Hey everyone, it’s Friday, the start of the final Week for Treachery in Beatdown City on Kickstarter. We’re pushing hard to meet $50K, because if we don’t, we get nothing. We have a lot of great art and videos over on our kickstarter page, so head on over!

If you can, please back us! And get a friend!

Thanks.

Hello everyone. After a long year of promoting, reworking, fine tuning and demoing, we are now kickstarting!

We are just two days in, and have a lot of work to do. On that page you can find a load of new media from art, music, and other in game assets.

We are still working on the Playstation Mobile Episode 1 release, which will be the 1st level of the game, and priced accordingly. We actually have a great set of features that will make that release alone be infinitely replayable. That should be done and out within the next couple of months.

Now we are also targeting PC/Mac for a full length campaign with additions that will be made possible by this kickstarter. We will hopefully be able to release on consoles/native handheld platforms as well.

So please, if you can, back us and tell your friends/family/enemies/congressman/corrupt billionaire mayor/cyborg ninjas. I can guarantee they will all love Treachery in Beatdown City.

If you need press assets/screens/etc. head over to beatdowncity.com/press

This is part 1 of a series on the art in Treachery in Beatdown City. In these pieces I will focus on various aspects of why we went with pixel art, to direct influences and the like.

A great question to think about on this landscape of artistic styles for supposedly “Independent games” made for every manner of device is “Why low resolution pixel art?” The truth is that in a form so understood to be the bastion of creativity there does seem to be a lack of originality when it comes to the tools used to create art for games, and what styles are often decided on for your new game.

For Treachery in Beatdown City, art that mimicked NES styled beat ‘em ups like Double Dragon was not the first idea for what would go on to be the visual style.

In fact Double Dragon, despite being a huge game during my childhood, was not even a part of the original decision process. Many years ago I wanted to actually make a sequel to a game I held dear, Bad Dudes. I began to work on test walk cycles, as well as testing out a style that I wanted to use for the new character art. One friend pointed out how problematic working within another’s IP would be, and he suggested I should just make up my own idea, so I listened to him.

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Featured above is the work in progress water color painting of the key art. You can click on it for a slightly higher res version. This piece is a couple of feet tall, and is being worked on meticulously.

Over the next couple of weeks we will be building up to a whole reveal, as well as more news! Stay tuned!

Also later this week be on the look out for a post detailing the artistic influences on Treachery in Beatdown City!

It is with a heavy heart that we unfortunately have to delay the release of Treachery in Beatdown City until 2014.

The current plan is to do our best to get the first episode release on Playstation Mobile (Vita + other certified devices) by February. This is including submission, and certification.

We will be making a few announcements closer to the middle of the month, including future platforms.

Some other updates – Currently a lot of the first episode is complete graphically as well as mechanically, but when optimizing we went back and re-did the way we were handling animation to make everything feel much better.

The first episode, which is just the beginning of the story, includes over 20 unique enemies, all with completely different art, and each one is individually drawn. In this post there’s some animation of a new enemy, Brick. He’s a member of a biker gang that you will encounter on the streets of East Fulton.

With 20 different enemies, all with different attacks and multiple “class” types, mixing it up in 1 on 1, 1 on 2 and 1 on 3, there are hundreds of possible fight setups, all with their own flow and tactics necessary to escape alive.

More to come in the new year!

This week has been very serendipitous with three distinct interviews hitting the web with me, the creative lead of Treachery in Beatdown City, Shawn Alexander Allen.

Above you can see the excellent video preview put together at Kotaku’s headquarters in NY. Stephen Totilo first checked out the game at E3, and decided he wanted to dig deeper into one context of the struggle just to get to the point where this game was being made.

That article is here – From Poverty to PlayStation…One Game Dev’s Climb Toward Success

For a day we were featured as the top story on Giantbomb. Patrick Klepek played TiBC at PAX, and decided to interview me about race and games, a struggle that TiBC tackles head on with the personification of characters and how they interact with each other, as well as the impetus to having a three person cast of minorities.

