Creative endeavors can take many forms as time goes on. Movies and video games alike may change their scope over time, either to reflect a shifting grand vision or dwindling resources. PseudoZap's Bad Boro has been on a relatively steady path for about four years, but in late 2021 it moved away from its original title Scrap Bringer. Though the first name reflected its goals from the outset, outside circumstances led to a rebrand that's "more accurate" for what the game has become.
Game Rant spoke to PseudoZap co-founders Peter Mosur and Konrad Messyasz about the backstory behind their debut project Bad Boro, as well as recent developments leading into a planned Kickstarter campaign. Interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Q: What's been your path into game development?
Mosur: For me, from an early age through late high school I wanted to do something creative. I was always into writing and music, but nothing really panned out. Eventually I was working this job where I was on 50 percent leave, so I decided to use the other 50 percent to work on a video game.
My cousin Konrad had always been into illustration and his father is an illustrator by trade, so he has a lot of artistic endeavors. We've been close friends based on talking about games, and I've been playing my whole life — its been my main thing.
I think I always assumed I couldn't create a game because it was too hard, but I hit this point where I said screw it, let me try learning how to program. I'm essentially self-taught, and it's now part of my day job four years later. Konrad and I started spitballing ideas, and we really got into what we were creating. Konrad was in his senior year of high school when this all started, and over summer break we made our first demo.
Since it was his final year before going into college I said we should get our demo done for the indie game festival Play NYC in August. That whole summer we crammed every day to get this game together, and we're really proud of what we made. Obviously it wasn't perfect, and we got a bit burnt out from it. Konrad basically took a break and didn't talk to me for his whole first semester to focus on school. Then in late November when we got together for Thanksgiving he told me he decided to drop out and focus on the game full-time. I was like, "Oh no, his parents are going to hate me."
But here we are, three or four years later. The progress he's made is incredible, personally I think he's gotten better experience working on this than he would have in school.
Q: Were there any favorite games you shared and bonded over? Any that really developed your tastes?
Mosur: I'm a decent bit older than Konrad, about 10 years. So there were definitely situations where he'd be coming over for family events and I'd be playing World of Warcraft while he's next to me playing Sonic Adventure 2 on GameCube. Our relationship was always defined by video games.
Zelda games were pretty huge, but I remember the first significant game I showed him was Dark Souls 3. At the time he was really excited for Breath of the Wild, and decided to try Dark Souls while waiting. He really got into it, to the point that he feels he didn't enjoy Breath of the Wild as much as he could have since he was like "an elitist" at that point.
The Soulsborne games are one huge series we bonded over: Bloodborne, Dark Souls, games like Hollow Knight — that's what I'd been playing when we started working on our game. Then the Nintendo classics were also something we bonded over, as well as random indie games like Enter the Gungeon.
Q: So when you started on Bad Boro was it meant to be a twin-stick brawler? Or were you aiming more in the direction of a Soulsborne?
Mosur: It wasn't originally designed to be a twin-stick brawler, mostly because we're only going with that title since we don't know what else to call it.
We definitely took a lot of inspiration from Soulsborne games, but we were also doing our own thing. For example, early on we decided to make it a highly stylized, drawn 2D game. I was also influenced by ARPGs like Diablo. Figured I wanted to make something in that style, something top-down where you beat up enemies and have special abilities. We did agree we wanted to make something really difficult, and have storytelling in the same way as a Soulsborne using vague, mysterious ideas with weird characters.
So to answer your question, it wasn't like we sat down intending to make 'this' or 'that.' We had all these different ideas that we threw together. It just came together in a sense, and ultimately it was a convenient way to incorporate 2D art.
Also, we really didn't want to make a Metroidvania.
Q: In terms of art, I immediately clocked a Newgrounds Flash game style for its characters. How much of an influence did that community have?
Mosur: I know I used to go on Newgrounds as a kid, like 20 years ago. I didn't realize it was making a comeback, but one day Konrad told me he had an account and it was getting traction. I was kind of shocked.
He definitely took some influence from Newgrounds, but also a lot of 90s cartoons. It might be that he was already headed in that direction, then he created a Newgrounds account and really leaned into it. The art style was completely different for that first demo I talked about, more ultra-realistic. He spent so long trying to make buildings look perfect and gritty, then he wanted to switch the art style and make it more cartoonish.
Messyasz: I grew up on a ton of Newgrounds games and cartoons that me and a bunch of school friends would be talking about and recommending. That harsh, uncouth style that a lot of the games had, along with the super thick outlines which were usually a product of animating in Flash, has always kinda stuck with me. While Newgrounds isn’t the only influence for my art, it definitely is a source for a large amount of my conscious and subconscious inspiration.
Along with the Newgrounds stuff, there’s some older cartoon inspirations. I look at the neurotic or manic facial expressions of Ren and Stimpy. I like the character design sensibilities of the side and villain characters in The Powerpuff Girls. The gritty and edgy style of Invader Zim is also something that I’ve pulled from.
