MONSTER TRAIN 2 INTERVIEW W/ MARK COOKE

by Veerender Singh Jubbal

Veerender Singh Jubbal: What are some of the biggest design implementations in the sequel in comparison to the original Monster Train?

Mark Cooke, Shiny Shoe CEO: We’ve added a number of new gameplay mechanics. One of the most noticeable will be new card types for existing players. New room cards that can be installed inside your train during a run, and we’ve got equipment cards, which can be attached to your unit. You can merge two pieces of equipment together. Having fun runs that sometimes get broken in fun ways and get really powerful. As long as that doesn’t happen often enough, it can be really rewarding when it does happen. Merging the two perfect types of equipment together is one of the things that’s really fun.

Veerender: Is there a good tutorial system to streamline that for newer players? 

Mark: Yes. We have a full tutorial system in the game that explains all the key core mechanics. We’ve iterated on that with new players, and they’re trying to make sure that the game is even more accessible than the first Monster Train. Things like tutorials, as well as just improved user interface, increased clarity, and better controls. 

Veerender: I always feel like, with how card games are talked about in the industry, they’re always talked about as a lesser genre overall. But I personally always feel like everybody loves card games in some sense. Balatro being a big example or Yu-Gi-Oh! or Magic, and the digital versions for that.  How do you feel about the retention rate for card games like Monster Train?

Mark: Card games resonate with a lot of people ’cause many cultures around the world have card games as a part of–physical ones–their gaming culture. A lot of people understand card games. A lot of people like card games, and digital card games have some advantages in that. Maybe it’s a little bit easier for us to put a user interface that explains ways you can change cards and upgrade them. I think [digital] is a fun way to play card games. The retention amongst players who play Monster Train is actually quite high. Like our median playtime on Monster Train on Steam is over 20 hours, which is wow. Very high for any game, basically. I can’t speak to Balatro, but they’ve done so well, and so many people love it. It’s probably even higher for them. Speaking of Balatro, by the way, we just announced we’re doing a crossover. There is a randomized event that can appear in Monster Train, where Jimbo the Joker shows up. 

Veerender: Oh, s**t. 

Mark:. And [Jimbo the Joker] offers some power-ups for you to decide to take on or not.

Veerender: Could you tell me a bit more about that as well? And also collaborating with the Canadian developers? Could you talk about the collaboration with Balatro? 

Mark: [Balatro] is one of three [collaborations]. Three that are in Monster Train 2. Another one that we’ve announced is Cult of the Lamb, so that is a Devolver property. But in the Balatro collaboration, essentially, you’re offered a variety of Jokers, which are implemented as artifacts within Monster Train. Those are the kind of things that give you a passive benefit in your run. There is the Cavendish Banana, so we’re leaning into the different Jokers, Perkeo is in there, and Jimbo gives you this offering. Some kind of secrets that fans of Balatro will understand. 

Veerender: How do you go about implementing the mechanics from Monster Train 2 to be replicable in regards to Balatro to make sure what sort of thought process and design philosophy [are conceived]?

Mark: So we try to capture the essence of the other IP in a way that makes sense within Monster Train’s kind of game rules. We needed to both adapt to our rules just in general, but also to be balanced, fun, and not just be either very weak or ridiculously overpowered. So there’s definitely iteration required to try to meet/bring those things together in a way that feels like it’s related to the IP, but it’s also something that feels like it makes sense within our world. It’s a process that is predominantly taken out by our game designers, but then we iterate with the community to try to really nail it.

Veerender: How has the reception been for Monster Train 2?

Mark: Mostly good. It’s been good so far. I feel blessed that Monster Train 1 did pretty well, and [there are] a lot of fans of the game. I know a lot of people played it on Game Pass as well. So Monster Train 2, unlike the first game, is launching simultaneously on PC on Steam, it’s on Xbox, PS5, and Switch. I hope that we can reach even more players, and we’ve tried to make every aspect of Monster Train 2 better than Monster Train 1. Better graphics, more gameplay, more things to do, better UI, better tutorials, better controller support, better audio. Trying to one-up every aspect of it with just even more strategic depth, and hopefully we can push that median playtime even higher, right? 

V: Since a lot of live service card games get updated and improved over the years, like Hearthstone or Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel–what compelled the developers to want to do a full sequel rather than like an update that a lot of card games get to see as an example?

