![]() ![]() ![]() “At first I wasn't sure how to do it, but then I just tried the most obvious thing that came to mind, which ended up being what stuck in the game. “The split-aiming was something I always wanted to do,” Ågren tells me. On top of the mobility overhaul, Pedro 2019 also implemented a whole new range of shooting features. Today, with a bit more experience with Unity and 3D game development, I probably would have done things a bit differently.” It was a lot of tweaking a number, play to see the difference, go back to tweaking the number, play again, and so on. Most of the time it's been a case of manually adjusting the bones of the character in LateUpdate to make them, for example, aim towards the cursor. “There isn't really any smart system going on behind the animations. “Since I didn't want the player to get stuck in a single animation while performing an action, I had to make sure all the moves could blend dynamically,” Ågren explains. Juicing up the slo-mo acrobatic bullet ballet However, because Pedro’s movement mechanics are hyper-stylistic, implementing the pirouette necessitated more work on the mobility system as a whole. Pedro has been widely celebrated for its ballet-like mobility style, with the pirouette becoming a core mechanic designed to dodge incoming fire. “The enemies ended up feeling a bit overpowered so it felt like some sort of dodge-maneuver was needed, and that's where the little pirouette was born.” “From there I kept experimenting with various levels, guns and enemies,” he explains. It’s no wonder, then, that when Ågren began work on the contemporary Pedro remake, this was the first detail he implemented into the game. When the original Pedro launched, this mechanic was what made it stand out from the saturated market of Flash shooters. According to Ågren, “The idea was to make the player feel like a puppeteer in control of the movement of the playable character, rather than having the player just press a button to watch a cool looking animation.” This mechanic may seem ostensibly and exclusively aesthetic, but its primary purpose is to serve a performative function. “The 'secret spice' of My Friend Pedro was discovered in the Flash version of the game, which is the flipping-through-the-air-in-slow-motion-mechanic.” “Most things in the game grew very organically and it was all about discovering as I went along,” Ågren explains. Sprinkle in a fair share of Max Payne, The Matrix, and Equilibrium and you've got the core of the seed that later grew in to My Friend Pedro.”Īlthough the sources that inspired the original Pedro span far and wide, the modern remake sought to build on its predecessor more so than to incorporate new influences. ![]() “The most influential game, though, must have been Rag Doll Kung Fu. “Flash games like Madness Interactive definitely had an influence, but also Half-Life mods like The Specialists,” he continues. “That's when the original Flash version of My Friend Pedro first started taking shape.” “A lot of the original inspiration for My Friend Pedro came from Flash games released around the year 2007,” DeadToast developer Victor Ågren tells me. Building a Flash cult hit into a full-fledged indie success Now, Pedro exists as a violent rendition of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, teeming with spent ammunition and devastatingly lethal frying pans. Recently, however, My Friend Pedro received a massive overhaul, to the extent that an entirely new set of systems and mechanics were assimilated into its makeup. Developed by one-man studio DeadToast, this Matrix-esque amalgamation of bullets and bedlam quickly cemented itself as a cult classic, but was unfortunately lost in the bygone era of browser games. ![]()
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