Terrible Lizards dev discusses twisting familiar dinosaur designs, out Oct 29

When I founded WDR Studios with my colleagues, the goal was simple: make the kind of games that we’d want to play. I wanted to apply the lessons I’d learned from years of managing a successful YouTube channel to the medium of video games, drawing inspiration from some of my favourite titles to create a fresh horror experience that puts gameplay first. 

That’s how Terrible Lizards came to be.

Perfecting paleo platforming

Terrible Lizards is a 3D first-person platformer, but we also use the term “parkour” to describe the game’s emphasis on movement through physical spaces. You could also call it an action/horror dinosaur game, in that you’re running for your life from dinosaurs. That balance between fear and fun is central to the game’s design philosophy.

As with any platformer, we knew we had to place an emphasis on enjoyable, engaging movement. Terrible Lizards is a fun game to be inside of, with controls and mechanics that are satisfying to use: runs, jumps, sliding, wall running, bounces, as well as grabbing ledges and leaping from ledge to ledge. There’s also a bunch of different tools that you can use to manipulate each level and environment. Overall, the game has a very tight feel to its control scheme, promoting intuitive movement with precise timing.

When we decided to utilize a first-person perspective, we made sure to create movement that felt distinct from other parkour games, instead building platforming mechanics based on the movement styles of popular first-person action shooters. There’s a balance between floatiness and a strong sense of control, and finding that perfect balance became our “secret sauce” for achieving a satisfying gameplay feel.

The result is a rhythmic game flow, where the player feels in control of everything. In our game, you’re always going the maximum speed whenever you can move and jump: it’s fixed, which makes it predictable and rhythmic at the same time. It’s easy to get into a good flow state, especially with things like aerial control. Instead of having to run and jump, your momentum carries forward, so you can just jump and stay moving.

It’s subtle but effective, and we’ve found it allows for both a low and high skill ceilings. Players can use aerial control to correct an over jump, or to move side to side in an instinctual way. You know when you play a racing game and can’t help but physically lean your body into turns? That feeling plays out here, too.

Jurassic parkour

The game takes place in the early 1990s, where you play as a college kid road tripping out west on Route 66. When your car breaks down, you venture into a roadside attraction called Dalton’s Dinos looking for help… but you find something terrible instead. 

We’re very inspired by the current indie mascot horror niche, which takes familiar iconography and twists it into something new, as all horror does. We started with a few broad concepts—American nostalgia, interstate road tripping—which led us to the roadside attraction as a premise. And when you look into the tradition of those attractions, there’s often a lot of silly dinosaur statues outside, advertising makeshift prehistoric tours or fossils of questionable legitimacy. These attractions became especially popular during the 90s, alongside the broader cultural fascination with dinosaurs reflected in popular media of the era.

As a child, dinosaurs were my first real interest and hobby, which I think is a familiar experience for a lot of people. The word dinosaur actually means “terrible lizard”, from the Greek deinos and saurus. It’s a term that’s been used before in the paleo community, but not for anything horror, so we knew it was a perfect fit for our game. We felt that considering how excited and feverish people are for dinosaur media and dinosaur things, it’s still a pretty underrepresented niche. They capture our imagination in awe-inspiring and frightening ways, both of which you can see on full display in Terrible Lizards.

Exit Through the Dalton’s Dinos gift shop… if you can

I’ve dabbled in enough mediums (such as film, music, and animation) to know that game development is one of the hardest art forms anyone could pursue. In some ways, I was a jaded gamer before this undertaking, but creating Terrible Lizards has made me fall in love with the medium all over again, as well the craftsmanship behind it.

Our team is made up of first-time game developers, most of us being creators coming from the online space. In that sense, Terrible Lizards is by the community, for the community, and we hope players everywhere enjoy the game when it launches on October 29.