A game that I’ve actually been inspired by since I was really young was Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga for the Game Boy Advance. It had really expressive and cartoony sprite work that I’ve actually studied for Bad Boro to get a good idea on how to make sprites in a top-down environment.
Q: What are some difficulties around using hand-drawn 2D assets for your game?
Mosur: Definitely making sure it's not too detailed, like I said. We realized that was unsustainable, taking too much time and effort. It's still fairly detailed, but there's a noticeable difference between that old art style and the new one in terms of understanding what details can be left out without sacrificing the integrity of the art. That was a learning curve.
Also, I think part of it was growing as an artist. There's a natural progression where I think Konrad just didn't like the old artwork anymore, realized he could do something better and more stylized. Something he could call his own.
Messyasz: There are some difficulties in doing 2D over 3D artwork for a game, especially in a top-down environment. For one, it's very tricky to have a character do things in multiple directions with 2D artwork. With 3D you can naturally just rotate the sprite and it’s a done deal, but with 2D you either have to tediously cover each direction with a unique animation (which is usually how the player character is managed), or we have to cleverly animate single actions to be able to cover a wide area around a character using smear frames (which is how we manage enemies and NPCs).
Q: In terms of programming, has using 2D assets been a challenge?
Mosur: Not necessarily. I'm doing the programming for the game, but always told Konrad to do whatever he wants — I'd just make it work. The real challenge is efficiently layering everything, but aside from that it's not bad. At all points we've worked closely together on the art direction to make sure it looks exactly how Konrad wants it to look. I give feedback every now and then, but for the most part he's in charge.
We're using GameMaker Studio, and I think that makes it slightly easier — though to be honest using something like Unity might have been similar. Development is pretty straightforward unless you want to do crazy things, creating the 2D art here is the hard part. A lot of our effects are also hand-drawn, so there's plenty of animation going in already. My role is mostly hooking everything up, getting hitboxes right, standard things.
Q: What kind of challenges have come about because this is the first game you've worked on? Especially for whatever your prior career path was.
Mosur: I actually went to school for business management, and I have a Master's degree in emergency disaster management. It was a strange course getting to game development, but I've always told myself I could do programming. I took Java and C++ classes in high school, so I wasn't on the track to being a programmer but it was in the back of my mind.
My issue was that I never had anything to work on. I wasn't the type of person who could just study and have it stick, I needed something to build. So like I said, one day I decided to make a video game and I stuck to it. Working with GameMaker Studio has been helpful because it has a great community with tutorials on YouTube and rich forums.
Now I'm a web developer, still in the emergency disaster management field. I work for a software company, it worked out nicely there.
Q: I've noted you say you're interested in urban exploration. Tell me a little about that and how it connects to the megacity in Bad Boro.
Mosur: I currently live in New York City, Konrad lives in New Jersey. I grew up on Long Island and he grew up in Brooklyn, so we've always been really close to the city. I've always enjoyed exploring, finding abandoned places, looking for cool graffiti. I just started to take pictures, and have something like a 2,000 image album in Google Photos. I haven't posted on my Twitter recently, but maybe I'll have to.
The idea for the megacity in Bad Boro mostly came from living in the city, it's what we're closely familiar with. We wanted to recreate that in a video game. I think I've actually sent Konrad images from that album as inspiration for different locations and types of graffiti; he's created some unique pieces that we've stuffed into the world.
Q: Are you planning on having that kind of exploration influence the gameplay or narrative?
Mosur: It's not going to be a focus point where we tell people what they're doing. Urban exploration, for me, is just going out and finding graffiti or interesting buildings and abandoned places. So we won't tell people to do it, but naturally it's going to happen as they explore the world. There will probably be some secret areas or pieces of graffiti.
There's going to be a loose story, a reason behind everything, but players can probably just ignore it and explore the city if they want. They'll just have to be wary of all the monsters.
Q: What kind of insights can you offer on the story?
Mosur: The story is something we've been working hard on for a while, trying to get it right. We'll continue to fine-tune it through the Kickstarter and release. Generally speaking it's about a megacity being controlled by an AI in a kind of technological future that's styled like 90s New York City. People have decided to replace the government with an AI capable of managing all city operations on its own, a sort of utopian idea where everyone's needs would be taken care of. But then something goes wrong and the AI snaps.
That's about as much as we're willing to offer right now. You're fighting against this AI now.
It's something I'm personally excited about, like I said earlier I've always been interested in writing. Coming up with ideas for this kind of futuristic sci-fi scenario is one of my favorite things in the world.
Q: Earlier you told me you're interested in music. What's the audio design going to be like for Bad Boro?
Mosur: Music is something I've always dabbled in. I'm not a professional or anything, but I'm interested in a lot of different styles like electronic or acid house. One way or another I got my cousin listening to electronic music, and he went in a totally different direction leaning into 90s UK garage, dubstep, 2-step. So we decided to make that the music style, matching our 90s aesthetic.
