PAX East 2025: Interview With Colin McKisick About Royalty Free For All

Ed: Hello, everybody. This is Boss Rush Network. I’m Eddie V., and joining me are Courty and Nellie. We are here at AAAA, and we played their game, Royalty: Free For All. We got to play it for PAX Media.

It is one of the most awesome, amazing, funniest, and beautifully animated melee games that feels inspired by the Smash Bros. series. We’re here with the lead creator. Would you introduce yourself?

Colin: Hi. It’s so nice to meet you. My name is Colin McKisick of Quadruple A Games or ‘Aaaaahhhh’ Games. 

Ed: Yes. So we got to experience Royalty: Free For All, but before we get into it, how did you get into gaming?

Colin: Oh, my gosh. I played Donkey Kong Country at my cousin’s house when I was two years old, and I just loved it so much.

I couldn’t stop. We were always looking forward to visiting my grandparents’ house. It was my cousin’s Super Nintendo.  Every time we went, it was just the best time of my little life. I got a Game Boy Advance for Christmas a couple of years later.

I have just been all over Pokémon, Donkey Kong, and Smash Bros ever since. 

Ed: Where did AAAA Games begin? 

Colin: Where? Yeah. Right here in Boston, actually. A couple of years ago, I came up with it, and it was just a joke at the time. I said to some friends, “Somebody should make a Smash-style game with public domain characters as a crossover theme.” I believe Nickelodeon Brawl was out at the time and there was a game called Freight Makers, which is a great indie brawler. I felt that the public domain has a wealth of content.

Just the most iconic characters of all time. And it was a joke then, but I quickly realized somebody should do it. I might as well. That’s what it became. That’s where it began.

Ed: The first thing we noticed was the artwork. Gorgeous artwork. It has that Cartoon Network aesthetic. How did you guys decide to pick this style of animation or graphics?

Colin: It’s something that I don’t see in games. It’s also something that we all grew up with. Everybody loves cartoons. Some great games have executed the vintage style, obviously, Cuphead. People often ask if I was inspired by it.

To be quite honest, I haven’t played it, but I know how gorgeous it is, and I know that it proves animated games can work. So I just wanted to make this really human-made personal craft in this field of games, where so many things, even Nickelodeon cartoon games, are made only with 3D models. That didn’t make sense to me, and I wanted something to strike that nostalgic feeling. 

Courty: Was it all hand-drawn?

Colin: We use Toon Boom Harmony, and it’s all done by hand. We animated a ton of different frames. I mean, there are hundreds and hundreds per character, but it’s all hand-drawn. Especially where you’re able to hand-craft each character with their personality.

We’ve used the same emotions for each character just to kind of push it through, but we dig deep and did every single layer with every single personality of each character.

Courty:  That’s really good! 

Colin: Thank you. Thank you. Yeah.

Our lead animator, Ivan, is to be credited for the sheer depth of emotion and expressive range in the game. I create the characters. I create their designs, and I create their personalities. He’s so talented. I just find that there’s very little back and forth, from my concept to his work.

He just nails it really often from the very first go. Since we have to draw every single character anyway, it’s not really any sort of resource-saving technique to give these characters overlapping facial expressions. Everyone has to be custom-drawn, so they might as well have custom looks. 

Courty: How many characters would be in the game, and how many stages would be in the game?

Colin: Right now, we’ve got eight characters and 20 stages. We are hoping that we will be able to run a successful Kickstarter in August to fund three more characters chosen by the fans in the stretch goals. 

Courty: Okay. Got to ask, because we just talked about it not being a Smash clone. After all, it’s just a melee kind of party game. Did the team think of having it be comedic and light, but also fast and fluid for people who want to get into games like this?

Colin: Yeah. Absolutely. There are two things on that point. One is that I have a background in comedy. I studied it lightly in college.

I did a lot of stand-up comedy when I was in my younger twenties. Now I’m in my late twenties, I really just love to make people laugh. I love to laugh. Obviously, cartoons do that a lot.

The other thing is, I noticed a lot of my friends liked Smash Bros in theory, but then when we actually pick it up and play, there’s just too much going on. There are too many moves to keep track of, too many characters to learn, and when you don’t know that game already, when you haven’t grown up playing every installation like I have, it’s just too much, and everyone would quit after one or two games. I wanted something that everyone can play, whether you’re a kid who just likes cartoon characters and doesn’t even know any of their name,s or a grandparent who knows all of their names and never played a video game.

