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.
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.
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…)
I thought we were out of the woods when I sent off our game demo to Sony, but I stayed put by my computer nevertheless. We were already late, and they had held systems back to make sure we were on the show floor, so I couldn’t just abandon my post. I know things can go wrong, and sure enough the first email back soon after was that the files weren’t working. This was a simple fix, and I sent it off again. The next email came through; the game was working on the Vitas, yay! Then another email came through, this time alerting me that a bug was found, a potentially big one that we had known about for some time but stayed just out of our collective conscious.
The way movement was implemented originally left the game in a state that pressing down on the left analog stick would cause the player to fly in the air, almost infinitely; a nifty feature, sure, but not a desirable outcome.
It was not an easy fix, but we were assured we would have the chance to resubmit and upload the build that Monday, the day before E3. If we were unable to fix it, we would just have to remember to tell people to stay away from the analog (I mean, who uses analog sticks for 2D games, anyway?). (more…)
Perhaps during the deluge of tweets unleashed upon the internet during the last week you missed this one in particular, so here, check out the art assets folder we have created.
After an incredible time showing our game off at the Sony Indie arcade the first night of GDC, and getting some cool press, we were given the opportunity to exhibit at Sony’s booth for E3, something that has been a dream of ours all of our lives, even with the problematic mess that it seems to represent as we grow older. The scariest thing though was that almost didn’t happen.
Heading into GDC we were having a number of problems getting Treachery to run on the Vita. In fact Manny stayed behind the first day and worked his ass off to get things running minutes before we had to strap the Vita it in for the Indie Arcade.
Even with our solutions, the build had some hitching problems with loading menus and two of the three player characters weren’t playable, so we felt the game required a more hands off demo. Although not ideal, it went well enough for the most part, as can be seen in our previous post.
After GDC I was planning to have Manny get started on fixing our hardware issues, but when we got back to New York I opted to push for the fighting engine and enemy types to be expanded. I redesigned the HUD and Manny threw in a few new characters and worked toward getting a bunch of new moves and fight types in the game. Everything ran fine in the simulator, and we did all of our playtesting with that.
A couple of months passed by and I decided it was now time to start building our overworld map. The fights were very close to being in a great place, but E3 was now mere weeks away, so why not just add in a whole new untested and unpredictable element to the game?
Suffice it to say it went about as well as it should have, it sucked. (more…)
On the whole of it Treachery in Beatdown City is an episodic game following the kidnapping of the US president by a group calling themselves the NinjaDragon Terrorists and the subsequent fight to rescue him by three fighters based out of East Fulton City, Lisa Santiago, Bruce Maxwell and Brad “The Bull Killer” Steele. TiBC will be releasing on PlayStation Mobile in fall 2013 with other platforms to come afterwards.
Even though it is a “mobile” title at the moment the game is focusing on a very hardcore non-traditional level of gameplay that has many layers. Today we are focusing on the core fighting aspect that I like to refer to as Double Dragon mashed up with Fallout III.
This quick name dropping description came into existence after describing the game to a bunch of people and thus is the more focus tested marketing term used to sum up a complex game design. It makes it easy to set the tone and usually brings to mind some high level ideas behind what the design is aiming for. Unfortunately it’s a flawed description invoking the names of other games and assumes a very specific level of gaming literacy, so I am here to explain what that buzzword filled one sentence description actually means. (more…)