Originally for the demo I was creating music, it wasn't anything groundbreaking but I have a basic sampler and synthesizer. Between designing the game and programming and all, tasks were piling up. We also wanted to have some nice music, so we took to SoundCloud and Bandcamp to find someone who could make music for us.
I'm not willing to share who exactly it is, we're saving that for the Kickstarter, but we found someone who basically creates UK garage music professionally. We're working with them to create the short tracklist for the demo and then probably have conversations to see if they want to work with us for the full game. Ultimately, it's a weird mix of 90s electronic music.
Q: I also wanted to ask why you decided to change the game's name from Scrap Bringer to Bad Boro, and specifically why it's happening now.
Mosur: The first name was around very early, even before that original demo. I'd been working on the basic engine and we were brainstorming, knowing more-or-less what the game was going to be about: a character we came up with punching enemies in a big megacity. Those were the main strokes, and we both instantly fell in love with Scrap Bringer because it kind of defines that.
The main reason we decided to change that all these years later, going into our Kickstarter and demo, is that the definition of "scrap" we're using isn't what most people think of. Our intended definition was getting into a scrap, a fight. We figured most people would get it, but then we saw a "coming soon" article where the person asked some basic questions and wound up leaning into the trash definition.
That made us realize if we wanted to change things, we should really do it now. We even did a poll on Twitter to get to the bottom of things, and most people thought about scrap metal. It's tangentially related, there are robots you'll be destroying, but it's not the messaging we wanted to convey with our name.
We spent a week or two brainstorming as hard as we could, there's a list with probably over 100 names. Eventually we settled on Bad Boro, which sounds cool and more accurately describes what we're doing. It's a city where things aren't great anymore, it's got a punk vibe — and the punk scene is definitely another influence for us visually. It also has nice alliteration, and you can't mistake it for something it's not.
It's something we're excited about. It has been over four years, so we've had a lot more time to develop our story. A lot more thought went into deciding it, compared to the original name we settled on when we found something good. Now we've had the opportunity to analyze every angle, and the reveal seems to have gone over well.
Q: Regarding that Kickstarter, I know you've talked about delaying or putting it off for a while. Is there a reason it's taken so long?
Mosur: We're really just trying to release this demo. We're both perfectionists, and that's the main reason we've been pushing back the Kickstarter. At this point I should stop saying when it's going to be out, officially there's no ETA. As soon as the demo is ready we'll try and release that, and as soon as the Kickstarter is ready we'll try to release that. It's our first game, and we want it to be perfect.
We're also fairly confident with our game. We've been going to conventions, getting people to play it. While we are newbies, people have tried it to let us know what they like or what's strange. We have a good understanding of what makes the game feel good, and usually go back-and-forth on controls or fight mechanics. We've been trying to fine-tune everything.
There's a good chance we bit off more than we should have with the demo, but I guess time will tell. I'd say we have a small amount left, but it's still there and we need to make sure it's wrapped up.
Q: How much will be included in the demo?
Mosur: It's basically the first overworld area, a neighborhood in the city, and then the first "dungeon." A boss fight and mini-boss fight included. There's a learning curve involved, but we think for a free demo it's a good amount of content we'll be releasing.
Q: When you do launch this Kickstarter, is there anything specific you're looking to get out of it beyond making sure you can continue to eat?
Mosur: A major thing is to hire help. We definitely need help with the art, basic animation things like coloring. Possibly help with background art or sound design — which we're doing ourselves for the demo. We're confident we can create something that sounds good for now, but for the final game we want something professional. Also working with that musician I mentioned earlier, most likely getting a second pair of eyes on the programming to make sure it's optimized properly.
It's mainly about getting the things we immediately need to finish the game. But also to put some food in Konrad's mouth. I've got a full-time job I'm still working on while doing this.
Q: There's been backlash against Kickstarter's decision to look into crypto, NFTs. I've seen a lot of indie developers react to it, so I was wondering if it was a point of concern for you and Konrad going in.
Mosur: Honestly, I hadn't heard about that. It's something I'll have to look into, so we can see if it will affect us.
It's funny you mention that, at one point we floated the idea of creating NFTs as Kickstarter rewards, but that was over a year ago when they were just starting to be a thing. Now there's way too much negative press associated with it, and the whole thing doesn't really make a lot of sense. If we're going to make Kickstarter rewards unique, people don't need to have an NFT. They already have a one-of-10 kind of reward. It's a silly technology if you ask me, having a decent understanding of how the blockchain works.
Q: In terms of those rewards, have you come up with any other ideas like incorporating backers into the game?
Mosur: We're definitely going to try and do something like that. One example I can tell you is that the world is full of graffiti, so one tier we're interested in is having people design a type of graffiti with Konrad and the art team. It seems too perfect to not do.
How that will work, we still haven't decided. It could be a custom piece of artwork, or we might just write the backer's name. There could even be two separate tiers. We've also talked about tiers where people can help design NPCs, enemies, or mini-bosses. We love when games do stuff like that, it's really cool.
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Bad Boro is currently in development for PC.