This dev team is making a Smash Bros.-style one-button action game from a hotel lobby
De Mambo has one hell of a pitch. It's a single-screen, single-button competitive action game with the right art-style. But wait until you hear the story behind its development.
The Dangerous Kitchen is very small, three-person indie team from England that wants to make a game they believe in, even if that means meeting in a hotel lobby to drink coffee and work it. The game they're working on is called De Mambo. This small time is working out of a hotel meeting space because, fresh out of art school, they can't afford an office.
"De Mambo is what happens when you make a game for the price of a coffee a day," The Dangerous Kitchen describes the game on its Kickstarter page. De Mambo is Smash Bros. meets Breakout. It's an action platformer taking place on a single screen that uses only a single button for its attacks - not counting the arrow keys/d-pad.
The levels are destructible and the jump button can be coupled together with the action button (which offers three attacks) for different combos.
"Our mantra was 'minimal' as we wanted to cut the fluff, to rid of anything not entirely necessary to the fun core of a game—it also went hand in hand with our huge technical limitations at the time," reads the page.
The campaign is asking for just £6,884: the price of a coffee a day. That and of course various other fees like admin fees, taxes, and of course the team's salaries. There'a good breakdown on the campaign page that other Kickstarters could definitely learn from.
De Mambo is in development for PC, Mac, Linux, PS3, PS4, and Vita. Download the demo and try it out for yourself on Itch.io or IndieDB.
The project has five days to go with a very modest goal. Catch the 60fps trailer and few of screenshots below.
