Author Archives: Shaun Roopra

About Shaun Roopra

My mission is to eradicate the life form you humans call pizza. I'm also an artist and writer at The Dangerous Kitchen.

The Not-So-Big Sleep

Alas it’s been a while dear readers. I’m afraid… Of the dark. I thought I’ll just put that out there.

So, like the acidic fire water the Alchemists deemed special, The Dangerous Kitchen are back—not sure how that relates, but whatever.

First of all, it’s taken a long time, but by what seems like sheer unobtainable and bizarre luck, Valve decided to accept us in their somewhat steamy company and so… we’ve been Greenlit! We almost forgot about it and then bam, it’s happened. Thanks to all those who voted and shared and generally existed in a manner that allowed the universe to Greenlight us.

Domo Arigato Mr. De Mambo

After the glory of the Tokyo Games Show last year, we realised we crave more! More! MORE! And so, The Dangerous Kitchen are heading back to the land of the rising sun, to exhibit De Mambo at TGS 2016. We really have to thank our publisher, the great Chorus Worldwide for again giving us this immense opportunity. We can’t wait to go back to Akihabara—I mean TGS.

Oh and I suppose we should mention that after a lot of back and forth, pizza-eating and general trials of power that tested our mental, physical and spiritual worth, Chorus have decided that we are worthy of being published in Asia! De Mambo will be seen loitering in Japan, China, Korea and Taiwan at some point down the line so look out!

Pizza

Since we’ve had a few complaints about how our updates are too pizza focused and there’s not enough game content, well, luckily for you, we don’t listen and so here is a poem dedicated to pizza.

Pizza, I love you and I always will your bewitching base, is the earth we stand on and your sensual sauce, the fire Prometheus gave to us, your captivating cheese is the very sun shining down on us. I love you pizza, and I always will.

For L.R.G My Star, My Perfect Silence.

New Stuff in De Mambo

So De Mambo… The one game that will rule them all. We have some new content to show you guys, so without further ado, another poem! Just kidding…

We’ve changed up single player mode into something a lot more flawless, and victorious… Instead of the ol’ ‘Zelda II meets Wario Ware’ pitch of yore, the new single player—whilst still retaining the Wario Ware—is a lot more combatant, especially for mortals. The original design for single player is something we want to keep for Super De Mambo, as it will require a lot more planning and thought to get perfect.

De Mambo’s ‘Solo Mode’ is a thrilling Science Fiction action adventure that instead of taking you across the galaxy and to fascinating alien worlds, you’ll climb some sort of impending tower of doom and experience various challenges—oh and lest we forget, there is an egg-cellent surprise at the end of this egg-citing journey!

‘Solo Mode’ will be inhabited by a heap of odd non-playable characters such as the endlessly useful and all-purpose ‘Traffic Cone Turtle’, a true marvel of games design. Hit the ‘Traffic Cone Turtle and watch it squirm!

And introducing, this character who has no name! Such a brutish brute, this fellow will rush at you full force until it brutally bashes you away!

We’ve finally reached the end of this behemoth update, so for those of you who made it all the way to the end, congratulations on wasting your life.

Farewell…

Through the Looking-Back Glass.

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Welcome.

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.

Farewell.

Out of the Fire and into the Frying Plan

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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

[su_video url=”http://thedangerouskitchen.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/IMG_6635.mp4″ align=”center” width=”100%” max width=”90%” poster=”http://thedangerouskitchen.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Screen-Shot-2015-12-08-at-15.01.57.png”]

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.

Take a look at EGX’s announcement of our existence here!

Things we love this month…

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Xenoblade Chronicles X
One Punch Man
Costa’s Festive Drinks
Splatoon
The Bridge III
La Forchetta’s Pizza
Fallout 4

Nippon De Mambo!

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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:

http://www.gamespark.jp/article/2015/09/23/60409.html

http://game.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/news/20150921_722209.html

http://www.inside-games.jp/article/2015/09/20/91430.html

http://www.4gamer.net/games/318/G031879/20150920024/

http://www.gpara.com/infos/view/27490

http://www.famitsu.com/news/201509/18088927.html

Finally, we’d like to thank all of our backers so much for supporting us! We’re now in the final stretch, so please share and spread the good word!

You can find our Kickstarter page at the link below:

kickstarter.demambo-game.com

Where we work – Part 1

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And so here we are.

Back in the Premier Inn, a place where dreams come true. It was here that De Mambo was conceived, born and then beaten when it misbehaved.

