THEE upNup on Geo Mythica

Guin Entertainment LLC is no stranger to THEE upNup. We reviewed their previous game “The Adventures of Chris” about a year ago and we fell in love with the tight controls, retro feel, expansive world, and its lovable but unlikely hero Chris (who bares a striking resemblance to our own Gorky Romano). The studio’s upcoming game was hinted at briefly in our last interview with Chris and when we saw Geo Mythica was showing at MAGfest 2024 we knew we had to make sure to clear a spot in our schedule to stop on by their booth.

Geo Mythica is an 8-bit JRPG in the style of Chrono Trigger or Secret of Mana. You control the main character Gio, an ordinarary highschool football player who ends up getting thrown into an adventure to save the world. You’ll be joined by a variety of vastly unique characters that all play differently. The battle system features a 3 player party interface that’s a mix of turn based, auto-combat, and real time action. Combat is fast and strategic and rewards good timing but also gives you the ability to slow things down. This allows you to use items or issue commands to your computer controlled allies. As for the world, it’s similar to Adventures of Chris in the sense that we will be traveling all across 1990’s Earth with levels inspired by real world locations. The game world feels large in scope and the overworld is lovingly made and reminiscent of the overworld of Zelda 2 or Star Tropics for the NES.

Check out the trailer Below!

We got to talk with Chris Guin at the MAGfest showroom. Here’s what he had to say about his new game: GEO Mythica

upNup:
Alright everybody, here we are day two of, well our day two, actually day three of MagFest. And with us we have a previous interviewee, Chris Guin developer of Adventures of Chris. If you've been a follower of THEE upNup, you are well aware of our love for the indie game and we're so happy we got to touch base with the creator, When we saw you were here as we were driving down we knew we had to talk, we had to meet in face -to -face. So right now we're watching gameplay of Geo Mythica and it looks incredible and I'm not just saying that because you're here it actually looks really really good I love love the aesthetic of it the even the box art is incredible. So I guess the first question I want to ask well first of all let's just let you talk about it what is Geo Mythica?

Chris:
Geo Mythica is a JRPG and it's it's designed to look like an NES game but it's supposed to play, what I've been telling people, is it plays like a combination of Secret of Mana and Chrono Trigger. So it's got a little bit actiony but also a little bit tactical a little bit you run around and you see the monsters ahead of time that kind of thing like like the externals of it should feel like Chrono Trigger, but the gameplay is you're controlling a party in real time. So we're trying to do a little bit of a blend.

upNup:
it looks it and it looks like its executed so well. Watching people play it's very seamless and it makes sense which I think sometimes in indie games, when they try to do something like that, marry two different kind of play styles, it can sometimes get clunky, but I'm not seeing that at all.

Chris:
Oh, thanks. I appreciate it. And it has taken a lot of iteration to get the blend to kind of feel right to people because, you try something that's not quite the same as every other game. You think, oh, it'll be great, but, like, it's a big risk, and it's really easy to go wrong. Because people come in and and say “Oh, I want it to behave exactly like X. And this exactly like Y? And it's like, well, it's a little bit of both. You've got to train them a little bit on it. You've got to set expectations properly. But I feel like it's gotten smoother as we work on it.

upNup:
So with the Adventures of Chris, you're primarily following one character. How different was it to make a party of characters?

Chris:
I'd say gameplay wise, it's significantly more complicated. Character wise, probably not that bad, you know, because the Adventure of Chris has more than just Chris in it. You're still writing characters. It's just from a play control perspective. And platformers have their own challenges. Absolutely. The physics and everything. but with an RPG, you're just tweaking stuff all the time. Getting things balanced, getting things to feel right. And the kind of people who really love RPGs are going to try really hard to break your game.

upNup:
And it's a balance of trying to let them break it, but still be fun. Like if you can get overpowered, that's a good thing sometimes.

Chris:
I love it when people figure out how to break the game. I mean, I know there's a lot of devs that feel the same way, but it's like, that's so cool 'cause it means you're into it, it means you're a kid. And like, I don't know if you ever played Final Fantasy VIII, but like, that's a game that's fun to break.

upNup:
Yes. - We were actually talking with somebody about that last night about the mentality or the idea , some people feel that it's a disservice to the game to try and break it. like I personally, even though I'm not like a speedrunner or anything like that I think you're like unlocking the utmost potential of the game by breaking it. Like you're saying how far can we take this thing which shows so much investment right? No one's picking up the controller and immediately breaking it. You're playing it for like 80 or 90 hours and then you're like oh my god I found this one exploit that lets me do this thing five seconds faster like it Like it totally is like engaging.

Chris:
I've had a couple of people speed run adventures with Chris and it's very fast. They're not big speed runners or anything, obviously, but I'm just watching them and seeing like how they would occasionally do things that I didn't know were possible. And I'm like, oh, that's so cool!

upNup:
Right? 'Cause you know they're into it, right? - So what made you go from a platform to an RPG? Making a platformer like Adventures of Chris to making this party -based RPG because, I mean, outside of being like a nostalgia bomb of a game there's nothing on the surface, at least it seems, in common between the two.

