now Kulebra. So yeah, long journey, but very happy with the turnout.
Paulo: Yeah, I personally already had a background in illustration and digital art, so yeah, for me it was pretty straightforward in that sense.
Jeremy: Yeah, I remember seeing the long development cycle of Kulebra, and I was like, “wow, this game has been around for a while.” The mobile game was a shock to me. That was a very interesting thing to learn about. Moving on to the next question….
Jeremy: What inspired you to make Kulebra and the Souls of Limbo? I know you were inspired by games like Paper Mario and Majora’s Mask, but were there any games or any other media that directly inspired you to create the game?
Paulo: Well, I could say that at least personally, with my philosophy, I wanted to create something that would be a positive influence in the same way that these video games were a positive influence for me when I was a kid. And personally speaking, I think that video games open this opportunity for teaching you lessons while you’re having fun, and in a way that can reshape your character to become better as a whole, and to have a clear goal of both productivity and goodwill towards things. I wanted to transmit that same sensation through video games, which I think have a unique power in the art medium that I usually don’t see in art in general.
Pavel: In game design-wise, when I was handling the challenges of Kulebra, I got a lot of inspiration from, like, basically a ton of the games that I had played. Like, we highlighted Majora’s Mask, and you mentioned Paper Mario, but the game has a lot of elements from games such as Ace Attorney that inspired the combat, well, “combat.”
Jeremy: That’s interesting.
Pavel: Yeah, I kinda figured, “well, we don’t want Kulebra to be punching other people,” but I wanted tension, so I remembered I really liked that game [Ace Attorney] because they managed to put tension, but it was like a puzzle where you have to figure out what was the right evidence to share, so i took that piece and applied it to the game. It’s mostly like figuring out what we want to do in the game or what problem we would want to have solved, and I usually look at all the games we played, see what I liked about them, and try to somehow make that fit into what we were doing.
Jeremy: Hearing the Ace Attorney Inspiration, that’s very interesting. I didn’t actually pick up on that. As someone who has played a few Ace Attorney games, that is very interesting. Though I do actually kind of see it a little bit, yeah.
Pavel: I guess I’ll mention a little reference, Professor Layton, with the hint coins that you would, like, click on certain things in the background to try and get a coin inspired the barrels. So, just another example of a neat little thing that I can put here in the game.
Jeremy: That’s interesting, yeah. Another question I have about the game’s style and inspiration is….
Jeremy: I’ve noticed a lot of similarities between character designs and Day of the Dead culture. How did your background or upbringing influence the game’s setting and characters?
Paulo: Yes, actually, I would say that there’s a lot of influence of, like, Dominican landscape when it comes to Kulebra and the Souls of Limbo in many ways. It’s very subtle, but, for example, Plaza, the main area of the game, is heavily influenced on the place where I studied, which is called Altos de Chavon. It has this colonial sort of tropical look to it, and I took a lot of that when it comes to designing that area in many ways. As for the art style, there is a lot of influence on the Day of the Dead, as you just mentioned, but it also comes with a mix of Dominican culture in many elements. Like you can see the mask of the main evil guy, in this case Risa, it’s got heavy Dominican influence when it comes to one of the characters from the Dominican carnival.
Jeremy: That’s very interesting. I can kinda see all these inspirations coming together, and that’s kind of what made the game unique. When I played, it was like having all these different things coming together in this very particular way; it was a very unique part of the game for sure.
Jeremy: What was the writing process like? How did you come up with the game’s story? Were there any challenges coming up with the plot?
Paulo: Yes, yes, I would definitely say that, and I think a good analogy to express the sort of development that we go through when it comes to story is that there is sort of a tennis game in which we pitch an idea or a character and then we put it on test against the gameplay and so there is this cyclical feedback loop in which we compare things like gameplay versus story and how the things match and don’t match, and with that in mind, we try to have a sense of cohesion that would help us to make sense of things as a whole. I think the biggest challenge when it comes to that is matching the gameplay with the story, because usually, with gameplay comes a lot of limitations with the things that you can do, and it’s a game of balancing things to keep it consistent, and at the same time, not going too crazy.
