 Some people say you should never meet your heroes. To these people I say, get better heroes, because I spoke with Christian Whitehead on the phone for 45 minutes and he is absolutely delightful. There are some names that jump out larger than others in the indie gaming sphere, and Christian Whitehead is one of them. Starting as an indie developer working on Sonic the Hedgehog fan games before being hired by Sega to do the real thing and making Sonic Mania. He and several of the other developers that worked on Sonic Mania then formed Evening Star and have created their own debut title, Penny's Big Breakaway. In videos I often like to portray Christian Whitehead as kind of the rock star of the Sonic fan game community. And having spoken with him, I absolutely stand by that assertion. How else do you define somebody who, when asked what the moral of his own life story is, responds with the David Bowie quote. Speaking with Christian Whitehead feels like something of a holy grail for me. I have long wanted to interview him, obviously couldn't get anywhere near him while he was working with Sega, and his social media presence is fairly sparse, so there's not an awful lot to latch on to there. Indie gaming though is a completely different ballgame. As soon as Penny's Big Breakaway Shadow dropped, I emailed Private Division and asked if I could have an interview, and for some reason they said yes. I imagine that the PR team probably regretted this fairly early into the interview. According to my contact at the company, quote, It was clear you were passionate, which we all know is code for you were an absolute fanboy. I couldn't help myself though, Christian was just so interesting and cool. He had so many fun things to say, and even when I threw him a question that was only half baked or half developed, he gave such a spectacular interesting answer. Before the interview I did put up a post on our channel's community tab asking you guys for questions, and I did ask him some of your questions, so if you're interested in knowing why penguins and what kind of yo-yo tricks Christian Whitehead can do, then keep watching. The one mine and niggle with this otherwise delightful experience is the fact that I've been asked not to use the actual audio from our phone call in this video. And that's disappointing because it's just right there on my hard drive, but I can't share it with you. Instead, in order to give you the full interview as best I can, I've taken selections from it, and I will be reading them myself, which is not ideal. It is absolutely not the way that I would like to present this, but it is the best I can do with what I have available. To that end, the rest of this video will be Christian Whitehead's own words coming out of my mouth. He will touch on topics such as his own experience of growing and learning as a developer and a programmer, on the process of building a Sonic the Hedgehog game and of building Penny's Big Breakaway, and where he sees the future of momentum-based games are going forward. This then is the story of Christian Whitehead, Sonic Mania, and Penny's Big Breakaway. 1. The Story of Christian Whitehead When I was a young kid, I literally thought video games were magical. I didn't understand how they worked, just this idea of mythos behind games. You'd always hear rumors about cheats you could do from your mates, and it kind of felt like anything was possible if you knew the secret chance to make something happen. There'd be classic rumors about how to get a secret, like Goro's brother in Mortal Kombat, and you'd try doing all these different codes and stuff. They wouldn't work, but you think, one day I'll figure it out. So I think early on I just had this desire. I wanted to make my own game. I want to know how to do this magic behind the scenes. Sonic was really interesting because it had this debug mode cheat that let you break the game in really interesting ways. I still wasn't super computer literate with programming, but I got hints like, oh, this object behaves this way if you don't set it up with this other thing. And so I kind of built up the idea of logic and how one thing makes another thing happen. One day I was in a store, and I saw click-and-play for computer, advertised like, make your own terrific games in just 30 minutes or something. Initially I was a little bit disappointed because I was imagining being able to make a 3D PlayStation game, and all you could really do is a single-screen retro style arcade game. I think the first game I ever made was this game called Space Cows, and it was basically just space invaders, but cows. The Sonic fan game scene kicked off soon after that. I got into that, and there's a lot of information on that online, but moving on to Xbox 360 and stuff, I was really at a stage in my life where I thought, I'm probably not going to be doing games because that's for big companies, and I'm just a small person, small creative. And so at that point in my life I was playing music in bands, and I wanted to do music videos and short film, and so I studied film and photography at university. I had a job as a freelancer doing video production and editing motion graphics, which was all still heavily computer adjacent, but then I had this hobbyist side of me that was always poking around at making games. Then, when mobile games became a big thing, then it was suddenly like the doors were open again to small people to experiment and make games. I definitely had this desire to make my own original game on mobile initially, but then it just happened to be the perfect time to try and do a Sonic thing because Sega was interested in my pitch to do Sonic CD, and then that really kicked off all the Sonic stuff. I went from being a passionate fan to someone who had the privilege of actually making stuff for Sonic, but I think for me, I always want to challenge myself to try something new and always be working on the skills, because especially with games development, I'm basically completely self-taught. I just had a real passion for the craft. I really admire how games have evolved over the last 30 years. My dream is to one day create something that's innovative in that kind of technological space, but I'm also just content to make something that people have fun with and enjoy ultimately. 