How a Joke About a Street Turned into Drunk-Fu: Wasted Masters

This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: Xbox Wire.

After years of ups & downs, Rusto has accepted that we should do what we do best: Brawl & rage in an intoxicated fury… virtually, at least. Rusto itself is a core team of three supported by (occasional) hired helpers. We fund our development from the sale of our previous games and good old bootstrapping from work for hire.

Drunk-Fu’s origins are as a side project during Rusto’s earlier years when we were joking that the local bar street in our hometown of Kajaani is restless enough to deserve its own game. The street was called Luotikuja which roughly translates to “Bullet alley,” so the first prototypes were named Kuja as the original test level was modeled after Luotikuja.

We still have the level called Kuja to commemorate these origins; even after a lot of iteration, the similarities might be hard to spot.

After the release of our previous Xbox One title Spareware, the thought started to evolve that we should expand on the idea of Drunk-Fu: Wasted Masters and bring it to Xbox One. In truth it’s a lot safer to brawl in a drunken fury virtually than in real life.

To keep the company afloat, we did some subcontracting work on the side and let the concept of Drunk-Fu fester in the back of our minds. How could we make the concept so that the characters (or Goons as we call them now) would deliver the perception of intoxication but still be controllable whilst staying physics based?

The development process has been full of iterating, testing, and tuning to find the perfect drunken stumble and combat systems to fit the mindscape of a drunken fighter. We tried some even more aerial Kung-Fu iterations, but playtesting with an intoxicated audience showed that the learning curve for that was a bit too steep for the relaxed fighting game we envisioned.

So we made the gameplay less aerial and more impactful by adding more mass to the Goons and introducing special attacks. By adding a control system where the Goons could unleash a set of prepared attacks instead of just flailing about physics-based allowed for more tactics & enhanced mobility, without losing the splendor of drunken stumbling. What we ended up is a game that perfectly envisions how someone who is plastered would imagine their drunken rampage would go.

Drunk-Fu: Wasted Masters is available now on Xbox One.