I wanted to have a product that bridges that gap. Families can play it together, friends at parties who’ve never touched a controller can play it together, and all just have a good laugh.

Ed: I was thinking about the greenhouse level. I think we talked about it on Wednesday during the media hour. There’s a big green guy. He’s just dancing around and everything. I want a plush of him! (Laughs) 

Colin: Thank you. Yeah. I’d love that.

Nellie: About the backgrounds, how did you all decide on designing them? Were you just drawing different concepts on what the background level should be?

Colin: Yeah. So there are a couple of different things. One is in the research of all this public domain material; some settings are famous, and they may not have a character necessarily associated with them. Maybe there’s a character, related to a setting, who we can’t necessarily make a fighter out of, but we can still represent that material through a stage.

That’s one. In those cases, we sort of retrofit, stage layout to the artwork that we can create of the environment. There are other examples where we notice a need for a particular stage layout. Let’s say a final destination type, a battlefield type. 

We retrofit some other stage concepts or locations from the media that we can apply. A really good example of this is Pimento University. We got a wish early on for a character from the Dover brothers, or sorry, the Dover boys at Pimento University. We noticed that the front of their college in that Warner Bros. cartoon, which has entered the public domain, but it is formally a Looney Tunes. It matched perfectly with the classic small battlefield style stage. 

So we said, “Great!” It entered production, and it was done in just a couple weeks versus a fighter that takes a lot more time.

Ed: Well, because you had to create the moves for the fighters. 

Colin: That’s right.

Nellie: How did you guys even think about that? Were you just animating different styles? Were you watching martial art movies inspired by the moves from them?

Colin: Yeah. That’s a great question that I can’t fully answer.

I can answer my side of it, but our animator, Ivan, is a seasoned professional in the TV industry. So he may be watching martial arts movies, for example. He may be studying anatomy, for example, to make sure that the dog and the fish all feel real. From my perspective, I kind of approach characters in two ways. One is from a fighting game archetype perspective. 

We need a zoner. We need a rush down. We need an agile character. We need a technical character. We just introduced Sakura, whose moves don’t work like Smash Bros, where different inputs on the analog stick will change which attack you use. 

They do change for her depending on which direction the attack faces. That’s a character where, if you have played Smash Bros for a long time, you will feel right at home. 

Dorothy is a great example here, where she can summon a twister. She can drop a house on you. We’ve combined her with Toto. She’s one of the characters that we’ve put a spin on, so she can lick and bark and bite and speak. Her wave dash animation, which, by the way, we’re canonizing wave dashes with a simple button input. Just press jump and shield at the same time, and you’ve done it.

There’s none of this frame-perfect stuff, even though we’ve preserved a lot of advanced text from those platform fighters that we’re inspired by. It’s easier than ever for anybody, of any age, to do. No more than two buttons at a time. 

Nellie: I have to ask about the sound mix because the sound of the music and just the vocals have this cartoony expression, but it sounds crystal clear. 

Colin: Thank you.

Ed: Sometimes people don’t even think about music itself. For this, I’m like, “Oh, they already know what this level sounds like.” This just sounds so good. I was bopping along and loving it. 

Colin: Thank you. Yeah. We started putting public domain songs on every single stage because one of the beauties of it is that you can use these sound recordings that have entered the public domain, you know, when you’re an indie game early in development.

We took a build to PAX West and met a sound designer there who said, “Hey, I’m looking for work. I think I’ve got what you need.” He turned out great. We also found a wonderful composer named Josh who lives near me. I think the algorithm sort of pointed out, ‘hey, you like Super Nintendo music, and you live near this guy.’

So we’re going to send his post about his album to you. I found this Super Nintendo demo album.  I started listening to it. I loved it. I asked him about the project, and he said, “yes, I’m in.”

So he’s been remixing public domain songs that I give him into really short battle pieces, where just about everything combines several songs from the public domain into a Smash Bros style, really upbeat, action-packed, treasure chest of classic melodies. You’ll notice the Tall Tall Mattress, which is our princess and the pea stage, has a pop punk version of Rock-a-Bye Baby. 