2. The Process of Innovation With Sonic Mania, basically Sega just wanted us to revisit the original levels, but just change a couple of things to make it have a few unexpected moments. We really dialed that up as far as we could go. We wanted to have different bosses, different mechanics, and do things that take people's expectations, but then deliver them something that they weren't expecting. I think for me, it was really tricky after Sonic Mania because there's a lot of fans emulating that style, and on the one hand, that's really gratifying and cool to see them be supportive of what we did and want more of the same. But then, on the other hand, how do I do something that they haven't seen? So I think there was a lot of pressure to just fit a certain mould with that. Having an original game and a 3D game as well, it's something that I don't think a lot of our audience even really thought that we would be capable of doing. So I was really psyched to show that we could do that. Definitely, there's a lot of challenges in doing that, but I'm pretty proud of what we did put out with Penny. I lived through the generational change from 2D to 3D as a kid, but then being able to kind of live that experience as a developer was interesting because at the time, there was no information on how you build a 3D engine or how a character should move in 3D or what the calculations are to do 3D collision. In a lot of ways, we took the hard path because we came from this background where we made our own engine for Sonic Mania and then with Penny, it's a new iteration of that kind of engine lineage but with design for 3D games. So we had to really think, what's the process for designing a level in 3D? And how do we do it in a way that our designers enjoy working with? So there were a lot of technical hurdles to work out, but then also on the creative side, I don't want to just make something that's a traditional collectathon like Banjo-Kazooie even though that's a fantastic game. I think it wouldn't be us if we just tried to emulate one particular game style. I think it was more a combination of living through that time period and then just wanting to experience it ourselves as developers. 3. The design of Penny's big breakaway. Penny wasn't really designed with a specific generational spec in mind but a lot of the feedback we've got has been, this game either will remind someone of a Longlock Saturn game or a GameCube game. It's sort of this hazy feeling depending on when you grew up. There's definitely different resonance points for people and I think that just came from us. Again, because we had to make our own engine and it was our first 3D game. We were pretty clever and conservative with how we did the art just because it's very easy for a budget to explode if you're changing and chasing after fidelity so we just felt like we wanted an art style that was crisp and clean and colourful. We drew broad inspirations from the Bauhaus art aesthetic which prides itself on geometric cleanliness and simplicity, clean, bold lines and style. It almost at points has a bit of an early CG look where they had a lot of polygons but then not a lot of complicated texturing. It was a very crisp, clean rendering of glossy shapes. So I think for us it was a good starting point because having gone from a pixel art workflow and that was a workflow that we understood really well and were able to create really high fidelity 32-bit style sprite animations but then in 3D we're like, okay, we're not going to be at arc system works level of artisanship on our first game. So let's just focus on something that looks fluid and clean and I think organically we just arrived at this sort of GameCube aesthetic. 4. Penny vs Sonic. It's challenging because at face value there's definitely some elements that you could look at and be like, yeah, this is similar to Sonic. The clean geometric kind of design of the stages and the fact that you can use terrain to pick up speed. But I'd say the way Penny moves is quite different to Sonic. Sonic is just an intrinsically fast character. He doesn't need any gadgets, he is his own kind of engine, he can just rev up and go. Whereas Penny is just an ordinary denizen of Macaroon and it's really her partnership with Yo-Yo that allows her to move in interesting ways. So I think as a player you have to work a lot more if your goal is to clear the stage as fast as possible. You have to work a lot harder than you would in Sonic to do that because it's all about changing and chaining all the moves together and maintaining a flow. So I think the fact that we have a combo system in the game there's almost a little bit of Tony Hawk DNA in terms of if we're talking about what 3D games influence the game. 5. Penguins. So penguins, there's multiple layers to it. Initially when we came up with the gameplay concept one thing we wanted, a key way we wanted to differentiate ourselves from other 3D platformers is not require the player to actually jump on enemies because that's quite often a bit difficult to perform. So instead it became this idea of a swarm of a crowd of people. One person is relatively harmless but then if you get a whole mob of people around you then that becomes very difficult to avoid. You can get swallowed up. We didn't really want an angry crowd of people that would be a bit intimidating. And so then we had Emperor Eddie and then it's like Emperor Penguin. There's that layer to it. But then