gamehuntersupdatetipsandtricshub: ZPF Interview: Gryzor Talks Design, Kickstarter Success, and Sound Style

Taking inspiration from shmup legends like Lords of Thunder, Elemental Master, and the ThunderForce series, players will be able to take to the skies in style with the release of Mega Cat Studios’ ZPF this year.

Gamers Heroes recently spoke with Gryzor about ZPF’s design, incredible Kickstarter success, and sweet, sweet music – learn more with our interview.

ZPF Interview: Gryzor Talks Design, Kickstarter Success, and Sound Style

Gamers Heroes:

As somebody whose first system was the SEGA Genesis, you’re after my heart with ZPF! What make you want to pursue a horizontal shmup?

Gryzor:

I have strong, fond memories of playing games like Gradius, SCAT and Abadox on NES as well as Super NES classics like U.N. Squadron, Super R-Type and Gradius III so I had been well familar with the genre even before I had started my own Megadrive/Genesis collection years later and finally sunk my teeth into legendary series like ThunderForce.

I’ve worked on several horizontals since I started tinkering with gamedev back in 2008. ZPF is the culmination and combination of most of those early ideas. I’m quite thrifty when it comes to keeping things I’ve made and making sure they find use somewhere. At least 2 of the new game’s major bosses were originally drawn via Wiimote.

Gamers Heroes:

I saw that ZPF absolutely crushed its Kickstarter funding goals, raising $204,670 and being over 1,000% funded! What’s it been like working with the community?

Gryzor:

It’s just been fantastic to feel the touch of success and feel your efforts pay off after such a long, long, LONG gestation.

I’m very happy at the response it’s recieved. For all the times stuck in the doldrums it felt like we’d never get this thing out of the door, especially in ’20, ’21 and ’22, it feels really good.

Gamers Heroes:

How are you building upon what you’ve learned from previous titles like the vertical shmup Super XYX for this release?

Gryzor:

All of my games are mixed together and built on top of each other in some ways. Super XYX is similar in that it shares, accumulates and combines elements from my oldest projects from ’08 and ’09.

My Game Maker projects nearly all share scripts, fonts, graphical effects, sounds as well as little mechanical details. This one was such a radical shift in having to learn totally different workflows and approaches to make things work on the system that it was nearly like going back to zero in some regards. Going from PC games to Megadrive/Genesis is quite a trip!

The biggest change was probably in building the stages. SXYX, like my older games just uses long single tracks where everything mostly stays the same aside from some key background changes to give the player a sense of progress and where they are. Due to mostly technical circumstances for making ZPF, we had to construct them out of little stitched together ‘scenes’, which was totally new to my process. Making simple visual setpieces, transitions and boss specific areas came naturally from that.

Gamers Heroes:

Jamie Vance is doing incredible work with ZPF’s soundtrack! What has it been like refining ZPF’s signature sound style and working with him?

Gryzor:

I’ve known Jamie since I was a kid and seeing his tenacity working with NES tracker music on an earlier project (Cavity Destroyer), I knew he’d be well up the challenge.

Actually, he was totally unfamiliar with the system’s sound capabilities when we started. It’s been mostly just him figuring things out as he learned, both in terms of the technical process and what he wanted to get out of it in general. The only creative guidance I’ve given is sharing some sample songs I like…. maybe one from Elemental Master, one from Lightening Force, one from Devilish, Gauntlet IV, Castlevania Bloodlines, those sorts.

The uniqueness and quality that resulted is really all on him and his skill.

My entire approach working with others creatively is to leave them be and let them figure things out at their own pace and I think that really paid off here. It was a long time before we had enough music to fill everything out; but placing the tracks was also one of the last things we did before having to hammer out other final details.

Gamers Heroes:

One of the things I love about ZPF is its emphasis on lore – I especially enjoyed “Story Time With Quibley!” What went to designing this title’s worldbuilding?

Gryzor:

Funnily there really was no “lore” for the longest time, only very loose ideas of how things connected. A lot of the original PC assets had been there a long time and I definitely wasn’t thinking about it back then, just ensuring that the different themed elements matched well enough in style. While finally fleshing out and finishing the stages, I had to think about how sections should intuitively flow into each other, what type of baddies and background details made sense to be in these places, etc. but not much more than that. On that basic level, I’m happiest with the Fantasy stages in how they present that world with little micro sized scenes taking place.

We obviously needed to help produce extra promotion-ready material for the sake of our publisher Megacat; but a lot of it came around the time I needed to make the character specific endings. I ended up with a huge matrix of who got what depending on what the player did and I suddenly had *a lot* of text to fill out and thinking about story to do!

Quibley, by the way, is also entirely Jamie’s creation. It was originally just an old unused sprite from an unfinished Space Harrier style game project. I had slated to re-use it among a few others and he just gave it it’s own life starting with the early KS materials he helped make.

ZPF is set to release on the SEGA Genesis/SEGA Mega Drive, along with the PC, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S.

For those looking to get a headstart on things, one can wishlist ZPF via its official Steam page.

Join us for Behind the Beats with Jamie Vance (@jgvex_), the composer behind ZPF! 🎧

Get an exclusive look into the creative process behind the game’s OST, from inspirations to challenges. Plus, don’t miss a live performance featuring some of the most electrifying tracks from… pic.twitter.com/Nzlcn8SUit
— Mega Cat Studios (@megacatstudios) February 22, 2025