Ed/Courty/Nellie: Oh my goodness. (Laughs)

Colin: So we’re doing stuff like that.

Courty: That’s awesome. Have you thought outside the box of Royalty: Free-For-All? Have you thought about a comic universe? Have you created stories with these characters? Is there something in the future you would love to do? 

Colin: Yeah. I’d love to do that. Needless to say, I want all these guys to talk to each other. I want them to go on an adventure.

I want to make, sort of a Subspace emissary style story mode where everybody has a role to play and everybody sort of gets to interact with each other, in this big, sprawling, maybe a Metroidvania style platform game. We don’t have the resources to do that now. We gotta keep it focused, but that’s one of my dream goals. It would be cool to have them, you know, like, we had Sweeney Todd and the Loch Ness Monster go, oh, I’ve cut you once. Here, I’m gonna cut you twice.

Then she goes, “ain’t no way” like, a bubble thing or something like where they have cute little interactions with each other. When you go to the story mode, you figure out why their story is that way. That would be cool. Yeah. Totally.

I’m all about mashing up different universes together and making a lot of silly puns about them. So I’ve got a lot of, like, little scribbles of scripts going on where people will say things that contribute to a developing story, but, like, the things that they say are also homages. It’s just yeah. That’s a really big goal of mine. Yeah.

Ed: Have you thought about using these characters for a beat’em up? A four-player beat’em up in the future?

Colin: I think we would love to expand this with more sequels and stuff. I think that would be a really easy translation. I haven’t personally thought about it, but that seems like an apt partnership for sure.

Nellie: Can you see this project turning into a magazine or a manga, or a comic book?

Colin: That could be really cool. Yeah. Yeah. We don’t have plans for that in development, but it definitely is a good fit. Yes.

Ed: Alright. Well, I have two more questions for you.

Colin: Sure.

Ed: Everybody’s got a different answer for this question, but I want to ask you, what one game or even franchise do you think has earned its stripes? 

Colin: Could you elaborate on the question, please?

Ed: So a game or a franchise that, no matter the sales or anything, it’s been such an influence or made a big impact. It changed the way we view games as a whole. It did something different. 

When you look at games, or even franchises, regardless of whether they’ve been out for years or something, they have been on the ground pushing the gaming industry further and bringing in new people to recognize this is what gaming to me really means. 

Colin: Yeah. That’s a great question. I’m on the list of people who are stumped by it.

The thing that comes to mind, I don’t know if it’s really, you know, changed the entire industry, but I am a big fan of the Donkey Kong Country games. I think every single one of them is a masterpiece. It has earned its stripes. I think Tropical Freeze, in particular, I think that’s the best platformer ever made.

I don’t think it gets its due, on that, but I think its work shows clearly. Yes. That is, and if you feel that way that way, I think people will agree with you, like the Donkey Kong series and even Donkey Kong Tropical Freeze has earned the stripes because even though this is Retro making the game, you know, we know Retro for Metroid Prime. They could take a Nintendo IP and make a classic out of it, especially on the Wii U, right?

Ed: Come on now!! (with laughter and glee)

Colin: It took Rare’s masterpieces and designed them for the modern generation. I mean, the level design is perfect. Oh, I see. Not just for playing through it sort of casually, but when they went back and added funky mode, I mean, that changed the mechanics, and the levels are even better for it.

I love speed running and trying to beat the level in under thirty seconds, and you can just do it without touching the ground. It’s just phenomenal. 

Ed: That is really good. Great choice. My final question is, what is your go-to snack while working on the game? With the team, or anything? 

Colin: I love Cheez-Its. In college, I used to eat an entire family-sized box at a time. Can’t do that anymore, but they’re still my favorite. When you get the small bags, there’s nothing wrong with that. There’s nothing wrong with it except that there’s not enough of it in there. 

Ed: Very true! Well, thank you so much for your time. Everybody, please check out Royalty: Free for All. Can they wishlist on Steam?

Colin: Yes. You can wishlist it on Steam now! We’re hoping to run a Kickstarter in the future. Yes.

Nellie: Where can they follow AAAA Games? 

Colin: You can follow us at Royalty Free For All on all socials, and join us on Discord. Thank you so much, everybody.

Ed: This has been Eddie, Nellie, and Courty from Boss Rush Network. Thank you so much, Colin, for your time.

Featured Image: AAAA

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