We’ve recently finished a short stint at Playhubs in Somerset House, as we very luckily won office space for a few months. It really was remarkable and we’ve learnt a lot, but for us nothing beats the lobby of a Premier Inn. Working here is really great as you’re constantly inspired. There’s an influx of different people here everyday, which is partly to do with Heathrow Airport location.

But, we are not the only operation being run here: there is another. A multi-level marketing company happens to also frequent our Inn, constantly offering us ways to make money that is surely legal… As much as these annoyingly birdbrained stooges irritate us, they invaluably provide much inspiration—as who doesn’t need the sight of brainwashed humans scuttling around like cockroaches to help remind one of their own sanity?

The staff at Costa though, are a nice contrast to this. At first there was a bit of a bit of dissonance between us, but after the first couple of months they warmed to our sizzling hobo-ish charm. They give us words of support from time to time and have once even called us family.

We have to battle for booth space daily and if we’re not strong enough to conquer one, are forever banished to the restaurant area where loud music and drunken antics take place. Sometimes it’s a challenge to work here, but as a wise man once said, “If challenge had a taste, you’d be quite delicious”.

Yes, the Inn became our place of work not by choice, but through necessity. It’s close to where we live, free and has perfect temperature… and did I mention it’s free? Working in the heart of London was spectacular, but that’s not who we are. We embrace stupidity, and nothing is quite as stupid as the making of a game in a hotel lobby.

Intro to Kickstarter De Mambo

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There’s a scene in the Mortal Kombat movie that everyone in The Dangerous Kitchen loves to recite.

“It has begun!”

Apt I’d say, as today, it truly has begun.

The amount of support we’ve seen already is—as clichéd as it sounds—far beyond our wildest dreams.

Reaching just above 20% in an hour and a half was crazy and then suddenly getting to £5,000 was absurd.

Making De Mambo has been so much fun for us already and being able to share this with everyone, is a pleasure.

As of writing this, we’re currently at 38%—there are no words to describe how we feel—so here’s to all the backers we’ve accumulated today and to all the backers still yet to come, wherever you are!

Malodorous Intent

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It’s been a while.

We’ve had a long few weeks preparing for, traveling to and then exhibiting at Radius Festival in Vienna and then Develop in Brighton whilst trying to maintain development on De Mambo.

It’s been an absolute pleasure to meet all the great developers, journalists and public humans at these events and we hope to see you again at some point!

But… we have some slight bits of not-so-new news.

Like the unavoidable stench of someone’s regurgitated lunch, on a crammed train on the hottest of day, you will never escape The Dangerous Kitchen. We will be there at every turn you make, everywhere you look and in the back of your mind…

What I’m trying to say is that The Dangerous Kitchen will be exhibiting at Now Play This and EGX 2015!

EGX Rezzed was incredibly toothsome so we’re thoroughly excited for EGX and the possibility of a dawning deadline to push development into the extreme!

Now Play This is located in Somerset House at the New Wing on the 4th-6th September.

But, there is another. Thanks to the exceptionally amazing people at Chorus Worldwide, we are exhibiting De Mambo at the Tokyo Games Show 2015! A monumental opportunity that we could in no way miss, we are super excited for the Japanese public to try out De Mambo!

We may also have news about a certain kick that may start at some point if you smell what I’m stepping in… And if anyone is interested in making a Let’s Play type thing, then please sign up here and we’ll send you a Demo De Mambo!

Until next time.

Child’s Play

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So far, The Dangerous Kitchen have only been to three events to exhibit De Mambo; EGX Rezzed 2015, Develop Interface and the Manchester Day Games Room. All three were incredibly valuable as we learnt so much, met some fantastic people and also peered into a dark, unknown facet of human repugnance… where heinous machinations of a strange cult-like people attempt to poison innocence—but, I suppose you didn’t come here to read that…

…yet.

The Games Room in Manchester, although lacking the first-time excitement of Rezzed, was probably the best time we had at any of these events, whilst simultaneously being the most exhausting.

We woke up at 4:00am on Saturday, boarded a train at 6:30am—barely making it, set up for 10:00am and then exhibited until 6:00pm. After a ritualistic consumption, we travelled a fair distance to our Airbnb destination and were greeted and shown to our room by two cats; Coco and Bossboy. We awoke at around 7:00am on Sunday, exhibited as usual from 10:00am – 6:00pm, gorged on some fine pizza (my personal favourite part of the journey) and then boarded the train home at 8:55pm—again, barely making it. After coldly waiting for a bus and then a delayed train, we finally got home… bone-tired and ready for our inner sandmen to lull us to sleep.

