Five questions with Nicki Hansen, co-founder of Rapidfire Games and Game Director of Backpack Brawl

Eric Halliday
3 days ago
7 min read

As I mentioned recently in a separate article, Backpack Brawl is one of the main games I’m constantly stunned isn’t a household name. More so than any other big mobile drop, this is the one I constantly come back to. Luckily, I have the pleasure of being able to talk with one of the people who make the game possible.

Before we start, how about you say hi and tell people who you are and what it is you do.

My name is Nicki Hansen. I'm the Chief Design Officer and co-founder of Rapidfire Games. For Backpack Brawl I am the Game Director. In the early days of the game, I did game design, coding, and a bit of everything really. Nowadays, I'm trying to do more of a helicopter approach, as we have other people go into the trenches, as it were. I'm also the most visible member of our team on our Discord server, and, I guess, the face of the game. I started playing games on Arcade Machines, Bubble-Bobble and Black Tiger were my jam, and Commodore 64 - some time ago - and have worked professionally with games since 2010. Recently I've been playing more indie games like 9 Kings and Void War, and some of the big boys like Diablo 4 and PoE2 as well.

QUESTION ONE

So, Backpack Brawl has been my go to since it dropped. While there are other games like this, the clean art and the ever growing variety of characters has breathed new life into this game more times than I count. And unlike most games adding new characters, yours are, admittedly, a bit unhinged. An old man obsessed with insects, a haunted sea captain, a gadgeteer, what sort of ideas are you looking for before going ahead with a new character?

Well, I'm happy you like the hero concepts. We aim to do a mix of more Classic Fantasy heroes and more crazy unexpected angles. I'm a big proponent of the 5% joke; i.e. a joke that only 5% of the audience gets, but they really really love. I think Futurama instilled that in me. So I would like to make hero designs more niche designs which don't appeal to everyone, but have a smaller audience that really like them. To me, those are the characters where you can learn something new, and it feels like there's a bit more meat on the bone. We will continue to do both simpler and more complex thematic heroes in the future. In the past, I've committed to wanting to make 50+ heroes for the game, and that still stands, unless I run out of ideas or people leave the game.

QUESTION TWO

My kids and I have all spent a lot of time playing this game and one of the big things we always say is that we really wish there was a multiplayer mode where you could just play through the rounds starting at stage one against an actual live opponent. Have you ever thought about adding multiplayer to the mix like that?

Multiplayer in various forms have been brought up many times by our community as well. Some people want friends lists and guilds, so you can play either vs each other or coop. While I do expect us to lean more into the social aspect, we have not solved the hard part of doing multiplayer with brawl, which is that it's a time consuming game that has many steps. Would players want to play 15 games against each other, with shopping in each step? (EDITOR'S NOTE: Yes this is exactly what I want) Will mobile players stick around for that? What happens when a player drops then? The most compelling ideas I've seen so far is doing it like Hearthstone Battlegrounds, where you group X players up against each other, and each play against each other until a winner emerges. I hesitate to promise anything, because none of this is in our roadmap, but I would love to do this. Some significant technical hurdles to overcome before it could work though, like maintaining a synchronous connection between all X players and handling when a player loses connection and/or reconnects.

QUESTION THREE

One of the things I’ve noticed, being a fan of this title, is that there a couple of games like this out there and each of them seem to loyally defend their inventory battler sim. What do YOU think sets yours apart from the other game and makes it its own thing.

