Welcome to the next edition of Newsletter De Mambo, the best way to waste a few minutes of a meaningless existence, to drop off into the abyss of despair and wallow in the darkness of a thousand—oh sorry, I forgot to mention that National Pizza Day was this week, so I hope you treated yourself on this holiest of days. What do we have in store for you this time?
Well, that ol’ quack professor Delta is back again…
De Mambo Colour Psychology With Professor Delta or,
‘How I Learnt to Win in De Mambo’
A long time ago, possibly in 2015, when exhibiting De Mambo, dazed by the tiring drudgery of exerting much energy, I noticed something interesting. It seemed like some players who chose yellow were playing in a certain way. I then noticed that some people who chose red also had their own playstyle, which was fascinating. After discussing my findings with the others, we wondered if every colour has its own playstyle… which led to the creation of this video! De Mambo Colour Psychology With Professor Delta or, ‘How I Leant to Win in De Mambo’! Please enjoy the video and share it around if you can!
Share the Bundle of Joy that is De Mambo
Finally our first sale that isn’t in Japan or North America, but the rest of the world! Enjoy your time to shine, rest of the world as De Mambo is now half price in the Share the Joy Sale on the Nintendo eShop until February 15th.
Now Loading… Bar
We just wanted to give a big thanks to the Nintendo Social Group for hosting us and the great aPriori Digital at the Loading Bar last weekend. We had a great time hanging out, kicking butt in De Mambo and devouring a 26 inch pizza.
Blind Update
So… here is an unspecified image to keep you busy whilst we continue the gruelling process of birthing more content we wish to graft onto De Mambo’s supple body.
P.s. The word of the day is liquor for some unknown reason.
Things we love this month…
Nathan For You
Monster Hunter World
Bojack Horseman Season 3
Coloriages Avec Moebius Book
Animal by Sara Pascoe
Happy! by Naoki Urasawa
Aperion Cyberstorm
So… as written in the above prophecy, the time is now. De Mambo is out today on Steam Early Access with a spectacularly petty 15% launch discount! Click here to go to check out the page!
RTX London
Just wanted to say thanks to all those who came over to play De Mambo with us at RTX London last weekend! It was a tiring event, but on the last day we spotted a certain someone… It was the creator of Blaz Blue, Toshimichi Mori! We had a few matches of De Mambo with him and he seemed to like it!
Things we love this month…
Danganronpa 3
Masafumi Takada (Eternally)
La Nueva Dimensión del Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlán
Playing Earthbound and Super Metroid again aka SNES Mini
Black Mirror
Tekken 7
It took a while, but De Mambo finally flew the coop and left its parents very proud. It didn’t light up the world with its blazing glory, but for a game with no marketing budget it did great.
This past month we took a break to catch up on some serious Zelda playing and then went straight back to work, planning the necessary steps for the update. Our plan is to do two updates for De Mambo with more multiplayer stages and more singleplayer content that includes new modes to play and other things we’ve received as feedback. We’ll have more solid info on this at a later date as we’re still finalising what can be done etc.
Our old friend, Insomnia…
Unlike The Dangerous Kitchen, De Mambo will have its run in with insomnia as it is involuntarily forced into exhibiting at Insomnia 61!
We’ll be there for all four days so if you’re going, why not come on over and say hello and if your brave enough, challenge us to a duel… oh and maybe a match of De Mambo!
De Mambo will be a part of Payload Studio’s Tentacle Collective (so look for the giant inflatable tentacles!) which will take place at the NEC in Birmingham on August 25-28th.
De Mambo Reviews
Here’s a selection of our favourite reviews for De Mambo! Thank you everyone!
So this might be the last update you get before the De Mambo finally releases worldwide. What a crazy adventure it’s been! We have to thank you dear reader as without you, these sweet, sugary words we force upon you would not fulfil their ultimate journey across the plains of existence into your soft, squishy mind, and would instead be lost in the ether.
