The Binding of Isaac: Repentance Dev Team Interview Pt.1

It's been no secret that the original The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth dev team at Nicalis has been working closely with Edmund for over eight years. Since that time the team has developed two DLCs and now for Repentance we're working with three new talented members who help little Isaac continue to grow.

You probably already have seen names like Jeremy, John, Simon, Adrian and Matt from the credits--and we'll interview them at a later time--but this week we want to introduce you to three of our newest members of the Isaac dev team. On the internet you might know them as _Kilburn (lead designer), LeatherIceCreme (designer) and NotYourSagittarius (artist). We've gathered together to get a better understand of their background and what they're doing to make the last DLC to your favorite video game.

Before we start, the trio have a ton of interest things to share so we're going to break this interview into multiple parts. We'll be sharing some pre-production dev screen shots and art so this is your #nospoilers warning.

You made proceed!

OK, now it's your turn, as we talked about we want to give little glimpse into the people who are making their favorite game. Can you each tell us a little bit about yourselves? _Kilburn (Vinh): I was born in the south of France from Vietnamese parents, my dad was a software engineer so we always had a PC at home for as long as I can remember, I was playing all kinds of DOS games as a kid. It didn't take long for me to realize I wanted to make games well actually, I was more interested in modifying them, adding stuff on top of them one of the games I played the most as a kid was Worms, I'd always dream about all the weird items and weapons I would add to the game if I could mess with its code in some way, it's probably the one game that really made me want to become a game dev.

I only got into programming much later though, when I entered high school, at the time I had very limited access to my PC since you know... strict Asian parents so my main source of entertainment was a graphing calculator. I spent most of my free time trying to figure out how to get games onto it, and eventually I started making my own, nothing amazing obviously but it was something to pass the time that's where most of my knowledge of Lua and C++ comes from, actually then when

When I entered college I got into this game called Garry's Mod, which wasn't so much of a game rather than an engine made to be modded, I made all kinds of small projects on it, including an attempt at a perfect replica of Team Fortress 2 which I eventually dropped after a year or two, I think still, I learned a lot from it, how a lot of game mechanics are implemented and how game engines work in general, and since I was studying IT in college at the time I got to apply a lot of what I'd learned as well

So, yeah, long story short, got my masters degree in IT, had a brief programming gig at a petrol company, then Rebirth came out, stuff happened and now here we are.

LeatherIceCreme (Nikola): My name is Nikola, I live in Serbia (not Siberia), I'm known on the internet as LeatherIceCream. My Isaac obsession started with me making animations of the Duke