We NEED this to happen! Mike Wells joined us previously to tell us all about Fallen City Brawl and the Kickstarter has just days left! Here’s a few more reasons why you should invest in this exciting project. Adrian and Anthony took care of proceedings as usual…
Glad to have you aboard for a follow up Q&A. So how have you been doing since we last communicated? Hope all is well during these hectic times.
Great to catch up with you again! Things are really good, thank you. We’re all safe and well which is the main thing, pushing forward with Fallen City Brawl’s development and right now the Kickstarter campaign is the big focus!
For those that are new to your work, would you be able to give a brief description of what your game is about?
Fallen City Brawl is a new 2D pixel-art beat ’em up with a strong late 80’s/ early 90’s retro arcade influences. A brutal battle for control of the criminal underworld of Fallen City shapes the fate of four strangers trained in hand-to-hand combat and forced to fight together to survive the brawl through Fallen City!
The game is inspired by my love of classic beat ’em ups like Streets of Rage, Double Dragon and Final Fight, but I’ve worked hard to give the game a feel of its own with a deep combat mechanic featuring combos, parries, counters and Riot (Super) moves. A wolf fights alongside you too. he can loyally defend you or be unleashed to wreck carnage on the enemy!
Since we last spoke Mike, how much progress has been made on the development to the game and have you added any new additional features and concepts?
Lots of progress, getting the two-player mode in place has been an important part of recent development, it’s such an important part of the game to get right and is a lot of fun at the moment! I’m working on joint two-player attacks – building on how in the original Streets of Rage you could throw your partner into the enemy and it would trigger a special attack.
Two more characters are in place now as well – Natasha: who fights with a wrench and Taekwon-do skills, and ‘Iron’ Jackson – he’s huge, carries a massive chain around his shoulders and uses it to smash his enemies! He was originally going to only be a boss character, but he seemed perfect as a big guy in the line up, so I moved him across. I intend for him to make an appearance as a boss still in a ‘prelude’ section for one of the characters!
When do you hope to release a playable demo of the game?
There’s a reward tier within the Kickstarter campaign which includes access to the Beta demo, this is due late 2020.
Could you tell us more about the excellent soundtrack, who was involved and how many tunes are available in the game?
Thanks! Daniel Lindholm (credits include Street Fighter V, Yakuza: Dead Souls, Resident Evil 6) is creating the soundtrack, a real privilege to have Daniel involved and he’s incredibly talented and creating something really special for the game! You can hear Daniel’s work on the game in the Fallen City Brawl Trailer, plus a track for one of the game’s stages here too.
There will be 8 stages, each will have its own theme, plus boss themes, intro themes and shorter tunes like for continue screen, game over etc. The digital soundtrack is one of the backer rewards too!
We also see you have new beautiful artwork being added added to Fallen City Brawl, please tell us more…
The artwork for the game’s title screen and character art through the Kickstarter page has been created by the hugely talented artist Zehb. I’m so pleased with the work Zehb has done, great seeing my pixel art characters brought to life in this way! The 16-bit instruction book and digital artbook will include these pieces too. Take a look at Zehb’s other work too – lots of pieces relating to beat ’em ups and fighting games, plus his own original characters as well.
When can the gaming public be able to play Fallen City Brawl? And would you consider making physical copies of the game?
Aiming to release June ’21, so around 10 months time on Steam (PC+Mac), PS4, Switch and Xbox One. I’d love to create a physical copy of the game, I’d need to find a physical publisher to achieve this on console, but it is definitely something I’d like to do in future. Right now though, there is a Kickstarter exclusive physical instruction book available in the ‘Ultimate Digital Plus Edition’. I love the full colour instruction manuals that used to come with 16-bit games (Japanese Mega Drive ones were especially great) so I wanted to create something similar for Fallen City Brawl, looking forward to creating these!
How can new followers of your game be able to reach out to follow you and support what you offer to the community?
II really hope your readers like the look of Fallen City Brawl! If so, I’d very much appreciate your reader’s backing on the Kickstarter.
I’m committed to providing regular updates to backers of the game and working closely with those backers to help make this an excellent beat ’em up!
There’s a newsletter for the game too and I also share updates regularly on Twitter too.
What are your personal views on Streets of Rage 4 and did that game surprise you in any ways?
Streets of Rage 4 is a really important game, both for the series and the genre as a whole. There were so many risks in creating a new entry in the series but I think the developers have done a fantastic job and created a really high quality entry to the series. You can guess I prefer a pixel-art look, but think SOR4 looks really good with its own style. I hope the developers get to make another sequel – if so it think it would be good to build in some more of the developments to gameplay made in Streets of Rage 3 – running and rolling for all characters for example to really push the speed of the game.
The brawler genre seems to be coming back with a real bang. Why do you feel this genre was forgotten for so many years, but is now becoming popular again?
I think the genre became a little lost when one-on-one fighters became really dominant, and fell out of favour with the larger developers. However I think the growing indie game scene and access to powerful development tools, including ones really focused on 2D (like Game Maker Studio 2 which I use to develop Fallen City Brawl) has given the opportunity for more beat ’em ups to do well. There’s a really passionate support base for great beat ’em ups and it’s brilliant to see the genre being continually pushed forward.
What are your plans after Fallen City Brawl?
All focus on Fallen City Brawl at the moment! The Kickstarter campaign right now, and then continuing the game’s development until release. In the future, if the game does well it would be great to look at a sequel, but I don’t want to think too far ahead – all focus right now on making Fallen City Brawl incredible!
Adrian & Anthony