M: Monster Train 1 got a number of content updates over its lifetime. Some were free. Most were free, actually. We had one paid DLC. But for Monster Train 2, since we’re a premium title, we don’t really have the business model of the free-to-play games; they can kind of update the same game forever. We kind of had enough ideas that we wanted to put into Monster Train 2. I didn’t say this earlier, but it’s got five new clans. It’s got all new enemies. It’s a new adventure through Heaven rather than Hell this time around in our fictional world. Basically, everything is new in terms of the core content, and we felt we had enough ideas that justified going for a sequel. Hopefully, we can update Monster Train 2 with additional content, both free and maybe something paid, in the future.

V: Do you feel like there might be a deterrent? Would I have to, or would players have to play the first one to go to the second one?

M: Absolutely not. There’s an intro cinematic that bridges the story. We’re proud of the kind of world and the lore behind Monster Train, but it’s predominantly a strategy game where you’re focused on your deck building. That said, we have tried to one-up the story presentation a bit in Monster Train 2.

There is a progression of vignettes where you talk to characters that follow a story. Winning one run is not enough to feel like you’ve seen everything. Not only is there gameplay content to unlock, but there’s also additional story content to see. New players can get up to speed very quickly with the interactive cinematic that’s in. The gameplay and the tutorials are better than Monster Train 1. I don’t think there’s any necessity to have played the first one. 

V: What’s your favorite clan this time around? Of the five new ones? What do you like about it?

M: It’s always hard to pick. I think my favorite clan is the Luna Coven. The Luna Coven is a clan of moths. And their gameplay is based around the phases of the moon. We simplified it down to two phases. We initially had four phases of the moon, but it was too complicated for the rules on the cards. We felt that it was getting too complicated in terms of the rules, but with two phases of the moon, there are ways that the face changes naturally on each turn. However, you can also manipulate the moon phases via different cards and character mechanics. There’s a unit that has one of our new features is Unit Abilities, which are activated abilities that certain units have, and one of them can change the phase of the moon. Playing with that [unit] to try to get the bonuses. Between the new moon phase and the full moon phase. Different cards will have different functionality based on what phase of the moon you’re in. And trying to think through, how can  [I/players] maximize my bonus from the moon phase on every turn? 

V: That sounds like my type of deck, I would play for sure. Is the team larger this time around?

M: A little bit bigger. Almost everybody from the development of Monster Train 1 is still at Shiny Shoe and working on this game. We do have a slightly bigger team to help us improve some of the aspects that we were looking to improve, like some of the character art and character animation. I think it’s really one-upped in Monster Train 2, and if you go back sometimes [to look], it’s hard to tell. But if you go back and actually compare side by side, it’s a huge improvement. There’s a bit of a bigger team, but not by a significant amount. 

V: Was it difficult to make a brand new card game? What were some of your inspirations and examples originally from Monster Train 1? What card games do you like to play specifically? 

M: Making a new IP is both fun but it’s also scary because it’s hard to make something that is going to resonate with people. We were really having fun with the ideas about playing as the “bad guys”. A little bit like the original prototype of Monster Train was not set on a train floor in hell. The art style was different and everything. After we decided the gameplay was where we wanted it to be. We sat down and tried to figure out what this world should be like. We started with gameplay development first, and then we’re trying to look for something that was weird and unique, and somehow landed on a train in hell. I was not personally involved in the decision-making. 

V: In terms of coming up with the concept of it, what do you think of it thematically? Because a lot of hell stuff is seen as negative when, you know, when you see Bible or scripture stuff–I went to a Catholic school–so like you can see God killed more people. What made you folks want to do it in that sense, to be more subversive with the genres in North American cultures? 

M: I think we just saw it as a fun fantasy world. We’re definitely not really connected to any real-world religion in any way. God is not gonna be the final boss. [Devolver’s] usually trying to push boundaries is kind of how I see it. We saw it as an interesting world that we could build off of and be creative in. Then with Monster Train 2, of course, we are building on an established IP now. It’s a little bit different, but also still fun to try to flesh it out further. Expand it beyond what we initially intended or thought of in Monster Train 1.

V: Were there any new modes added that were given a lot of feedback originally, that you folks added this time around? 

M: We made two changes. One is that we had a mode that people liked. In Monster Train 1, it was called Expert Challenges, but it was locked behind a ridiculous amount of skill. Basically, you had to have won the game at the highest to get access, and essentially those were like pre-designed challenges by our design team where we preselected the clans that you played and preselected the mutators. It had a theme to it. We wanted to bring that to more players. That’s now a mainline feature of the game. They’re called Dimensional Challenges now. It’s not unlocked at the outset, but pretty quickly, you get access. We’ve redesigned it, where it’s a branching path of challenges. If you win one, you can unlock the adjacent ones next to it. You can go in different directions with different types of challenges. And people, it seems like our playtesters in pre-release liked that more than we even expected. It was something that we had a lot of fun playing internally in the studio. 