I see them as squeaky bowling pins. You can knock them about and they'll take punishment but they don't get hurt. They just kind of bounce off everything and recover. The other purpose they serve is to provide pressure points in the stage so that you're encouraged to keep moving. They help amp up the challenge in certain areas where maybe you have to use yo-yo to pull a wall down. And that action on its own is pretty straightforward and you can take it at your own pace but suddenly when you have a crowd of penguins coming up behind you you suddenly have to pull off that action a lot quicker. It's this psychological factor of oh no I'm going to get captured if I don't move quickly. It's interesting. I think some people find the penguins adorable. Some people get totally stressed out and they're like oh I wish the penguins would go away I need to relax. But we just wanted something a bit goofy and fun. But then also just as they build up it builds the tension. Six, can you do yo-yo tricks and did you have a yo-yo consultant for the game? I think I can only do a sleep and a walk the dog. I used to be able to do the trapeze triangle trick when I was in school. But we kind of went in deep on the yo-yo tricks. The thing that was tricky, the way they move the yo-yos in competitions is tight and close to the body and they're always flicking it around. We concepted a whole bunch of moves and most of them did make it into the game. There was a few that didn't make it into the game just because it was tricky to translate it into meaningful gameplay. For instance like detaching the yo-yo temporarily from the screen which is a move people can do. We had this idea of making a tightrope and then using it to cross gaps. That was thrown out early on because the move that we discovered that was really fun in the game was just when you slept the yo-yo in space. You'd always need to have it gripping onto a pole before you could do a swing. But then when we were testing the initial prototype we thought what if we just let the player sleep the yo-yo anywhere in space and then just use that as an anchor point? And that really changed the game early on where once we had that you can go anywhere. You can move much more acrobatically. It's not really realistic moves at all but I think it retains the spirit of the way they swing the yo-yo around. It's just really satisfying to see it whip around so we just wanted to capture that part of real-life yo-yoing. 7. The Biggest Challenge Personally the biggest challenge was basically building the engine. I think with Sonic Mania we did the fifth iteration of the engine for that but that only took me about two months to make because a lot of it was just building on what I'd done previously. And so it was very easy to move on and focus on the game itself. But with Penny we'd already spent a couple of years building the groundwork of the engine and so we had the necessary base to develop the game but then there was always a never-ending supply of interesting problems to solve. The design team needs specific tools to make the shapes in a more efficient way. We came up with this procedural generation system where basically the art team created a single set of assets and then the designers blocked out the shapes for the level. Typically with 3D games when we researched it you do what's called a gray box pass and you map out how the stage plays and then you give that to the artist and then they make a nice decorated version of the stage and then that sort of locked in place and you can't change it. But our experience on Sonic was we were doing a lot of tweaks to the terrain shapes all throughout testing because we wanted to try and get the best sense of momentum through the stage. We wanted the ability to continually tweak the angle of terrain on the design side but then we didn't want to have to continually be like hey Tom, can you redecorate this part of the level for us? So our technical artist Brandon basically created this entire sweep of Maya scripts that take the art assets that our artists make and then conform them to the shape of all the level geometry and then it creates the pretty version of that. I had to do a lot of rendering programming on my end where I programmed all the rendering backends like Switch, PS5, Xbox and PC and then did the light mapping system and so there was just a lot of technical things that I had to make. I think going forward for me the great thing is we can leverage a lot of this stuff in the future and then go even further on the gameplay side of things and use the prior experience on our first 3D game to kind of go even further, hopefully. Again, I'm completely proud of what we achieved with this but as a developer there's always the next level. How can I improve my workflow and do better than I did before? So yeah, I'm excited with the possibilities having had this learning experience the first time. Particularly on the 3D side of things how to work together as a team to make that type of game there's a lot of things you have to figure out and a lot of things that can slow you down if you don't have strategies in place to manage it. Another thing that was particularly challenging was the amount of art assets we had to manage for this game compared to Sonic Mania. There's just so many more assets to keep track of and it's a classic thing where there's this meme where artists name everything New Document 1 or New Document 10. If you don't have a bookkeeping system in place for what your rig is called, how you name all your textures and how you name sound effects and everything there's just so much stuff that it's easy for people to lose track. So we figured a lot of that stuff out on this game and on future games we'll be able to leverage that which will be great. 