Chris:
Well I would say so I've always loved RPGs, that's that's been my genre and I wanted to make the game when I was a kid. But like at first I was like, "Oh yeah, let's just dip my toes in the game dev. I'll make a platformer." But it all adds some RPG elements to it, right? So there's a town, you buy stuff, you know, Chris gets stronger, that's a big part of the gameplay loop, right? So like, he's not gaining levels exactly, but it's a little bit of RPG. But then like it took years to make Adventures of Chris, like it might as well have been an RPG for the amount of time and effort and stuff that went into it. Geo Mithica was actually, it was gonna be Adventures of Gris RPG when I started out. So it's actually set in the real world. It's a geography -based game. There are some overlapping characters a little bit. I took it out. eventually because I'm having some story problems so I too it out, it was much easier if it's just its own story and there's a few references, but if you look for it. You can find an Easter egg of Chris. There's a little bit of adventure to Chris still in there But for the most part but but still it's a geography real -world -based game you're exploring real stuff and and villages, bullet hippos, you know.

upNup:
Adventures of Chris, we traveled all over the world. We doing that in this one and what's some of the locations that we may be getting to see? Don't spoil anything though.

Chris:
Yeah, no, I'll give you some. You get to see one of my favorites which is you go to Macau and you go to kind of a sketchy casino. So I got some gambling games that I just finished working on in there. I hope people don't miss it. and I want someone to break those, you know, like save scum a little bit and make a lot of money.

upNup:
That's something I miss so much too about those like classic RPGs, it's like the mini games within them that exist and totally optional. You don't have to, but if you want to have a little extra fun, I love that. And that's another thing that's kind of the same between Adventures of Chris.

Chris:
I love optionality, I love like giving you the ability to like, I don't want to do that. And you know, of course. I'll do it in different order or I did enjoy that. I'll get like 999 cookies and then come back.

upNup:
So we did see Geo Mythica wishlist announced on Steam. Is that right?

Chris:
Well, no, that was a re -post. I announced it earlier. Just a repost for MAGfest. But if you're asking when would I hope to release it, I don't have an exact date but I feel like we're within a place where I can see the end, we're a couple dungeons from having it content complete, but then there's all you have to do to polish it, and get it ready. So I'm hoping sometime this year. Yeah. And I would love to start working on the next thing, you know.

upNup:
Good for you.

Chris:
Yeah. Yeah. It's a lot of fun, you know, working on games.

upNup:
I noted before Adventures of Chris was almost solely your baby. There was a just a couple of people involved, right?

Chris:
Same people actually this time around. It's really just me and Kyle as kind of the main guys.

upNup:
Two man team.

Chris:
Yeah. My buddy over there who works on the RPG Quartet he's a composer where does jazz music. I hired him to do a few tracks for the New Orleans level and the Casino level. Yeah, so, I get some people help out here and there, but for the most part it's a two -man show. I would love to work on a big team at some point. I think it'd be fun to like collaborate, but so far, you know, it's just been pretty small scale.

upNup:
Yeah and this is still fantastic. It really is like... It's impressive. I was trying to say... A two person team making any kind of video game is astonishing. We're a two person team and we barely make a podcast. So the fact that a two person team made what I'm looking at right now is wild. Yeah,

Chris:
I'm impressed with anybody doing anything now. If you've got day jobs, you've got kids, you've got into my age range. It's like, you take what you can get, but part of the reason for scaling the graphics down to NES level, even though I love the nostalgia, and that I love the style of it, is because once you get it kind of set up, you can pump stuff out a lot faster. - Yeah. - And so it's like, you know, my buddy's making quartet, making my familiar, making these other RPGs, like they look so good. But it's just, it takes longer.

upNup:
Well one thing I really like about the way Geo -Mythica looks, is that sometimes when people make a retro game today, you get this, like, the outlines of the characters are kind of thicker and chunkier, like the pixel art, you can see the squares around them and stuff, because the images are a lot more crisp now than they were back then. But what I love about the art in Geo -Mythica, is that it feels like, like it's the art from back then. It doesn't have that, like, thicker, chunkier, pixelated outline. This, to me, is so nostalgic in the sense of it looks like how I remember RPGs looking when I was 7 years old. Like, it looks exactly like what I remember. So I think that's just, to toot your horn a little bit, that's, I think, one of the most appealing things just on the surface level. I'm thinking if my stepdad walked in on me playing this game he’d be like I never saw this game when did this come out like it looks like a game that released in like the mid 90s even with the overworld we're looking at right now that's incredible. Very Legend of Zelda 2 look to it.

Chris:
Yeah yeah with the way the characters look there's a lot of star tropics if y 'all are familiar with that one.

upNup:
I love how you play with the scale, kind of like Earthbound did every once in a while.

Chris:
Yeah, like the different scale, that's a Star Tropics thing too, that's a kind of move from one level of map to another. Zelda II as well although the towns there are pretty much straight up platforming. There's a lot of ways to do it and I kind of picked from a bunch of different old NES games.

upNup:
Well is there anything else you want to plug about the game anything you want to say about it before we go?

Chris:
It's on Steam as far as being able to wishlisted, that's probably the best place to go check it out and it's been a real great time talking to you.

upNup:
Absolutely, it was great catching up with you in person, and keep an eye out everyone for Geo Mythica! What platforms is it releasing on?

Chris:
Definitely, STEAM. I'm talking to people about putting it out on consoles. I’m aiming to put it on Switch and PlayStation, but we'll get there.

upNup:
Awesome, awesome. Good to hear. Well, hopefully we can touch base in the future when the game releases again, and we can chat then.

Chris:
Yeah, that'd be amazing.

Gorky Romano N Chris Guin - MAGfest 2024

Thank you to Chris and the best of luck to the entire crew at Guin Entertainment . Check out their page and follow them on all their social medias and KEEP UP with Geo Mythica!

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