Factsheet

Developer:
Ruffian Games
Based in United Kingdom

Release date:
December 19 2017

Platforms:
Windows

Website:
fragmentalgame.com

Available From:
$4.99 - Steam

Description

An intense competitive and co-operative, couch-play multiplayer twin-stick shooter with some of the fastest and most frantic gameplay around. It’s a single screen, explosive arcade blast of fun where the weapons and arenas are deadly and the rivalry is fierce.

History

Prototype Team

Over the past few years Ruffian have mostly been working on work for hire projects. We've always wanted to make our own games, but we've never had the budget to put the entire company on to a project like that.

In August 2015, we had a small multi-discipline team of guys who weren't on one of these work for hire projects, and looking at our cashflow, we had just enough money to support that team to allow them to start work on making prototypes, with the goal of creating something that could turn into Ruffian’s first, self funded game where we owned the IP.

The team was made up of a group of designers, artists, animators and coders, so we knew we could cover everything we would need to do in order to make a full game. The big question was, what were we actually going to make?

The Pitches

Over the course of a month we asked the team to pitch ideas for the kind of game they wanted to make. We kept this really informal, there was no specific structure to this, the only demand we had was that everyone on the team proposed at least one idea to make. When we had enough pitches ready to talk about, we got everyone into the meeting room and went round the table. Everyone took turns pitching their ideas for a maximum of 10 minutes per pitch, while the rest of the team listened then asked questions afterwards. We went through a lot of pitches and in the end, the game idea that we decided to go with, came from a pitch that the team initially didn't like. The idea was to create a new Powerstone game for the current generation. 4 players running around beating each other up. Like I said, nobody really liked it, but it kick started the conversation that led to us finally agreeing on what we should try first. We spoke about our nostalgic experiences of couch play games, going back to the SNES, N64 and Playstation. How we all loved those nights where you and a bunch of your mates had a few beers and spent the night playing 4 player, single screen games. So we liked the idea of making a game that had that gameplay experience, but a Powerstone clone didn’t feel right. We then shifted genre and talked about how we all enjoyed Hotline Miami, the simple controls, the one shot kills, the speed of play, the frequency of the kills, the top down view, and all of these things seemed like they would work as a fast paced single screen, competitive multiplayer shooter. We quickly created a prototype and it showed great promise. So we continued working on it.

Getting the Green Light

After a couple of months of full time dev, we were pretty confident about our game, so we started to look into how we would release it to the public. We really liked Steam, so we focused on that as our release platform. In order to release your game on Steam, you first need to go through the Greenlight stage. For those who don't know, this is basically a voting system that allows the Steam community to vote for or against your game idea. If the community like what they see and vote positively, you'll likely be chosen to pass through the Greenlight stage and then be allowed to develop and release your game through Steam. If they don't like it, you don't pass and you don't get to release your game. We filled in all of the forms, uploaded all of the images, videos and information and then waited to see if the public would vote for us. We were absolutely ecstatic when Fragmental got enough votes to pass the Greenlight stage after only 8 days. Now that we were through that, we had to decide when and how we were going to release the game to the public.

Release & Early Access

We had two options open to us, continue to develop the game away from public view and release it later in the year when it was complete, or release it via Early Access, which would allow us to release earlier and allow the public to play the game and provide feedback. After a lot of discussion we decided to go with the Early Access approach. We released the game in Early Access at the end of February 2016 and we've been developing and releasing updates ever since. The game is in great shape now, but we still have 1 more planned update to complete before we will be happy to say that the game is properly complete and ready to exit Early Access. We hope to do that at some point in Q3 2017.

Features

• Ruthless One Shot Kills
• Quick-Fire, Multi-Round Gameplay
• 2 to 4 Player Couch Play against your Friends or AI
• 100+ Dynamically-Shifting and Hazardous Battle Arenas
• 22 Unique Weapons
• 6 Powerup Modifiers
• Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Onslaught, Survival and Team Survival Game Modes
• Vibrant, Intense Visuals and Audio
• Fast, Frantic, Fantastic Fragging!

Fragmental Credits

Billy Thomson
Creative Director

Duncan Harrison
Technical Director

Graham Hughes
Senior Gameplay Engineer

Bert McDowell
UI Engineer

Simon Kilroy
Gameplay Engineer

Alex Porter
Gameplay Engineer

Steve Banks
Lead Designer

Dave Hoare
Level Designer

Martin Livingston
Level Designer

Richard Ralfe
UI Flow Designer

Paul Large
Art Director

Gary Whitton
Animation / UI Artist

Neil Macnaughton
VFX & Technical Artist

Tom Carter
Weapons Artist

Kev Black
Lead Tester

Paul Conry
Test Manager

Jim Cope
Producer

Gaz Liddon
Studio Head

Barry Cairns
Senior Engineer

Ross McDonald
Gameplay Engineer

Rebecca O'Neil
Concept Artist

George Rankin
Level Designer

Matt Boyle
Level Designer

Dave "Shnarf" Reid
Level Designer

Dale Smith
Audio / Music

Contact

Support
billy@ruffiangames.com

Homepage
fragmentalgame.com

Indie DB
indiedb.com/games/fragmental

Twitter
twitter.com/FragmentalGame

Facebook
facebook.com/fragmentalgame

Twitch
twitch.tv/fragmentalgame