It was a mode where you all played on the same run sets, you had the same clans, same randomization, all that. It was inspired by PUBG and games like that. Where the closing circles limit how much you can go. In our game, it was a timer. You had to finish the battle within a certain amount of time. Otherwise, it would just take control away. You’re under time, pressure, and everybody was playing at the same time. Then whoever had the highest score at the end would win. Or whoever lived the longest. It was fun to play in person. It was one of these things where it’s like in person, when we were all in the office and all sitting next to each other, whooping and hollering. When we played with random people online, it just did not really work nearly as well. It just didn’t really have much utilization by players, so we decided it wasn’t worth making, but we did, of course, keep our Daily Challenge and the Custom Challenges they’re called formerly known as Community Challenges, that can be shared, and they each have their own leaderboard.

In card game design, not just mechanically, but also artistically, always a card people like to have in their deck, like an Ace Monster in Cardfight!! Vanguard. Your Ace. Your Trump card, in a sense. 

V: What is your favorite, if you have one? Just artistically or even mechanically? 

M: I like to pick cards sometimes just based on their art. I have a couple of favorites. Hell Furnace is one of them. That’s a room card. The Pyreborne–one of the new clans, for whatever reason, just the lighting and how it’s been painted, I really am attracted to [the Hell Furnace] card. That’s one of them. There’s a weapon, new equipment called Blood Thirsty Blade. That looks pretty cool. I’ve got a number of personal favorites, but it’s always fun to see what other people’s are because they’re never the same, usually. 

V: What do you hope for Monster Train 2 this time around that’s different from Monster Train 1? For the audience reception, you were talking about the retention rate being a higher one. Is there anything else you’d like…?

M: Well, I mean, of course, I hope it sells a billion copies. 

V: Right. Yeah, of course.

V/M: *laughs*

M: But you know, we want everything to be better in the game from a developer’s point of view, and we want players to agree. That’s an important thing to me. I want our players to agree that they think it is honestly better than Monster Train 1. That’s important to me. I think we have more things to do in this game in comparison to Monster Train 1. I’m confident that we do, and I hope that turns into more players getting more value for their money, and also enjoying playing the game for a longer period of time, just because there are even more kinds of strategic combinations in Monster Train 2 than there were in the first game.  [Players] need more things to explore in that way. We’re shooting for overwhelmingly positive ratings on Steam and, you know, hopefully a better Metacritic than the first game. 

V: *laughs* Right. Right. Right. Before we were talking about cultural differences in the sense that every culture has a card game of some kind, either their own rules, house rules, or variations of that. Are a lot of the designers from around the world for the developers? From different cultures, and how does that influence the mechanics and the design philosophy? 

M: Interesting question. The game designers, I wanna make sure I’m right about this, so I’m thinking about it. I think they’re all Americans.

V: So then my follow-up with that is that a lot of North American card game design is extremely slow. Like, Magic is popular. I don’t know if you played Magic. 

M: I played a lot of Magic in the past. A lot. 

V: Perfect. So you know the Land Issue. Magic is popular because it was one of the first trading card games. Outside of that, if it had released, let’s say a decade ago, it’s really f**king slow. 

M: Mm-hmm. 

V: And you can see that when they try to fix it–Disney, the Disney card game.

M: Lorcana.

V: That still goes with the design philosophy of trying to fix the Land Issue by playing a card or making it ink. But then still doing like 20 damage  [for Lorcana’s Questing/Lore mechanic]. How do you feel about North American design? We’re sticking with very slowness because the reason Magic is popular is that it’s one of the first trading card games. Not because like it’s mechanically done well, like the past few years we’ve seen [new card games] do really well–One Piece. And those are quick-action stuff.

M: I should play ’em. I haven’t played those. 

V: I think they have a digital version coming out for the Digimon one. Then, the Gundam card game was announced recently. What do you think about the way a lot of card games from outside of North America are very fast paced because they have to keep up with the times and you can tell when a North American developer–they play a ton of Magic and they want to fix the Land Issue, which doesn’t really work out ’cause it’s still an issue. How do you feel? Hearthstone, you get a Mana Crystal each round, and that helps to undo a lot of the curve about what you can do as a player. Like playing a three-cost card while you have [four Mana Crystals] or playing two [two-cost cards], that sort of thing. What do you think, since your design team is from North America? But you have, you still have a lot of different backgrounds from different leadership and development as well.

