Ra Ra Boom — a side-scrolling beat-’em-up about a group of sci-fi cheerleaders fighting a rogue AI — is out now. But the game’s six-year development was a boss battle in itself, according to Gylee Games founder and CEO Chris Bergman.
“[Ra Ra Boom] was our first game, so a lot of it was trial and error and learning, but it was six years to get the game out the door,” Bergman told Polygon in a video interview. “It was quite the journey. COVID actually was wild, man. Because COVID happened, that was a huge challenge. We’re such a small team, and everybody had all these big solutions for how to do development during COVID, and we’re just like, ‘I don’t know, man, let’s just talk on Slack a lot.’”
Based in Bergman’s hometown of Cincinnati, the studio faced numerous challenges working through the COVID-19 pandemic. Making a game during a global crisis is hard, no doubt, but making one at all is already difficult enough. Roughly 18 months into development, Bergman and his colleagues were forced to make the difficult decision to toss out all of the game’s concept art and start over from scratch, completely reworking the game’s art style.
“We were about a year-and-a-half in, I think, and Streets of Rage 4 was announced, or was about to come out, and we looked at the art on Streets of Rage 4, which is like, really, truly the best-in-class as far as, you know, the [beat-’em-up] genre is right now, and had to throw away every bit of artwork we had done,” Bergman said.
The dev team pulled inspiration from a number of sources, including franchises like Streets of Rage, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, X-Men, other arcade beat-’em-up’s, and a mobile game called Robot Unicorn Attack. But Ra Ra Boom’s reworked art style is surprisingly colorful for a game set in a post-apocalyptic universe where AI has taken over Earth and humanity has escaped to a space station. Bergman said that part of the inspiration for the game’s look came from a rather unexpected source: ’90s school supplies.
“Lisa Frank [was] another big influence,” Bergman said. “’90s Trapper Keepers and that sort of vibe. We wanted something that was colorful and beautiful and fun, for sure. Also, I just love colorful games.”
Six years is a long time, and by the time Ra Ra Boom finally launched, the world it was released into had changed drastically in numerous ways. Regarding the game’s main antagonist, a rogue AI named Zoi, Bergman said he never expected the game’s story (which he dreamed up long before the birth of ChatGPT and other AI programs) to become so relevant.
“The idea, from the narrative standpoint, is [that] 20 years ago, humanity creates this AI, and I wrote this in, like, 2018,” Bergman revealed. “So I had no idea AI was gonna be this crazy, scary thing that it is today. It’s wild to realize how prescient that was.”
As for the game’s brightly colored take on a post-apocalyptic Earth, Bergman explained that it was the result of Zoi’s actions. According to the game’s lore, humanity created the AI in hopes of reversing climate change. Naturally, Zoi’s first move was to purge the planet’s most destructive parasites: humans. The Ra Ra Boom girls train for battle in a VR simulation that depicts Earth as a barren, desaturated wasteland, but upon touching down on solid ground for the first time since humanity evacuated Earth, it’s quickly revealed that the cheer squad’s assumptions about the state of the planet are completely off-base.
“They go to Earth, and you realize that this AI has treated Earth like a bonsai tree,” Bergman explained. “It has done what it said it was going to do, which was solve climate change. [We wanted to explore the idea of], ‘What happens if the AI actually does what it says it’s going to do, and it sees itself as this preserver of Earth? What would that look like? That was really fun, because then we were able to come up with really cool environmental concepts that sort of explore [the idea of] Earth, but it’s been run by robots now for 20 years that have been cultivating it and, you know, trying new ways to grow new plants and different things. What does that look like? From a pre-production standpoint, that was so fun to conceptualize and figure out.”
But as interesting as Zoi’s motivations are, the rogue AI isn’t the star of the show here. Ra Ra Boom‘s four protagonists — Aris, Ren, Saida, and Vee — are technically cheerleaders, but players won’t see so much as a pom-pom in the game, and Aris is the only character wearing anything remotely similar to a cheerleading uniform. Bergman says this is because in the Ra Ra Boom universe, cheerleaders aren’t trained to use their acrobatic skills to cheer for an interstellar football team. Instead, they’re trained as the first line of defense should the rogue AI attempt to attack the space station, which — spoiler alert — it does.
“We had earlier designs where they were much more cheerleader-y,” Bergman revealed, adding that uniforms made the characters feel far too similar. “It was hard to have distinctive [character] silhouettes and distinctive characters between the four [protagonists]. That was a real balance that we had to strike across the entire game in regards to like, ‘Well, we want them to feel similar enough that you don’t feel like you’re missing out if you’re not able to play a particular character,’ but we want them to feel different enough that it doesn’t feel like each character is and looks the same.”
Bergman says that despite their lack of attendance at football and basketball games, the Ra Ra Boom squad does have an official cheer captain.
“Aris is definitely the leader,” he said. “She’s the team captain, and she has the cheerleader outfit for sure. And then [we thought] ‘Now let’s see what other characters can look like and how we can make them look different.’ But Aris is a reluctant captain. I mean, she is constantly looking for emotional support from her friends through that process of like, ‘Hey, please validate that I’m making the right choices here and that you want me as your leader.’ You know, I think that’s one-hundred percent just me projecting my own insecurities.”
The Gylee Games founder says he also inserted a bit of himself into the game’s environments, too. When asked which of the game’s levels was his favorite, he answered immediately with zero hesitation: the amusement park.
“So that [level] is based specifically around an amusement park in Cincinnati, that we all grew up going to,” Bergman explained. “There’s a ton of homages in there that are about that specific amusement park. The boss is fully based on the largest, longest wooden roller coaster in the world, I think, still.”
(Bergman is likely referencing The Beast, a 7,361-foot-long wooden rollercoaster located at King’s Island, about half an hour outside Cincinnati. The Beast first opened to the public in 1979, and still holds the record for the world’s longest wooden rollercoaster.)
“It was great, because we had to go [do] research on that,” Bergman said. “But it was like our one chance, because we had a couple levels that we had to cut, just because [of] budget and time [constraints] and not having enough money to, like, just try and get the game out the door. One of the levels was this abandoned mall that’s also in Cincinnati that I really loved. So that got cut, [but] we did have the amusement park level.”
“Any opportunity we have to show love for our city makes me so happy,” he said.
Another thing that makes Bergman happy? The chance to work with a talented crew of artists, voice actors, and developers, including Hicham Habchi, who also created the character concept art for Marvel Rivals.
“He is brilliant, I literally drunk Insta[gram] DM’d him to see if he’d be willing to do any freelance work,” Bergman shared, laughing. “I just feel like we were punching above our weight the entire time and working with insanely talented people that had no business giving us attention. Just the joy of creating something together and collaborating is one-hundred percent what made every day great.”
As for the future of the game, Bergman hasn’t written off the idea of DLC, but says that after working through a pandemic, a creative crisis, and a tech landscape shift that completely changed the context of Ra Ra Boom‘s story, he and the rest of the Gylee Games crew feel like they just experienced a six-year-long cheerleading performance.
“We’re not announcing anything yet,” he said. “I think we all just need to take a nap first.”