8. Working on Freedom Planet 2 That was actually before Sonic Mania. That game was a real labour of love for Sabrina and the team. I was on very early on because Sabrina came to me and initially was interested in getting Freedom Planet on consoles. Thankfully there was an easier way of doing it than having to reprogram that game. And so instead she was basically like can you help me set up the gameplay from Freedom Planet 1 in Unity for the sequel and the graphics are going to be slightly larger, the sizes were different. At that time Unity didn't have a lot of systems in place for 2D momentum. At the point where you could play as Lilac with her core move set from the original game I can't remember if any of the other characters were in when I worked on it but I just got it to the point where I was like cool we can see the game working in Unity. And from there I think I moved on to Mania soon after that and then I was just sort of keeping an eye on that in the background. It was really satisfying to see that come out because I heard the initial outlay of the story and what was going to happen in the game but I didn't see any of the content until it came out years later. And so it was just a real cool surprise and then almost surreal at the end where it's like, oh yeah, I worked on that. 9. The Future of Momentum Based Games I've definitely seen how there was the indie scene before Mania and then the indie scene after. The thing that's really interesting for me is seeing how multiple genres are being blended together like with Pizza Tower where on the one hand there's the Wario influence but then there's also the Sonic influence and how moving those together creates something that's a different thing. Even with Freedom Planet as well there's a lot of action influences from titles like Mega Man Zero. There's a bit of a combat focus in that game and the bosses are way more aggressive than what you could do in Sonic because of the evolution in the mechanics in that game. I think for me, despite knowing the mechanics of Sonic so well I didn't want to make a game that was close to Sonic because having worked on it there's just such a passionate love for the characters themselves that if you don't have the characters it's hard to make people care about the game. If they're like, oh I wish Sonic was here, why isn't he here? We were almost rebelling. Anything that felt too Sonic-like we were like, okay we can't do that. We could have done it and it would have been good but we have to challenge ourselves not to do that, not to lean on that crutch. I think the challenge is how can you take the core idea of momentum but then use it with totally different constraints and goals for the actual stages that you play through because there's a lot of different ways you can approach a platforming game. 10. Christian Whitehead, The Rockstar In terms of live instruments I play drums. I can do a bit of keyboards as well. Initially when I was really young I learned to play a piano that I kind of stopped. My dad's a guitarist and I tried to learn guitar but then I found drums were my instrument that really resonated with me. T-Lopes and I go way back and we're really good mates. The work he's done on Penny's soundtrack is phenomenal. And also Sean Viallo who's our new composer pick on this project but I also basically co-wrote five of the songs on the soundtrack. T is obviously a man who's always in demand. There were a few moments in the project where we needed to get moving on a track and he was busy on something else. And so I'm like, here's some ideas that I whipped up for some of the stages and then he took that, those demo tracks and then turned them into some really sweet songs. 11. If you could go back ten years and tell your younger self something to better your game development skills what would it be? There were a lot of silly programming things that I could have progressed a lot faster if I'd known. With my early fan game work I didn't know anything about virtual functions and a lot of more advanced programming topics. If I had the ability now I'd be like, here's the cheat sheet of all the things you need to know and it will boost you, get you five years ahead of where you are now as a programmer. And then you'll be able to finish your fan game in twice the speed that you could have done it. That's the one sad thing about the fan game story is that as soon as I moved on to official Sonic stuff, the fan game, Retro Sonic it meant we could never finish that game. It would have been cool to finish that fan game before I moved on to professional stuff. That's probably how I'd tell my younger self to cheat. Having the tool set that I had to make mania back when I was a teenager, that would have been awesome. But at the same time I suppose you have to earn those things to really understand them properly. 12. What is the moral of the Christian Whitehead story? David Bowie in one of his interviews he said, Never play to the gallery. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you're capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth and when you don't feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom you're just about in the right place to do something exciting. You do have to put yourself in slightly uncomfortable situations. It would be very tempting to just stay comfortable. Just continue doing the same thing every time. But I think people would get bored of that. And I realise that at the same time as an artist, not everything is going to hit in the same way. And especially the more out on a limb you get, some people may not like that. But I think at the same time being able to look back on your body of work and being like, Oh man, I tried so many different things. I'm in awe of how many times Bowie as an artist transformed himself and his aesthetic, his style, his musical direction and sensibilities. I'm not saying I'm David Bowie in any way, but just having that aspiration really intrigues me.