M: Well, that’s really interesting. I haven’t played some of the games that you’ve referenced. Sounds like they come from Japan. I played the Pokémon card game, but I have not played Digimon. And what was the other one? 

V: One Piece, Cardight!! Vanguard. One Piece that [Bandai Namco] is doing. If you’ve seen any of the art for those games, it’s phenomenal art. [Japanese card game developers/designers] really like [using] full art. I mean, you’ve seen Pokémon cards and how people just buy them because like how gorgeous some of them are. 

M: In general, what I can say I think is that digital games have some advantages in terms of play speed. That’s really important to us is to make sure that Monster Train can be played as fast as you can think, basically. We don’t have Land as a concept in our game. We do have Mana. It’s called Ember in our game. But you have a consistent amount more like Slay the Spire. Or like a concentrated  [Mana system]. It’s really important to us to not have you feel like you’re just waiting for something to happen. That is a little bit different than the kind of constraints that real-world [card] games face, but it’s the same, in the same ballpark of things. You don’t want to be stuck feeling like you can’t play ’cause you’re waiting around for something. That’s why we offer all kinds of speed modes. You can speed up the animations if you just want to blast through those as fast as possible–until you get to the next turn, you try to make all the UI feel snappy and responsive. Even like just small things, how fast the train moves when you’re on the map and you’re choosing which way to go. It’s faster in Monster Train 2 than it is in Monster Train 1. ‘Cause we felt like it was pretty quick in Monster Train 1, and nobody complained about it. We’re like, this could be faster. So we spin it up, and now I don’t notice it. I’m totally used to the Monster Train 2. 

V: The graphics on level three..

M: Exactly. 

V: Situation. 

V/M: *laughs*

M: But if you go back to Monster Train 1, it feels less responsive in a wide variety of ways, and we’re trying to really juice that up and make it faster. Make it as easy and smooth to play as possible. 

Where’s most of your player base been from Monster Train 1? If you’ve seen data for it, is it mostly North America, or is it interesting to see other places outside? 

M: Yeah, no, it’s very global. It’s about a third in the US. About a third in China. The rest is distributed all over the world basically. I’m sure Canada’s up there, too. I don’t remember offhand what the percentage is. 

V: When did you folks collaborate–how far in advance with Balatro did you start doing initial collaboration? 

M: Stepping ground stuff for that?

V: Because it was way before tariffs. 

M: Probably a year ago, we pitched a concept for what it could be. Then moved forward in development, so definitely before tariffs. 

V: Are you folks planning to put Monster Train 2 on Switch 2, or is it way too early to think about that in development-wise? 

M: My honest answer is we’d love to do something to support it.

V: I think because with the mouse stuff–I had a chance to try it a few weeks back at an event– I feel like the mouse stuff would be more instantaneous for like a game like that. Because a lot of people played Slay the Spire and other card games on their Switch handheld. Even like picking cards, and that does take a bit of time. The mouse support and Switch 2 does seem like an obvious fit for a game that was made on PC for mouse control.

M: I’m right there with you. If we did a Switch 2 version, we would do that for sure. We support mouse, which I haven’t yet used personally. I would be curious to try it. I wonder if there’s any Switch 2s here at PAX. I don’t know if there are. 

V: Nintendo has been less and less at PAX each year.

M: I will say in Monster Train 2, we’ve tried to improve our controller support in a wide variety of ways, with how it feels and works. There are differences in controlling. You have to page through each card one by one [whereas] with a mouse, you can go right to it.

V: I assume you’ve seen people like play Balatro PC versus on their phone, where it’s a very different experience. Smoother, but also like you’re less thinking about what you want to do. 

M: I’ll say as well that Steam Deck support was important to us. We treated that as a really first-class citizen to make sure that that works really well. Obviously, that requires good controller support. 

V: A lot of card games in general have turban options or characters with turbans. Do you have any cards that have turbans yet or at all, even? Hope you do have them, because card games have always had them. It’s [rarer] to see a franchise not have them than have them as a sort [inclusion]. I can show you a bunch of Yu-Gi-Oh! cards or Cardfight!! Vanguard cards have turbans.

M: We don’t have any turban options, and there’s no–I mean, not “turban options”. I mean, characters with a turban on the art or anything. That’s what I mean. 

V: There’s so much out there [in card games].

M: We don’t right now, but you’re inspiring me to consider it.