How Treachery in Beatdown City's DLC Ultra Remix makes the game "spiritually complete"
21.11.2023 - 18:05
/ gamedeveloper.com
The Treachery in Beatdown City: Ultra RemixDLC builds upon the tactical street fighting of the original game, adding new moves, locations, enemies, and tunes. With the original game having such a precise, challenging turn-based hand-to-hand fighting system, how do you carefully build onto it without breaking the original release?
Game Developer sat down with Shawn Alexander Allen, the lead artist, writer, and designer of Treachery in Beatdown City: Ultra Remix and its base game, to talk about the thoughts that went into adding new combat abilities and enemies so that they built onto the foundation of the main game, their desire to bring new musical artists to video games, and how the US of the last few years would continue to shape the game’s villainous cast and the very real-world darkness of their backgrounds.
Treachery in Beatdown City: Ultra Remix adds new levels, enemies, fighting moves, and more. What brought you back to create more content for Treachery in Beatdown City ? What made you want to continue working within this world?
I’ve looked at Treachery in Beatdown City as my own Dante’s Inferno (the book, not the questionable game) for some time. So, we always had more to do and more to say.
When we launched the base game in 2020 it was in a sort of a functionally complete, but spiritually incomplete, state. I was happy with what we got out in 2020, but it only encapsulated part of the vision for the full project. We ended it on a cliffhanger, which was always the plan (to have some cliffhanger-based storytelling), and I knew sort of what I wanted the ending of the full ride to be. I just didn’t 100% know how we were going to get there.
So, I made this promise at the end of the 2020 release—there was a title card when you beat Treachery in Beatdown City that said we were going to give out a free update that continues the story. In hindsight, we should have just been like, yeah that’s how it ends, and we’re gonna do a season 2 if there’s enough interest.
But I stick to my promises. And this was something I really wanted to see through to my own expectations. Thankfully the initial game release was profitable, and we got some investment and could work on it some more.
To wrap it around, I’ve said for years this is my own Divine Comedy, except instead of following up the Inferno with Purgatory and Heaven, you just keep going further down into Hell [laughs].
What challenges come from trying to build onto something you've already created? What interesting benefits came out of re-exploring the world of Treachery in Beatdown City ?
In many ways, we had built Treachery in Beatdown City to exist in its own perfect bubble of imperfections—a lot of the game wasn’t really built with a lot of new