Aaron Conklin
UW grad Benedict Fritz (left) worked with a Chicago team to design Tumbleseed.
Plenty of modern videogames draw inspiration from the classics. The touchstone for Tumbleseed, a new indie game designed by a team that includes UW-Madison grad Benedict Fritz, reaches way, way back into the cult-game recesses. It’s Ice Cold Beer, a 1983 cabinet game by Taito in which players balance a marble on an ascending metal bar — an actual metal bar, not a pixelated simulation — to roll it into lighted holes that represent bubbles in a mug of beer.
Fritz and some of his friends encountered the classic cabinet at Logan Arcade in Chicago, and Fritz was immediately struck by it: “Why has no one made a game with this type of play since the mid-’80s?” he wondered.
Now Fritz and four Chicago-based developers have set the moving-bar concept in a busy, visually stylistic world with all sorts of stationary and moving hazards to threaten your cute li’l seed’s ascent up the side of a mountain — holes to fall into, insects that dive-bomb and shoot projectiles at you. Fritz began designing Tumbleseed back in late 2014, and, almost three years later, it’s set to release May 2 on PlayStation 4, the Nintendo Switch and PC.
Fritz graduated with a degree in computer science from UW-Madison in 2011, but it wasn’t until his senior year that he got into game development. In the spring of that year, he participated in a campus games jam, an event that challenges participants to design a game over the course of a weekend. Fritz ended up throwing together several Flash games and realizing he had a passion for game development. The same year he began working on Tumbleseed, he released Dudeski, an arcade skiing app for iOS and Android.
Tumbleseed proved a much tougher nut to crack.
“The hardest part was figuring out the design, figuring out why this is fun,” says Fritz. “The game is about moving and rolling. As soon as you add something that’s not about rolling, it’s not fun.”
At one point, the team gave the seed a bow and arrow to shoot at enemies, but playtesters found it distracting. Instead, the team installed a system of collectible seeds that, when planted in soil plots on the side of the mountain, give the seed power-ups like spinning thorns or the option to call down a storm to fill the holes with rainwater.
Once the gameplay elements were set, the question became which console platform. Sony’s PlayStation 4, the indie developer’s current preferred platform, was an obvious choice. But so was another platform.
“Tumbleseed is a colorful, but challenging game,” says Fritz. “And that’s a combo that’s very Nintendo.”
Fritz reached out to the Big N late last year to inquire if Tumbleseed might find a home on the Wii U. The team didn’t realize Nintendo was on the verge of announcing a brand-new console. It ended up being such a natural fit that Nintendo featured Tumbleseed as part of its “Nindies” Switch Showcase in February.
“It’s painful that the game took so long to make, but it happened to line up with Nintendo’s console release schedule, so there’s a silver lining there.”
Fritz and his co-developers are obviously anxious to see how gamers respond to Tumbleseed. But it may be the newbies who like it most.
“A lot of people who play a lot of games struggle more than those who don’t,” notes Fritz. “They tend to overcorrect. I liken controlling the seed to drifting a car — it’s like a controlled chaos, where you’re moving, but things aren’t really responding to your actions.”
Tumbleseed is rated E and will be available on May 2 on the PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch and PC for $14.99.