Jeremy: Yeah, I think you guys did a good job avoiding what is known as cognitive narrative dissonance, which is kind of a problem some games fall into, where actions and gameplay don’t really match what’s going on in the story, and I think that this game does kind of avoid that overall. I didn’t really notice any problems with that.
Paulo: That’s always a challenge, but definitely something that we try to avoid as much as we can.
Pavel: Definitely. I will say the lack of combat helped us go a long way in helping deal with that issue that a lot of games have to come up with, I guess, a reason to actually engage in the combat or fighting and all that can be difficult to fit into the story while making sense. With Kulebra, because of the nature of being more like a conversation or discussion, I think it’s a lot easier to feed into the story. So that limitation, or I guess we wouldn’t call it a limitation, that design decision did go a long way.
Jeremy: That’s a very good philosophy, I think, for sure, and I think you guys hit it out of the park with that, most definitely. Kind of moving on to some of the characters and stuff….
Jeremy: What was the process for creating each character’s design like? How difficult was it trying to come up with so many unique designs? What was it like creating the world of Limbo itself?
Paulo: I would say that for characters, it comes back to the same idea of this cyclical process, same with the story that I would, for example, create the design of the character with certain elements of their story, and we would put it on test against the gameplay, and then we would see the limitations that would come with gameplay and puzzle, and at the same time feed the design of the character to match the needs that we have. There’s this organic play on the puzzle versus the character that ultimately shaped them into making sense as a whole and for the characters. For the world of Limbo, that one was a very organic process, I can say, yeah. That might be the word of this conversation, or for at least the development of Kulebra, organic, because originally, the world of Limbo comes from the mobile game, which was our first game that we made in 2015. In the end, we decided to make a game that was totally different from that, but we wanted to keep the characters of the mobile game since we pretty much had a lot of appreciation for them. Kulebra is a character who was very charming for me, and the development of him was pretty organic.
I wanted to keep the charm in the next game. So, we rescued the elements of Limbo and created the time loop curse and other things to implement and make sense around the gameplay. So yeah, that’s pretty much how it was shaped into the game that we know now, but the world of Limbo has even a bit more of a backstory that comes from a software limitation, funny enough. Kulebra, originally, was meant to be an endless runner in which you would be zigzagging, avoiding obstacles, and going as far as you can to get a high score, pretty much the highest score you could get. With that limitation, we needed a snake as the main character. Well, not a limitation, the idea that a snake would fit better as the main character for that type of gameplay, but we had the limitation that we couldn’t make a fluid tail-
Pavel: A seamless tail.
Paulo: That it would be a single element behind. So, we decided to chop that tail into small little pieces so it would be easier to produce software-wise, and with that limitation, we needed to justify why the tail would be cut into pieces. So, the skeletal snake fit the idea, and to justify the skeletal snake, we created the whole theme of Limbo and the undead, or dead, yeah dead, not the undead, yes. Yeah, that’s how the whole story started, pretty much.
Jeremy: Very humble beginnings for this little snake. I just imagine putting Kulebra into that original high score game.
Paulo: That was pretty much it, yeah.
Pavel: I spent a long time, well, not a long time, I spent a good while trying to get the tail to work, but it wasn’t going anywhere. Funny enough, I think to this day I don’t know how I would go about it. That’s a problem I haven’t found a solution for.
Jeremy: That’s your great treasure. The day you become a master programmer is the day you can figure out how to work that tail.
Pavel: Hopefully, I’ll do it before the end.
Jeremy: Why did you end up making the protagonist a snake? Was there some sort of symbolic reason for it?
Paulo: It actually comes down to the same element in which we wanted to rescue the characters from the first game because I really liked them, but we really enjoyed their look as a whole and I think Kulebra was a very charming character that represented a lot of positivity in a sense and we wanted to further express that in the game. It was also part of that whole organic process, but I think in the end something very beautiful and unique came out of it in many ways.