So when is De Mambo actually releasing!?
Well, Japan was lucky enough to have the original release date of June 29th. Sadly De Mambo was delayed everywhere else and is now releasing on July 13th in the west! As our loyal backers, you’ll receive your breathtakingly beautiful code of De Mambo on the day of launch!
We’re very sorry if there’s been any confusion about the release date, but it’s been very hectic time for us. As this is our first game, we’re obviously doing things we’ve never done before and the final process of getting a game through the submission process is something we’ve most definitely never done before! It’s a pretty powerful process, especially when your as experienced as us and even with amazingly talented people helping us on the technical side, we struggled. Thankfully we got through it and next time it should theoretically be much easier… well unless our brains mentally regress any faster than they currently are!
Hyper Japan Expo
We’ll be exhibiting De Mambo at the Hyper Japan Expo on July 14th to 16th which will be at our old friend the Tobacco Dock. Info here!
Goodies from across the web
The amazing Martin Robinson from Eurogamer came down to visit us a few weeks ago and wrote this wonderful article on us. Please have a look here!
We also took part in a great interview with Nindie Spotlight which can be found nestled within these words.
Thanks to our superb publisher Chorus Worldwide, we’ve had a lot of Japanese press including Dengeki and Famitsu doing live streams of De Mambo which can be seen here and here. Famitsu also had a massive two page spread of De Mambo and gave us a solid 30/40!
That’s it for this update! The next time we speak to each other, De Mambo will be unleashed upon the world and we’ll be probably dead from exhaustion!
Things we love this month…
Allan Moore’s Promethea
Twin Peaks Season 3
Arms (the game, not limb)
Zelda: Breath of the Wild
So, let’s just say it’s fairly crunchy in our current vicinity, but things are going great. De Mambo is ever so close to being fully-born, which is kind of a scary thought, since we’ve been touting it around on the internet and in public exhibitions long before it even had a chance to fully develop.
But, it’s finally time.
We are finally ready to announce the release date of this despicably lovely game we’ve been pouring our various hard-work juices into—blood, sweat and tears before you get any funny ideas. De Mambo’s Nintendo Switch release date is…
The first smashing game on Nintendo Switch will launch with three modes; ‘Mambo’ the 2-4 player multiplayer dance of death; ‘Solo’ the salivating single-player gameplay extravaganza; and ‘Survival’ the 1-4 player co-op mode where survival is the name of the game… literally!
BitSummit De Mambo
De Mambo will once again be clutched by Nintendo, and potentially taken against its will across the Pacific Ocean to Kyoto, Japan for A 5th of BitSummit. De Mambo will be part of Nintendo’s Nindie booth on 20-21st May with the first public appearance of ‘Survival Mode’.
Look What the Cat Dragged In
So last month we were in a Nintendo Direct, which was phenomenal, but this month, something far more spectacular occurred…
De Mambo was featured in the Cat Mario Show, the most prestigious game related internet show of all time. This show is so marvellous, some critics even call it the Citizen Kane of Youtube content.
So before we begin to torment you with as much pain and suffering as we can physically manage in one update, can we just take one moment to tell you that De Mambo made it into a Japanese Nintendo Direct! A goddamn Nintendo Direct. For those of you who may not know what a Nintendo Direct is, then for shame… but yeah, a Direct is a video that Nintendo releases every couple of months highlighting new games and such. It’s pretty crazy that our little makeshift “Smash Bros ripoff” game has reached this far. You can see our 3 seconds of fame below!
Anyway, back to business, or at least something vaguely resembling coherent text…
EGX Rezzed 2017
We were incredibly zombified after exhibiting at EGX Rezzed 2017. Our leg bones became dusty as chalk, our brains as mushy as peas and our spirits crushed like our enemies… well actually the last one is a lie, as our spirits were highly elevated due to us having a good time. Being on Nintendo’s Nindie booth was such a pleasure, as we received so much more human traffic that we usually receive…
Some people’s first experience with the Switch was De Mambo. That’s quite bizarre to consider that people have played De Mambo before Zelda on Switch!