We were originally inspired by Backpack Battles on steam, which is a lovely game too, but we didn't care for the art style and really wanted to play it on our phones, as our team was getting to the age where sitting down at the PC for hours at a time started to be problematic. Two of our founders have young children, so they need to be able to interrupt playing immediately to handle them. We really tried our best to aim the game at that demographic - 20-40 year olds who've started to not have "uninterrupted time" any more. When we looked at the competition in the market, it was basically non-existent. Even now everyone tries to emulate Voodoo's "Bag Fight" which is sorta the Duplo to our Lego, and is babied down so much for "casual users" that it loses its edge. This comes back to the 5% joke - I would rather make a sharp niche game, than make it for everyone and lose all the edges. We looked at games like Clash Royale which require short spurts of absolute focus for ~3 minutes, and if you look away, you lose, and thought "we don't want any of that!". When we looked at what was available on the mobile market, we saw that there were basically no entries of this "Inventory Tetris" which we internally called it, so the natural conclusion was "let's just make it then!" We started in November 2023, but did some turns on the way to try the mechanic with other flavoring and games, and fully committed to Backpack Brawl in January 2024 and released in March 2024. The first edition of the game was a bit broken, but we got it done REALLY fast. Since then we tried to make weekly updates where we constantly added new things to the game, and improved the mechanics. We now have a bit of a slower schedule of updates, as everything connects to everything so the work grows every time we want to add any little thing. I feel like we've gone against the grain on mobile, where we've leaned into mechanically heavier and more complex gameplay, more akin to a PC game, and try to stay light on the classic "mobile monetization schemes" too. When we started talking to publishers, the game already was starting to gain momentum and we often got the question "Why do you think it works? Because it really shouldn't." I think this has played to our advantage, since the huge players in mobile haven't wanted to get in on this, and by now we've established ourselves more in the market, and our amount of game content can be intimidating to have to match. We are still committed to doing updates often, and once seasons land with version 1.0 we hope to have a more reliable cadence of new updates every 1-2 months. We hope the game scratches an itch that PC players have not been able to get at on mobile before, with lots of replayability and thinking.

QUESTION FOUR

Now, in my previous article I mentioned how long I’ve wanted a chef character that utilized Backpack Brawl’s plethora of food items. And, according to the Discord, this has actually been a thing slated to come out in a future update. Where did the inspiration for the character come from and, follow up, can I pretend it was from me?

The Chef has been planned for the 1.0 update since Xmas. I made the call of delaying 1.0 because there were a bunch of features that I felt we needed before we could call ourselves 1.0 proper, and so the Chef moved with that update. We even put together a filler hero, Dorf the Dwarf Miner (EDITOR'S NOTE: I have rapidly become a huge Dorf fan to the point where I'm offended he's called a filler), so it wouldn't feel like too long before a new hero came out. Remember, in 2024 we made a new hero every month, and in 2025 so far (august) we have 2. So we've really been slacking off in the Hero Department. I was quite inspired by Delicious in Dungeon (Dungeon Meshi) and our first draft of the hero was a Dwarf Chef, but we've since changed it to something else, since Dorf came into the picture. She's gonna be fun and bring a set of whole new mechanics to the game.

QUESTION FIVE

With all the crazy ideas that you’ve had, from mutated mice, golems of all sorts, battle crabs, I’m sure your cutting room floor is a nightmare. What are some of the craziest things you’ve tried to get to work in the game that you ended up having to scrap?

Well, we don't have that much on the cutting room floor since most of it makes it into the game! We have talked about lots of hero types from Paladins to Necromancers, from Walking Mushrooms to 3 Goblins in a Trenchcoat. Some of these might still make it in, so like don't tell anyone. ;) (EDITOR'S NOTE: Oops) We tend to go from the Hero idea as the seed of item concepts, so figure out "what is this hero about" build items from that, and see how far we can push that.

A fish person with a beard and a pirate hat.

One thing that was cut, is that Morrow was almost a Fishman named Gilmore. I ended up pushing us in the current direction, since we had established the whole concept as Lovecraftian "Dredge" inspired, and the Murloc looking Fishdude was way more of a happy wacky direction than we had gone with for items, music etc. We might reuse Gilmore for future PvE encounters or a different hero, but it will be a bit before we dip into the depths again.

CLOSING STATEMENTS

And, finally, if there's anything you want to mention, closing statement wise.

We're working hard to get 1.0 to come out soon. This will bring new mechanics to the game, and hopefully be the best it's ever been. We're working hard on improving and continuing Backpack Brawl and I feel like with every update it gets better. I'm super thankful that our community has stuck with us, and I encourage people to come to our Discord and hang out. We're quite engaged there, and we get lots of ideas from the community and encourage feedback. Thanks for having me, let's talk again some time. :)