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!

[su_youtube_advanced url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-MFLXT4q2U” showinfo=”no”]

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?”