We’d like to thank Nintendo UK for allowing us to exhibit with them, all the amazing Nintendo staff and most importantly, pizza for sustaining us indefinitely… and I suppose we should thank the mass amount of people who came and played De Mambo at Rezzed.
Bit Summit 5
If you happen to be in Kyoto on May 20-21st, then why not head to Bit Summit in Kyoto where Nintendo will once again violently chain De Mambo down and let the Japanese public experience the full pleasure it has to offer.
So, after what has seemed like a millennium of disgust, we are right near the end. It’s finally time. We’re targeting Summer for release, so very soon… Switch De Mambo will be completed, and we will begin the slumber of a thousand sleeps… well, that’s the dream anyhow!
Please enjoy this barrage of De Mambo Switch pictures and videos and until next time, godspeed.
Things we love this month…
Nintendo Switch
Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Carl Jung
Samurai Jack
Rick and Morty Season 3 premier
Do you sometimes wonder whether the voices in your head are real? Well this voice, the one you are currently hearing, isn’t. It’s merely a figment of your imagination, just like all the best things in life are.
Welcome to The Dangerous Kitchen’s De Mamblog (I can’t believe it took us this long to come up with that). How is everyone? Actually, don’t answer that, as we can’t hear you or are particularly that interested, since the main goal of this message is to continue the unconscious brainwashing and brain scrubbing started many moons ago.
Anyway, enough meandering, it’s time for…
TGS 2016
We’ve (not-so) recently returned from the land of the rising sun, exhaustion and rain… lots of rain. It rained so much in fact, that our souls will forever have permanent water damage.
TGS 2016 was the first time we ditched the good ol’ SNES controllers and instead decided to use Playstation 4 ones, since that’s what the final game will be on. To quote Arnold Schwarzenegger as Hamlet in The Last Action Hero, “Big mistake.”
Let’s just say that the urge to die was so beautifully close to completion, as the whole first day of TGS was a gargantuan mess where nothing would work! In retrospect, it was hilarious to see that I-don’t-want-to-be-here glow of doom that permeated across everyone’s faces. Thankfully, the wonderful Ryuji—a true pizza-bro if I ever saw one—fixed all the problems and got the PS4 controllers working for the last three days. There was some lag involved, but the less we talk about that the better…
Solo Shenanigans
Showing off single-player for the first time was an interesting experience for us in that it was the first time we’d publicly shown off any single player content we’ve ever made! Our previous single player prototypes for De Mambo were generally meh—official game developer jargon of the highest order—and not really to our standard. But, no one saw them, so that was always our opinion.
Solo mode was a new venture for us, as we didn’t want to just make a standard multiplayer-turned-single-player-mode, that’s too obvious (if you’re not willing to explore, then what’s the point?). We were a bit anxious to see if our odd ideas would pay off and if the various amounts of people at TGS would enjoy our solo mode… thankfully, they did!
Everyone who played, all got their butts gloriously whooped because we didn’t test the difficulty beforehand! Oops… but, the difficulty seemed to resonate with people since the controls of De Mambo are inherently simple, a bit of spice in the mix didn’t hurt. It was a great learning experience for us as making a good single player experience is very different from a multiplayer one.
If you haven’t seen the trailer for Solo mode, here it is!
Japan Highlights
Hanging out with Suda51, because that’s apparently what we do now!
Possibly the biggest highlight from TGS, was meeting my idol, Suda51. Since No More Heroes is like, my favourite game, it blew me away to actually have a photo taken with him, and realise how he does that little arm pointy thing he does in all his photos—I was planning on explaining it in all its ethereal detail, but alas, it’s best experienced in real life. He even gave us some development advice!
