Unlike yesterday's post, this one is actually genuine news, lol.

If you've been on any video platform recently, you have probably heard of Buckshot Roulette, an experimental point and click horror game by Estonian developer Mike Klubnika. This game attempts to answer the question of what would happen if you tried to play Russian Roulette with a 12-gauge shotgun instead of a revolver. It requires a mixture of smart thinking and risk-taking, and gets more strategic as the game goes on.

The game was released in late 2023 and became wildly popular in early 2024, with let’s plays and clips posted everywhere on YouTube and TikTok. There’s been theories, gameplay tutorials, and deep analyses of how the game works and what’s in those files. But I realized as I watched through all of this that nowhere did I see anyone ask Mike himself how he got to this point.

And he actually responded. This is really surreal.

I'll be posting more of my thoughts on the info I got in video format on my YouTube, but in the meantime, you all get to hear it first!

Inspirations/Process

So, I see you make games, music, and animations. What inspired you to get started with each of these media?

The process of making games, music and animations is really cool, including the end result. That's really one of the main things that inspired me to make them. For games it's all the programming, technical art and designs, for music it's the sick synthesizers with all the cool knobs, displays, and buttons. As for animation, well, 3D animation is usually a pain so I guess that's the only part where the process isn't that cool for me lol.

How did you get the idea for Buckshot Roulette? What came first - the gameplay concept of Russian Roulette with a shotgun, or the thematic idea, or something else?

For Buckshot the gameplay was the most important aspect since the beginning. I didn't really start thinking about story beats or the 'plot' until the last few weeks of development. The main aesthetic was of course part of the original vision, the entire 'playing russian roulette in the back room of some industrial warehouse', but apart from that there wasn't (and still isn't) much in regards to story.

I'm pretty sure it was just a random question that popped up in my head like "oh what if you do russian roulette with a shotgun", and then I thought about it for a few days and couldn't really come up with a solid design for it. For me it was more important to have a solid game of shotgun roulette rather than a narrative heavy game that tries to tell a story around it while putting less focus on gameplay.

What did the earliest version of the game look like? How did it change from then to now? What stuff got scrapped?

Earliest version of the game was thrown together in Tabletop Simulator and had chess pawns and other miscellaneous things for the items. Red and blue dice represented shells and they were shuffled in a brown bag in place of the shotgun. Originally the game was supposed to have big hacksaws that you would use to saw off the barrel, but later they got swapped for foldable hand saws so that they could fit better into the grids. One of the more interesting features that got scrapped though was stackable hand saws. Essentially the idea was that the player could saw off the barrel twice in a row and cause 4 damage. You would first saw off the barrel, and then saw off the rest of the shotgun until you're holding basically the receiver. It's pretty funny but very unbalanced.

How did the process of creating the Dealer’s AI go? Did you have to try to balance him?

Dealer's AI is pretty simple when it comes to the logic. The more difficult part was keeping track of all the items, animations and states and making his hands do the right things in the right order. Pretty much the presentation of the dealer's logic was the more difficult aspect of development.

In terms of balancing the dealer there's not much to it. I did add a cap of 2 cigarette packs per player because oftentimes there were more cigarettes than actual live rounds in an entire game.

About this absolute banger OST: Where did you find the inspiration for the different musical tracks?

For techno it's a mix of hotline miami, hör berlin sets and underground techno artists. the rest of the tracks that are more ambient, those are more or less inspired by the work of IDM artists like aphex twin and boards of canada.

Success

What was your initial reaction to seeing your game all over the internet? How have you felt about it since?

It makes me very happy to see all the people enjoying the game and the music, especially since buckshot (and all my other things lol) are passion projects. So I couldn't be more grateful. That was my initial reaction and it honestly hasn't really changed. In a way it's surprising, since I was expecting to make stuff for like a decade longer before I saw success similar to what buckshot has gained now.

Quite a bit of fan content has popped up around Buckshot Roulette - fan games, mods, Roblox recreations, lots of fan art, and lots of remixes. What are your thoughts on the content that’s come out of it so far?

I like checking out all the fan art, remixes and other developers' own spins on the game mechanics. I think the fan content is cool and I'm happy that the game has inspired people to go out and make stuff.

Considering the mixed consequences of things going viral, where do you see the growing Buckshot Roulette fandom heading in the future and do you feel good or bad about it? What are your hopes and fears?

Not sure I understand this one

What do you want to do with this game in the future, and can we get a sneak peek at any other projects that may be up your sleeve?

Currently not in a position where I can share stuff about future updates for buckshot, but there will be news about it very soonTM.

Misc/Silly Questions

Is that your face on the defibrillator guy’s model? And what happened with the scrapped iteration of the Dealer face model? (Context)

No, that's not my face :). I think the dealer face you're referring to was one of the models the dealer swaps to after it gets shot. If I remember correctly it just didn't really look that good in-game.

If you had given the Dealer a body, what would he have looked like to you? If he had a proper voice, how would he sound? Were there any scraped concepts related to him?

Never really thought about what the body might look like but I've seen a bunch of fan art that gives it a trench coat or something similar. Those look dope.

What inspired your brilliant shitpost about a fridge full of beans?

I honestly don't remember since that was quite a while ago, but I'm pretty sure it was just a domino effect from the initial goal of making the bean can model, and then making the fridge and filling it to the brim and being like "oh yea this looks kinda funny" and then making a full shitpost out of it.

These are all joke questions I got from my friends: Does the Dealer have dental insurance, does Digita beer taste good, will you add a sex update, and how much money would have to be at stake for you to play Buckshot Roulette in real life?

Dealer unfortunately doesn't have dental insurance and honestly I think Digita probably has the worst taste ever, since it sits inside the table for who knows how long before it's pulled and then it's probably warm, too. Kinda gross :/. I wouldn't play buckshot roulette in real life even if it was for like a billion dollars mainly because then I would have to drink the damn thing.

So yeah! I sent more questions as well, still waiting for answers on those or if I'll get them answered at all. If I do, this post will be updated and I'll add them to the video as well!

This was honestly really surreal, to actually be able to talk to a now-popular indie horror dev whose work I've come to look up to more and more the more I look into it. Please go check out Buckshot Roulette and his other games if you haven't already, they're all worth a look!

Have a good day, everyone!

-Cass (Thetageist)