The Giantbomb post is here – Write What You Know, Learn What You Don’t

And last, but absolutely not least (but probably least content game wise) is the video interview on Destructoid Sup Holmes where Shawn & Jonathan Holmes have a long talk again about race, fighting games and many other aspects of the games industry as well as the driving force behind the games that Nuchallenger wishes to make.

We want to thank everyone who wrote about the game this week, and also everyone who shared these posts on various social media sites. There is a long road ahead for Treachery in Beatdown City, and it won’t be an easy one!

Hello out there! If you are new to beatdowncity.com, please check out this post to get a brief run down of the game mechanics!

Today we are going to explain a bit in depth of how Treachery in Beatdown City will be releasing.

As you may know, Treachery in Beatdown City is about the US President being kidnapped by Ninja Dragon Terrorists and a group of heroes who must save him. This story begins on the streets of East Fulton, one of the biggest cities in the world.

The story part of the game will enable players to fight with enemies in the streets Treachery in Beatdown City as well as leaving the city.
As of this month, November 2013, we have been working on this project in the Playstation Mobile SDK, for a little over a year. That is if you don’t count the down time caused by Hurricane Sandy in October of last year, which is an easy thing to forget.

Treachery in Beatdown City: Episode 1 will be the first release for the game, coming out as soon as we can possibly finish for Playstation Mobile. That goal is by the end of the year, aiming to hit before the end of “fall” which is towards the end of December.

On top of that we are planning to continue the series of episodes for Playstation Mobile, as well as expand the game onto other platforms in 2014. We’ll have a lot of news for that closer to the Playstation Mobile release, so stay tuned!

Hello, and welcome to beatdowncity.com! If you are new here, please look around! If you follow us on twitter and are wondering where all the f’n updates are, this post is for you.

The image shared above is a just finished piece of work, some background art based in Lower East Fulton. This is just a small piece of the second half of a 4 panel map, parts of which can be seen in the demo we run at various shows. Each panel (320X180, blown up to 640X360) takes roughly almost 24 hours worth of work between researching, arranging and adding all of the little details. It can get pretty nuts.

The team behind Treachery in Beatdown City comprises of two people, Shawn and Manny. (more…)

During the weekend of July 12-14th NuChallenger was in attendance at the world’s largest fighting game tournament, EVO 2013. I was there as an exhibitor, showing off Treachery in Beatdown City which is still pretty mind-blowing.

Deciding to attend EVO as a part of the Indie Showcase was not a decision that came lightly, though. On the one hand EVO was something I’ve wanted to attend for some time and being invited by friends to come through and exhibit was a huge honor. At the same time, though, it was a month after E3, an expensive trip to pay for after scrimping to get by in LA and largely an unknown quantity; I really did not know what to expect from the event.

Even after the Indie Showcase tables were setup and the floor began flooding with people I was still pretty much in a crazy red eye flight the day before daze. However it was not long into the first official day of EVO that I began to get a buzz on everything that was going on. People were coming by, watching the trailer, checking out the art and perhaps even stopping to play our new demo that we had worked hard to put together in the last month. (more…)

The second day of E3 arrived all too quickly; tired from the night before but excited for the day at hand we stumbled downstairs for the complimentary waffles that our low budget hotel had served the morning before… that now had a long line waiting. Already running late we left the hotel and went to find some breakfast and coffee at an off the beaten path shop to avoid any of the craziness that comes with anything remotely adjacent to South Figueroa Street during E3.

It was still fairly early and we weren’t scheduled to demo until 2 pm at the earliest, but I knew that it would sneak up on us quickly. We got to the convention center, headed to the Sony Booth to drop off our stuff and hung out during the quiet moments before the show opened. I’m not even sure what we did for those hours leading up until 2, but I remember having a great enchilada for lunch courtesy of Sony’s awesome break room.

After finishing up our food we made our way to the Mobile Pavilion, an interesting lounge sitting just outside the convention hall (but still indoors). I really didn’t know what to expect for that area, I had only heard that there was a lot of developer engagement, and that many people weren’t even E3 attendees. (more…)