We thought we’d be able to take our time over it.
That we’d be able to learn, take our time, not have a massive following. But like, we thought we’d kind of be on a long burner. “It was kind of terrifying, really!” says Brown. But for a team learning as they went along, it must have come with a fair amount of pressure too. Such immediate, enormous attention is of course a dream scenario for game developers. And within an hour or two of uploading it, it was played on a Giant Bomb livestream to I think 40,000 people, and then like a week or so later Dan NerdCubed said ‘greenlight this game!’ And yeah it got greenlit, and we’ve been playing catch up ever since.” So we uploaded the prototype to Indie DB. We thought that we probably wouldn’t get that much exposure again. “People liked it, and played it all night. And me and James decided that we’d take the game down there, see what people thought of the prototype. “We were at a game developer meetup that was part of my university, run by a friend. The character design was largely dictated by the demands of the game’s physics It’s this simplicity of design that likely helped it attract the attention of some of the biggest YouTubers and Twitch streamers, propelling the game to mainstream attention. The simplistic design is easily recognisable, giving Gang Beasts an definitive brand. The game’s character design may have been born out of the realities of game development: But it certainly helped with the game’s enormous success. No neck, because… we just couldn’t be bothered to do a neck.” They have solid white eyes because we needed a way of figuring out which way they were facing. We figured ‘oh, we’ll get time to do proper art later.’ But people liked it, so we kept it. They are solid colours, because it was actually a placeholder art.
They don’t have feet because the feet were getting caught on things. “They have short legs, because there’s an invisible ball between them, which helps them not only move around, but also helps with collision detection on the ground. Part of the reason why the characters look the way that they do is because of these experiments, and the problems we kept running up against.
“There’s just so many different variations of physics characters that we’ve built. “We messed around with the physics, and just slowly evolved the character from that,” says Brown. In order to get the physics functioning in the way it needed to, it dictated even the game’s iconic character design. The game’s physics is obviously central to the Gang Beasts experience: but it goes even deeper than that. We’ve got Unity on board with us, and they’re helping us fix a lot of the legacy issues.” Every time it’s gotten more efficient, cleaner, and we’re actually rebuilding the game again now. The performance gains were so substantial, we needed to do it – but that also had the side effect of breaking all our physics. But then Unity updated their physics engine.
#Gang beasts how to#
The first version of the game was written in Javascript, but then we learned how to do C#, so we switched over to that. “I mean, we’ve actually rebuilt the game three times now. We kept plugging away until it worked – we didn’t realise how much of a headache that would be, but it’s been an absolute nightmare. “We figured, because we don’t have an animator, we can’t make smooth animations and stuff – so let’s try it with physics. With the game’s direction set, the team decided early on to include what became one of Gang Beasts’ most compelling elements: its physics-based gameplay. So we started to try and make a Final Fight/Street of Rage clone.” So we decided, if you can punch someone in the face, you’ve got a game. But we found we didn’t have the skills to make that really work at the time, because literally, we were learning on the job. “We originally started out making a different game, a high fantasy game, kind of like Golden Axe meets Shadow of the Colossus. So when the three got to work on game development, they tailored the games they made (including a few game jam projects) to cater to their lack of experience My brothers: one was working at CEX at the time, and the other was teaching Fine Art.” “I was studying game design, but I didn’t have a programming or 3D modelling background, or anything like that. “When we first started, we didn’t really know what we were doing,” says Brown. Michael Brown gives us the rundown on how the three brothers created the social media sensation. Which makes it all the more impressive that Gang Beasts came from a team of three brothers, learning game development as they went along.īoneloaf was founded in 2011 by brothers James, Jonathan and Michael Brown, to make experiences informed by their childhood. It’d be quite the accomplishment for any seasoned developer.
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