We also attended an event where we met the great Yoshiro Kimura again and we somehow stumbled into Hirofumi Taniguchi, the amazing Love-de-lic and Skip LTD composer! Ever since playing Chibi Robo! Back on the Gamecube, we’d been huge fans of his, so it was incredible to converse with him in person.
We were also clued into… the war. In Japan, in the deepest, darkest recesses of the underworld, there exists two factions. The spectacular Shroom’s and the other is the shameful Shoot’s! The Dangerous Kitchen is two-part Shroom and one part Shoot—and yes, we will shoot him for his crimes against humanity!
He never stood a chance…
NPC’s
Wormb
Now the Wormb is possibly the best thing we’ll ever make, and that’s entirely down to the disgusting noise it makes. How was this noise made? Nobody who was present at that time is alive to tell the tale…
Mushroom-Foot
“We need a Goomba!”
“Mushroom-Foot…?”
“Eureka!”
That is how things get done in The Dangerous Kitchen, and how this particular fellow was born.
Before we go, we have to say thanks to all those who helped us out in Japan. Shin and Ryuji! Daichi and Camille! Anjali! Yoshi! You guys are the best! Thanks for your support and may the Mambo gods bless you with infinite pizza.
P.S. There was once a man from a cave of warmth, he asked, “How are you doing?”
Sorry for the silent silence that has clouded its way in-between the last time we contacted you and now, but we’ve been busy… busy fighting a PHP-based battle with the website and thought an extended break from us would do you no harm.
We’ve been mainly working on refining a lot of the core details of the game and designing lots of new stuff—there’s been some pretty bizarre things that have been proposed—and generally looking at bettering what we have.
Take a look at some concept art, which is indeed conceptual.
Before we move forward, we’d like to have a look back, as last year was monumental for us.
2014 was our awakening, the growth of cosmic seeds that burst forth into our mundane existence, while in 2015 the seeds sprouted; De Mambo took us from our place in the soil and propelled us towards the great sun.
We met an invaluable colleague and friend in Daniel New, who had the unholy pleasure of interviewing us around this time last year. That was a special moment for us, as Daniel truly believed in us and what we were doing which really fired us up and prepared us for what was coming next…
Our first public exhibition was in March with EGX Rezzed and then we won our place at Playhubs—this was where we met so many fantastic people who’ve helped us immensely; like Nisha Valand, Vincent Scheurer and Shin Kanaoya (more on him later…), and got into such events as Manchester Day Games Room, Radius Festival, Develop Interface and Brighton Develop—where we met our bright-eyed intern, Keir Sweeney. Hanging out with the public, meeting loads of cool developers and (especially) beating people at our own game was truly amazing.
We next took to Kickstarter and then to our collective personal highlight: Japan and TGS. We are all still in awe that we were able to not only go to Japan (a childhood dream for all of us), but have our little game exhibited at the Tokyo Games Show. It’s all thanks to the aforementioned Shintaro Kanaoya, his awesome partner Ryuji Ooyanagi and their amazing company Chorus Worldwide—you guys are awesome and we cannot thank you enough.
TGS was astonishing as the Japanese really enjoyed our game (thanks have to be given to Daichi Aono for his superb translation abilities) and the press, such as Famitsu, 4Gamer and Dengeki, gave us the enormous pleasure of interviewing us. That was a super personal highlight for me, as I was the one being interviewed—but then again there was so much more. We got to meet the marvellous Yoshiro Kimura and have some humorously fun De Mambo matches with him, Ryuji introduced us to Suda51’s manager (I’m a huge Suda fanboy), Kazuyuki Kumagai who said that we can visit Grasshopper Manufacture the next time we are in Japan, we saw Koji Igarashi of Castlevania fame in the flesh and finally shook hands with Shuhei Yoshida, the President of Sony’s Worldwide Studios.