One could hazard a guess and say that pre-E3 hype played a part in keeping us alive, but in all seriousness, it was the stellar reaction De Mambo got in the Town Hall that sustained us through our broken wrists, hollowed shoulder bones and sleep-deprived crazy-eyes.

Bearing in mind that we are gamers who selfishly made a game for ourselves, it was great to see small children react so positively. We’d had a few children pick up De Mambo at Rezzed—much quicker than a lot of adults and season gamers mind you—but since the Games Room was open to the general public, there were tenfold more of these wonderful little people around. There were even times when we had children about 5 years old competing with twenty something year old gamers—which was insanely glorious since they held their own. The cherry on top though, were the SNES controllers we used to play De Mambo. We saw a few adults in shock with not only seeing the SNES pads, but that children were using them, which must’ve taken them back.

We never designed De Mambo to unite the world, but seeing stuff like that gave us hope. De Mambo will usher in a new era of world peace… or more probable, drown the world in fear, famine, pestilence and—A-A-Achoo! Excuse me. The combination of cat allergies and hay fever has crippled me profusely.

Anyway back on topic, we here at The Dangerous Kitchen just wanted to thank Rock, Paper, Shotgun, David Hayward, Simon Smith, all the individuals involved in setting up the Manchester Day Games Room and everyone who played De Mambo.

We truly had a remarkable time. Thanks!

A few updates on our near-future whereabouts.

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For those of you who want to track us down for the huge amount of money we owe you, avert your eyes now!

Firstly, we will be appearing on Payload Studio’s TerraTech Twitch stream at 4pm UK time on Friday 12th June. If you’ve ever wanted to see three awkward, unsociable and derelict examples of human beings, then here’s your chance!

A big thanks to Payload Studios for allowing us on the stream and an extra special thanks to Vincent Scheurer for making it happen!

>Tune in here!<

Secondly, De Mambo will be exhibited at the Manchester Day Games Room this weekend! Located in the Town Hall, it’s free entry for all, from 10am to 5pm on both Saturday 13th and Sunday 14th June. Make sure you come visit us if you’re there and remember, we aren’t adverse to bribes when pizza is involved…

>Info here!<

And Finally, De Mambo has been accepted into the Radius Festival, which takes place on the 9-12th July 2015 at the Ovalhalle in the MuseumsQuartier in Vienna. Definitely come over and talk to us if you happen to be there, as we’ll likely be dishevelled and in need of communication to sustain aliveability.

>Info here!<

Bit Trip Reminiscence

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So after a long week of meeting new people, having some rather glorious meetings and one delicious, mouth-watering pizza that I’m still thinking about… with the extra creamy buffalo mozzarella and the crispy thin crust and the fresh basil leaves—oh god! I’m sorry. It was a darn good pizza…

Anyhow, after a long week, I decided to peruse the 3DS eShop and see if there was anything my paltry £5 credit could buy. I was pleasantly surprised to see Rising Star Games had a sale and took the plunge on Bit Trip Saga on 3DS.

Runner will always hold a special place in my heart, but as I was playing it again, I became slightly emotional. You see, The Dangerous Kitchen was birthed around the time of Runner’s release, when we were plucky university students living in a dank student house, with tiny-humble dreams of world domination.

Notably, Runner was the first indie game we fell in love with, so we placed it on a towering, inspirational pedestal to gaze upon and aspire to. It was a great game made by three people, which at that time was fairly radical. Gaijin Games (now Choice Provisions) are definitely one of the reasons we started The Dangerous Kitchen all those years ago…

It was a really good point in our lives that was amplified by the religious playing of Runner for weeks after its release. You could go to the toilet and hear the sound of Anamanaguchi’s Blackout City trickling in from someone playing Runner elsewhere in the house. We enjoyed it as a group, just hanging out after University playing Runner, watching newcomers fail at timing the jumps on the stairs and everyone being utterly enthralled at Commander Video’s simple rainbow trail.

The reason I became emotional was that if we recall Commander Video’s story, Runner is where he takes his first steps, where he feels the pleasure of exploring life for the first time; he runs toward an unknown future, full of joy. This kind of parallels with where we were at that time: taking our first baby steps regarding The Dangerous Kitchen, sewing the seeds that would eventually sprout into De Mambo.

Playing Runner again just brought back all the memories and was especially poignant since we sort of managed to level up as a company this week. It’s funny how good things can make you look back to where you came from… but a good pizza can unstick you from the boundaries of space-time and show you the infinite possibilities of pure, conscious reality.

Yes, I really enjoyed that pizza.

Farewell.