When your entire development team consists of two programmers, adding additional elements to your game can be a challenge. Germany based Rückert Broductions, decided to solve this issue by avoiding it completely. The result is Redie, a top-down shooter that focuses exclusively on gameplay.
On the Kickstarter page, the developers readily admit that they have completely forsaken any attempt at storytelling in favor of making a challenging game. “We know how enthralling a well thought-out story can be and how frustrating it is to experience a game with a half-hearted narrative. Our decision was to focus our limited resources to refine other aspects of the game instead.” Initially I was oddly impressed by this admission. It’s not often developers acknowledge their limitations and don’t attempt to bluff their way around them. Sadly, story wasn’t the only aspect that got skipped over.
To be fair, Redie isn’t really the sort of game that requires much backstory or character development. Instead the game gets right into the action. A well armed protagonist must eliminate all enemies in each level. You’ll have various weapons at your disposal which can all one-hit kill an enemy. The downside being that it only requires a single bullet to take you out as well.
The developers describe the art style as “functional” which I felt was rather generous. Despite the abundant blood effects and destructible environments it still looks more like a school coding project than a full game. Redie is looking to raise $5,578 with its Kickstarter campaign. This isn’t a huge amount, but it could still prove to be a tough sell. The game relies entirely on its mechanics, but doesn’t do anything new with them.
The devs are also hoping to get Redie on Steam Greenlight to facilitate distribution of the upcoming closed beta. Potential backers should note that their access to the beta is dependent on Redie getting on Steam. While I appreciate the developers sticking to what they know I think they’d be better off adding a few more members to the team. You might be able to bypass one part of development and still make a successful game, but not without over-delivering in another.
I wonder if the devs have considered making mobile games? Then they wouldn’t need story or graphics to sell the project.
I actually don’t think it looks that bad. Provided the controls are good I’m willing to look past quite a bit.
The controls looked solid, I just have a hard time getting excited about a game that doesn’t give me something new or interesting.
Hi Greg,
we’ve just released an Open Beta for Redie, if you want to check it out yourself.
Download: https://rueckertbroductions.itch.io/redie
Hey, I am Fabian, one of the devs. Thank you for the article.
We don’t make mobile games, because we are PC gamers ourselves. By developing for PC, we are not that limited by hardware and because of our functional art style, still have a lot of room for cool physics and can achieve very high frame rates.
We also think our game is best played with mouse and keyboard and don’t want to make the game easier or change it drastically, to fit it to the controls of mobile devices.