After we landed back in London we had to drive up to Birmingham the next day to setup for EGX, which honestly… nearly killed us. (Four people and a 32” TV should not be able to fit into a Fiat 500…) but we survived and finally went on to see the successful end of our Kickstarter Campaign!
Thanks again to everyone who helped us out, shared the campaign and especially those of you that donated your hard-earned cash to our cobweb-ridden wallet!
It’s safe to say that a lot happened last year, which runs in contrary with the fact that we are three nobodies making a game in a Premier Inn lobby. We’re currently working on loads of new content for De Mambo, so make sure you join us at our next exhibition: EGX Rezzed, the place that started it all.
Anyway, as a wise man once said… Enough talk! No more looking back. On to the future where, De Mambo will be released and the world will cower in its almighty presence… well hopefully.
Welcome to the latest edition of myself rambling on about some kind of Dangerous Kitchen and that crazy dance game called De Mambo. A lot has happened since we last met, but at the same time… absolutely nothing has happened.
The End is Nigh
Anyway, I hate to say it, but the end is near. It’s the end of the beginning of the final stretch… of the final stretch, to be more precise, so we still have a long time before we unleash De Mambo upon the world.
Since the end of Kickstarter, we’ve been really busy planning on how to create a 51-carat solid-gold pizza, that is indeed edible for those of us with animal teeth—oh and planning the final game, obviously.
Currently at 14-carats and inedible.
Planning the final game is hard. No longer can we haphazardly run amok with our decisions. Everything needs to be efficient and outlined before we even start to build the final game.
Currently, we’re working on our un-patented ‘Blockpendium’ trying to come up with as many new blocks that we can. Some of us like to shout out random words and watch the others squirm as they try to come up with justifiable gameplay function; as who doesn’t love the idea of a concrete-squirrel-octopus block and need it in the game!?
GameCity De Mambo
A GameCity exclusive – Broken TV Mode!
On Halloween we ended up exhibiting De Mambo at Gamecity and met some amazing people, like Peter Harries from Butcherlab working on Theo and Lizzy, Nick Holder from Badger Hammer working on Idioctopus and Geraldo Nascimento working on GunKatana.
We also had the pleasure of being interviewed by the great Keith Stuart from The Guardian, which you can listen to here!
Farewell—oh wait, one more thing! We’re heading back to EGX Rezzed in April 2016! I can only imagine the improvements we’ll have to show you then, so until next time… stay fresh.
So it’s been a very long couple of weeks for us! The long radio silence was sadly a combination of spotty Japanese Internet—we couldn’t use 3G/4G either—and then extreme exhaustion from exhibiting and jet lag etc., but regardless, we must apologise.
We travelled to Japan on the 14th of September for the Tokyo Games Show, thanks to the wonderful people at Chorus Worldwide, to exhibit De Mambo in the Indie section. Let’s just say that our Japan experience was immense. As lame as it may sound, we really felt that Japan was our spiritual home.
As game designers—especially designers interested in Japanese games design—Japan was almost like a video game in itself. One example was the traffic lights, which had health bars that decreased to show how much of the green light was left. This most probably existed before games did, but it was fascinating to see such design embedded into Japanese culture. It really helped us feel welcome in such a foreign place.
At TGS, some of us were slightly worried at how the Japanese public would react to De Mambo, but thankfully, they loved it. We’ve never seen anyone pick up the controls so quickly before and reach such a good level of skill so quickly. It was honestly a pleasure to play De Mambo with everyone at TGS, as we had some intense matches!
Thanks to the amazing Ryuji at Chorus, we received a lot of attention from the Japanese gaming press, including Famitsu and 4Gamer:
The Dangerous Kitchen is like that nostalgic, homemade dish you loved as a child. The one you rushed home from school for. The dish that even now, the thought of devouring it, melts your mind. Now imagine that dish was spiked with a ton of hot sauce. Yep, that’s us in a nutshell. We also make games, and are based in London, England.
Steam for all!
Thank you everyone! Kickstarter De Mambo is a success!