PAX West 2024 Conversation with Colin McIsaac of AAAA Games, creator and director of Royalty Free-For-All
Royalty Free-For-All is a hand-drawn party brawler where the crossover theme is the public domain, so we’re creating original fighters based on tropes and themes that recur time and again throughout storytelling. For example, in this demo, we’ve got characters named Sweeney Todd, Dorothy, Mother Goose, and Lilith. They are the tropes of a killer robot, silly goose, a nature princess, and a little dog, too.
So Dorothy, for example, has made a wish that she can speak to Toto, it sort of backfired, and she became a dog. She can summon twisters and drop houses on you. We’ve reinvented Sweeney Todd as a killer robot – his official fighter name is Screamshaver – he’s got scissor feet and a vampire bat cape which is sort of like a theatrical-curtain-red, he’s got bloody rags for hands, which have swiss army switchblades all up in them, there’s a buzzsaw and cleavers and a hairdryer. So, we’re really having fun just completely transforming the image of these characters that everyone already knows and loves.
Why this premise? Why these characters?
It was honestly kind of a joke to start out with. I thought it would be really funny if someone made Smash Bros but with public domain content.
And you’re like, “I could make that!”
Yeah, like I’m somebody! Let’s do it, let’s go!
How long has it been in development?
I’ve been conceptualizing it for about three years and it’s been in development for about six months. So, here we have four fighters to show off at PAX, 12 stages, and there’s a lot more on the way. And we’re actually taking votes for characters that people would like to play as in the future. Right now, this choice of four is based on playstyle – Sweeney Todd is a rushdown; Dorothy is a mixup; Mother Goose is an agile character, and Lilith is a zoner. And we’re really having fun with it. Mother Goose’s knockdown frame is the Family Guy Death Pose.
Perfect.
So, we really just want to make people smile, including ourselves. Like I said, it started as a joke and it still is a joke and, you know, we wanna do that while honoring the legacies of these timeless classics rather than mocking them.
What was the biggest challenge in making this game?
The biggest challenge is legal. We’re operating in extremely nuanced and complicated areas of the law, so we’ve got a great legal team helping us navigate what we can and can’t do. That is an enormous part of our budget, I would really not recommend people do anything but create their own stuff to be honest.
Were any of the characters you’ve got now in a legal gray area?
Well, it’s interesting, one of the ways that we’ve arrived where we have with the character Screamshaver came from an iteration where it was Sherlock Holmes. At the time, a few years ago, there were Sherlock Holmes stories that were in the public domain but some were not. The Conan Doyle estate was arguing and winning on the premise that you can’t have Sherlock Holmes show human emotions because that only happened later. He has to be an unfeeling robot, so to speak, and I said ‘bet, he’s a robot.’
Ultimately we found Sweeney Todd to be a better fit on the concept. He’s an electric razor, a sort of demon barber pole—and by now those later Holmes stories have joined the public domain anyway. So Sweeney Todd became the robot..
I didn’t even know Sweeney Todd was in the public domain.
Yeah, Sweeney Todd is a penny dreadful character from the mid-1800s.
And what are some of your inspirations?
Other than the source material? Smash Bros., and I guess to be more specific to myself, I was a big Wikipedia kid growing up, so I would just go down every rabbit hole I could about, like, Ben 10 and Pokémon, so I kind of want to create that experience for people in the modern age. I want to be able to give kids a rabbit hole to go down about Sweeney Todd, Mother Goose, Lilith, rather than the trophy section of Smash Bros., where I spent a lot of my time. That feature hasn’t appeared in Smash for nearly a decade, so it’s really been fun trying to think of how to pass that experience on to the next generation of players.
Is there any specific process with deciding how you’re going to put a twist on these old characters, other than the most natural evolution, like Sweeney Todd as an electric razor?
It’s sort of about making a diverse cast of characters. Needless to say there are a ton I’m working on that are not here at PAX and they are not public information, but I look at the whole of the picture and I say “oh this guy’s a little too close to this guy, maybe do we combine them or do we separate them out and make them even more different?”
Lilith, for example, you’ll notice that her hair and her grass skirt are like one-to-one the original Peter Pan illustrations. She’s also combined with the plant Audrey from The Little Shop of Horrors, which, in the 60s, they thought “no one’s going to like this movie” and they just never bothered to copyright it. So the original black and white Little Shop is part of this character. I thought, “what’s the natural extension of the fruit growing and budding into a new creature?” Oh, it evolves mobility and this sort of predatory process of evolution by becoming a full human-type creature with arms and legs, and her toes can grow into plant roots for one of her attacks, and the leaf at the end of her braid is a hungry venus flytrap mouth. So it’s really wacky when you lay the whole process out, but the end result is surprisingly simple: it’s a plant girl… that’s it!
When you have to focus in and get something done, especially creatively like this, is there certain music or a certain playlist you put on?
There are some YouTube compilations called like, “classical music that goes hard,” stuff like that.
I’ve heard like, the lo-fi beats, hip hop, classical. I put on the Succession score.
Yeah, I try to avoid anything more recent than a hundred years old when I’m working, because I don’t want to accidentally get inspired by something that I shouldn’t be.
How’s your experience been at PAX?
Incredible. You know it’s kind of tough to thread the needle between the casual audience and the fighting game audience. There are a lot of kids who will just take to these cartoon characters, not even knowing who they are in the first place. And there are a lot of people who recognize the names that we’re using but don’t really play fighting games. So it has to skew a little broader than something with a highly technical component.
The way that we thread that needle is by simplifying the attack commands. We have light, strong, and special attacks that work on the ground and in mid-air, and that makes a total of six attack options. Very easy to follow if you don’t know these types of games. At the same time, we’re fighting game fans ourselves, and we chose to maintain the fast pace, the high technical elements like wavedashing and tech-chasing that make some of the games in the genre really fun. In fact we’re canonizing these things by giving them fun animations and simplifying them down to two-button commands. They’re easier to use than ever, and it’s been really rewarding to see that actually pay off. Fighting game players love it, and people who have never picked up a controller love it. It’s been really incredible to watch.
What’s next?
More fighters!
You get home after PAX and it’s like, back to the drawing board.
We have a pretty good idea of who’s coming next.
Any final thoughts?
I would encourage you to please go check out our social channels. That’s @royaltyfreeforall on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. On X and BlueSky, it’s @royaltyfree4all with the 4 because otherwise we exceed the character limit.
You can also check out AAAA Games and Royalty Free-For-All on their website and Steam. There’s an upcoming Discord server and a Kickstarter planned for later this summer, so keep an eye on the Royalty Free-For-All socials for more information!