Pavel: A lot of the time, we jump into an idea with a series like Kulebra, but we don’t know exactly where that would lead. We have an idea, but we do a lot of figuring out as we go. I think, typically, gives, for lack of a better term, more organic results.
Paulo: Yeah, natural.
Pavel: Natural, yeah.
Jeremy: Yeah, I definitely feel kind of flying by the seat of your pants, because that’s basically my writing style, so you know I feel you.
Pavel: I didn’t know that was the phrase, seat of the pants?
Jeremy: That’s a phrase I use for it, that’s what I’ve always said. Does it make sense? I don’t know, I didn’t get a degree, what are you talking about?
Jeremy: This may be a bit of a loaded question, but how did you go about developing the gameplay? Kulebra has a very unique style of gameplay focused on rolling around in order to complete puzzles and challenges. How difficult was it to actually come up with the core gameplay loop?
Pavel: It definitely took a while to learn the elements. After we decided to go from to like actually making the Kulebra we know now, we knew that we wanted to make a game about helping souls and being in Limbo, and another point of reference that we had was to take Majora’s Mask, which had a huge emphasis on learning about characters and then helping their problems using that information. We kind of wanted to take that and turn it into a whole game about that. So, that was my starting point; we knew the game would be about talking with other characters, getting items, and then getting clues to solve them [puzzles]. The notebook was a good addition and was a very good head start for the idea. From there, it was a lot of experimenting, like we started with the first chapter with Flora. We had the smaller area in Valley where they are, in the little circle with the store, and that was the first environment we started working with, and we started putting out plants, and you have to buy them, and then, oh yeah, you need to collect pearls. It was just a lot of experimentation.
Where we landed on the workflow with the story and gameplay working together is that Paulo would, I think we mentioned it a little while ago, Paulo would come up with the plot and the characters that would be a part of the story, and I would try to figure out, “okay, with these tools what could I make for a puzzle.” For example, oh, do you have to buy the pearls? How do you get the pearls? One of the plants is actually locked somewhere, and it was a lot of coming up with problems that the player needs to solve, and then I would hand it over to Paulo, Paulo would see if it would fit the story, and it would be a constant back and forth. A lot of the times, when we start with a chapter, it always starts with a draft of what’s going to happen, and it’s just going from there. We kind of bounce ideas until we have something that feels complete, and yeah, fun.
Jeremy: Sounds like a pretty well thought-out process, sharing ideas definitely worked out in y’all’s favor.
Paulo: Oh yeah, yeah, it’s definitely a very comfortable way of working. In a way, we’re spoiled since we have very similar tastes. We work together very well, and in a lot of things, there’s little to no clash in how things flow, so it comes down to a very smooth process, a malleable and flexible process, which we can shape things into what feels natural with little to no clash.
Pavel: I think that’s something we learned naturally, it’s not like something we thought out. As we kind of worked together, we kind of realized that’s what we were doing, so we formalized it like, “hey, this is working, so let’s keep doing it that way.”
Paulo: Yeah, I would try and make a story that would make sense within a video game environment, even with certain goals and things that seem reasonable. I wouldn’t go with a story for Kojima from the start, and see if Pavel could figure it out. I would try to make things fairly reasonable with clear goals, in which we try to shape things, remove, and add according to the necessities of each element of the game.
Jeremy: Awesome. Awesome, awesome.
Jeremy: How challenging was it to develop the game with such a small development team?
Paulo: Well, that’s actually sort of a double-edged sword because it came with a lot of conveniences. For example, the fact that we, the two of us, had this much synergy, and it is a fairly small team, we didn’t need to create too many templates of things that we would stick in the game and then have to remove. With that came a lot of flexibility. It is a lot of work to do, but there is also a lot of flexibility with what we can add, and we can change things in an instant, fairly quick, without much discussion or any ideas. I don’t have to create a whole template of concept art to explain my idea around a whole team of artists or programmers. It’s pretty much just with a few sketches or basic writing, we can establish what’s going to happen super smoothly. It is a lot of work, but it comes with a lot of flexibility and efficiency due to that.
