Here’s a first look at a previously unseen location.

A lush forest somewhere in Cuba, with pollen floating lazily in the wind. A dream to some, a nightmare to others, depending on how much they enjoy inhaling allergens.

No one knows who ever came up with the idea of trimming a bush into a Dudebro shape, but we’re certain it helped making our protagonist’s ego a little bit bigger.

One recent addition to the array of Dudebro II’s gameplay mechanics was allowing the player to shoot faster by tapping the button instead of just holding it.

This may seem like a minor detail at first, but it can actually make a world of difference, saving Dudebro’s gentle buttocks in a wide variety of situations.

In fact, it allows the player to either focus on spewing bullets faster and more precisely, possibly as a means to survive a heated firefight; or instead to focus on mobility/aiming while still keeping a constant – yet slower – rate of fire.

However, this mechanic doesn’t actually apply to all weapons. Some may already have a fast enough firing rate or, in certain cases, may be too peculiar for faster shooting to make sense in the first place. For the weapons that do allow tapping, though, finding the best rhythm to tap the button with, which may differ from weapon to weapon, is a good first step to mastering their usage.

With probably the least subtle name of all time, the Money Shot is one of the first weapons players will gain access to near the beginning of the game.

This semi-automatic rifle uses its integrated piggy bank to shoot bursts of three coins at a time, which can get up to sound barrier-breaking speeds. Getting hit in the face by a golden shower of coins may sound painful enough, but this weapon’s capabilities – like most guns in Dudebro II – extend far beyond simply hurting enemies. The Money Shot, in fact, is rumored to be capable of breaking paywalls and buying back affection, but beware! As relationships in life can hardly be reduced to mere numbers, throwing money into the equation has a significant chance of backfiring and making things worse. There’s no “cashing out” in that case.

To refill the piggy bank, Dudebro won’t be able to use ammo pickups found lying around. Thankfully, the game world is littered with ATMs to draw money straight from Dudebro’s private bank account. Will our hero go completely broke before the end of the game? That will be up to you.

Public Service Announcement: Starting from the next post, now scheduled for May 31st, website updates will go online on Saturdays instead of Mondays.

In game development, a variety of software tools are needed to accomplish the most disparate tasks efficiently. When such a tool doesn’t exist, or isn’t easily obtainable, the most sensible choice is often to just make your own. That’s what we did in the early infancy of the 2D version of the game, with the Dudebrewery tool.

This tool was developed rather quickly as a separate XNA application. It was meant for 2D artists and coders to visualize sprite sheets and superimpose shapes representing, for each sprite, their colliders within the physics engine (named “fixtures”). This would allow them to position and resize (“brew”) the sprites precisely.
Similarly to other tools used in development, the focus for Dudebrewery wasn’t making a user-friendly application with a neat looking interface. It just needed to work, so we could afford to leave some roughness around the edges.

Over time, we abandoned this tool for a more flexible solution that allowed us to work on each fixture directly within the game. Still, Dudebrewery remains a nice curiosity worth sharing, especially for those of you curious about game development.

In a previous post, we showed that General Dawgless Lee, Dudebro and Chicken’s commanding officer, would follow his brodacious soldiers through their mission as a cool-looking hologram.

Back then, the switch to a 2D sidescroller wasn’t announced yet, so we had to settle on only showing a cutscene sprite, whose 16 bit style was already public.

Well, a lot of time has passed since then, and on the left you can now finally see how our beloved General really looks ingame, in pure 8 bit retro style glory.

Over time, though, we came to realize that holograms alone wouldn’t have been good enough. They are, by nature, static. Especially in a sidescroller, that is something you can rarely afford outside of cutscenes. If the only way to communicate with General Lee (or other characters) was through holograms, we would have been forced to keep that to a minimum so as not to interrupt the player too much.

Instead, we came up with another idea: giving Dudebro a mobile phone.

This would allow for some interaction with the offscreen characters, without interrupting the flow of the gameplay with cutscenes or separate “codec screens”. The phone call dialogue wouldn’t require user confirmation and just punctuate the action in specific instances without stopping it altogether.

To choose a design for Dudebro’s phone, we went through multiple iterations until we found one that covered the least screen space, but still allowed for some sort of visual presence for your interlocutor. Our goal was to make this as unobtrusive as possible, so we went for the rightmost design in the picture above.

And here’s the final result: a thin phone call dialogue box with a half-transparent background, located near the bottom of the screen to prevent it from covering important gameplay elements.

While adding another means of communication may seem redundant in theory, phone calls have already proven themselves a valuable tool in the instances where holograms just wouldn’t fit, and together with the Holo-General they have allowed for a whole new array of jokes and gags.

Update:

Well, yeah. The feature list may have probably given it away, but it was all a joke. No VR announcement for the time being, and thankfully no VR mode with features closer to the dark side of a certain social network than to what we’d expect (or want) from the real thing. We dodged a bullet on that one.

Normal updates will resume as usual on Monday, April 14th.


DudeVRo II: VR Support Announced!

We are glad to announce that Dudebro II will be the first completely 2D game to support virtual reality headsets.
No stereoscopic 3D, no virtual theaters, no BS, final destination: a quality VR experience to immerse yourself in a world of pure brodiocity.

Disclaimer: The VR experience may or may not involve one or more of the following: targeted advertising, online arguments, moral relativism, hashtags, chicken.

In a previous post, we showed a screenshot of a fist-bumping pair of statues.

They look bro enough on their own, but there’s something strange about these statues. Most people that pass by them are too drunk to notice, but rumor has it that their heads change into something else entirely on a somewhat frequent basis. Heads like these have been spotted on multiple occasions.

Nobody knows just what the original heads of the statues were, or why they seem to change on a whim without anyone realizing.

The dialogue boxes shown up until now may have looked vintage enough for our retro aesthetic, but they also covered a pretty large portion of the screen. Because of that, we recently decided to revise them a bit.

As highlighted by this comparison screenshot, we made the font thinner and non-monospaced to improve readability, and removed some dead space from the window frame. We also made their background slightly transparent, preventing parts of the scenery from getting hidden and, at the same time, making them appear more varied and less monotonous.

The end result is a smaller box that doesn’t completely hide important onscreen elements anymore; fitting better with some visual features we honestly can’t wait to introduce when the time comes.

BalloonPros are curious fellas who seem to enjoy more than anything the pleasure of floating around in the air. Of course they don’t seem to care how reckless it is to be attached to balloons filled with incredibly dangerous explosive gas. One well-aimed shot is more than enough to make them go boom.

Their balloons can also act as improvised platforms, but beware! They can still explode quite easily, and you wouldn’t want to be in close proximity when that happens.

Dudebro II features a helpful mini map sitting in the bottom right corner of the screen.

The map fills out as you explore the complex layouts that make up each location. Abstract blocks on a grid represent the rooms you have visited and how each is connected to neighboring ones. The area you are currently exploring is highlighted in orange, and the blocks with a white dot in the middle mark the save rooms, so keep an eye out for them!

We all know how these maps work after all, right? Well, we would if that was all this one mini map had to offer. We’ll delve further into some more peculiar functions in a later update.