Jon Chey & Ben Lee On Wild Bastards: What You Can Expect From Void Bastards' Hyped Sequel

is an upcoming sci-fi shooter that serves as a spiritual successor to 2019's. Both produced by developer Blue Manchu, this latest venture aims to expand upon the foundations of its beloved predecessor. It maintains the same unique animation style and some of the original mechanics, while adding more depth when it comes to strategy, characters, and environments.

maintains some of ' roguelite elements with inclusions like procedurally-generated environments, but player characters are no longer just disposable prisoners. Instead, players will be working to reunite a group of 13 outlaws scattered across different planets, while also gathering lots of loot along the way. Each of them possesses unique fighting styles, making team building before each mission take on a new element of strategy, and relationships formed between outlaws will impact their success when working together in combat.

Roguelike and roguelite are interchangeably used to describe games with permadeath and procedurally generated maps, but there is a distinction.

interviewed Blue Manchu co-founders Jon Chey and Ben Lee — who also each serve as design director and creative director respectively on the new game — to discuss building upon, creating diverse and engaging environments, and what players can expect from.

Screen Rant: The original was so cool in so many ways, and I think this new theme is a really exciting one. What made you guys want to go from a sort of sci-fi, spacey theme to a Western one?

Jon Chey: A lot of the direction for this game came out of wanting to do more character for the player. In Void Bastards, of course it was all about procedural generation and every character was different, but none of them were persistent. You couldn't really develop any kind of relationship with them.

I think the starting point for this project was wanting to try to create characters that you could form a relationship with and get to know over time. The Western setting, I think, was actually a later