Pavel: In the other areas that we couldn’t cover, like the audio and music, we did have help from Zach Striefel, and sound effects were by Clayton Tapp. They were very helpful and competent in working on their own. We needed help for something and-
Paulo: Productivity-wise.
Pavel: Yeah, productivity-wise. So they were also a very important part of the project, and we couldn’t have done it without their help as well. We did get very lucky to have met them.
Jeremy: Yeah, definitely seems like it worked to y’all’s benefit to have such a tight-knit team there.
Paulo: It’s also very important for team members to be independent in the sense that you can produce work without much instruction, so it does not come down to a lot of micromanagement, and that’s something that is especially a good highlight with the two of us, that we can produce a lot of work without the necessity of having to exchange too much or wait too much for the work of the other in order to proceed. That also comes with a lot of good results, or fast results.
Jeremy: Definitely sounds like a pretty thought-out plan, I think. Even if ideal in some ways and not ideal in some other ways, I think it definitely worked in your favor. Now, kind of going into more future plans….
Jeremy: I know you’ve got more updates planned for this year and have already started work on the game’s DLC, but do you have any more plans for the game? Any potential sequels?
Paulo: Right out of the gate, we would love to do a sequel. We would love to revisit the world of Limbo. As for if it would be our next project, that would depend.
Jeremy: Yeah.
Paulo: But it is definitely something we would love to tackle sooner rather than later. Do you have anything to add?
Pavel: Yeah, we’re focusing our work right now on finishing the DLC for this year, like you mentioned, before we move along to the next project, whatever it might be.
Jeremy: Yeah. I think you need to focus on a very minor side character, I know everyone loves, the rock, from the beginning of the game. I think he needs a whole game. We need Rosa’s whole origin story, that’s what I’m thinking.
Jeremy: I’d like to once again thank both of you for taking the time to answer these questions. I’ve got one last question before we wrap up. Were there any questions that you wished I had asked, and what would your answer to that be?
Paulo: That’s an interesting question.
Jeremy: I had to give you a thinker for the last one.
Paulo: Let’s see….
Jeremy: Or if there’s just anything you want to talk about here, feel free.
Paulo: Well, I could, I guess, also add that a good way, which in a way is part of one of the questions you asked us, I think I just forgot to include it. Part of the main philosophy of the game, going back to the whole idea, is that it’s good to know that Kulebra is a game about empathy and the power that comes from it, and that the game tries to teach you the good that comes with these actions and the bad things that can happen. Nevertheless, it’s always good to give it a try, and to try our best to do the right thing. That’s the core message of the game; it’s pretty much that it’s always good to share.
Jeremy: Yeah, definitely a good message, I think. One that we need nowadays.
Paulo: You have anything?
Pavel: Well, I guess a little detail is that when we started making this game, we didn’t know a lot of things, we kind of went along with filling out things on the way. So, I guess if someone needs some motivation or reason to get started on their own project, whatever it might be. It might be a video game or another thing they want to do; sometimes, the best step is to get started. From there, you can figure out the rest.
Paulo: Oh yeah, don’t worry about if the game looks ugly at the start, or if you don’t have any idea what you’re doing, that’s part of the process. Figuring things out as you go, in many ways, is part of the evolution of the process. It’s only natural, yeah.
Pavel: The game was pretty ugly for three years.
Jeremy: I definitely sympathize with that advice because when I was writing my book, that’s kind of what ended up happening. There were so many things that changed over time, you kind of have to go with the flow of it sometimes, just like let your mind sort of on the spot. That’s when some of your best ideas can come about.
Paulo: Yes, things would take shape or form with work, and as long as you put the effort there, things should shape into something that you aspire to do.
Jeremy: I can definitely agree with that advice for sure. Well, I think that is everything for this interview. I would like to thank you both so much, again, for coming on and answering my questions.
Paulo: Yeah, for sure. Thank you for having us, it’s been great, yes.
