Rabbit And Steel Creator Explains His Game’s Relationship With Final Fantasy 14

Highlights

Rabbit and Steel was crafted to make MMO raiding elements accessible to casual players through prioritizing dodging and mobility.
Mino avoided complex mechanics in Rabbit and Steel to ensure it was easy to pick up and play for a wider audience.
Rabbit and Steel may receive a big update during the next Final Fantasy 14 ‘lull’.

Rabbit and Steel was born from Mino Dev’s love for Final Fantasy 14 and massively multiplayer online game (MMO) raiding. This connection was especially evident during the game’s development, as Mino admits he “self-crunched” to finish the game before Final Fantasy 14’s Dawntrail expansion was released, so he could fully enjoy the new content.

In a recent interview with Game Rant, Mino discussed the relationship between Rabbit and Steel and Final Fantasy 14, and how the latter influenced the former. The objective of Rabbit and Steel’s design was always to translate the oft-complex MMO raiding experience into something a casual player could pick up and enjoy.

Raiding, Without The Fluff

To achieve this, Mino focused on building a game that prioritised dodging and mobility, rather than any mechanics with a steep learning curve. “I tried to avoid that stuff because I don’t think it’s good design,” Mino explains. “I do think it’s cool within the context of Final Fantasy 14, but because [Rabbit and Steel] is a tiny indie game that is supposed to be pick-up-and-play, you can’t have any complicated stuff like that. You can’t do things that need to be puzzled out, it needs to be very obvious why you died.”

These considerations made Rabbit and Steel reminiscent of the Bullet Hell genre. However, Mino had to turn down the difficulty of these elements when he observed a top Final Fantasy 14 raider struggle with Rabbit and Steel’s normal difficulty. As a bullet hell veteran, Mino hadn’t realised how difficult he had made his game.

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As Mino ponders when he’s going to release a big update for Rabbit and Steel, he lands at a natural conclusion. “The next time Final Fantasy 14 falls into a little bit of a lull,” Mino starts. “Maybe between patches or something like that. I can try to have something big, something like new bosses, new classes, that kind of thing. It might be like, you know, ‘Let’s agree to meet back in the Moonlit Kingdom next we’re all bored, okay?’”

Rabbit and Steel is currently available on Steam, and holds an ‘Overwhelmingly Positive’ average review score after over 2,000 reviews.