If I’ve been missing from the internet it’s because I’ve been spending my evenings grinding on a game from Butterscotch Shenanigans called How Many Dudes? Hot off the heels of the release of their massive multi-year sequel project Crashlands 2, the family+ operation at BS turned a little game-jam style prototype into a “Featured on the Apple App Store” game in under a year.
How Many Dudes? seeks to solve ancient internet riddles like:
- How many toddlers could you take on in a fight?
- Would you rather fight 100 duck-sized horses or 1 horse-sized duck?
- Who would win: 100 men vs 1 gorilla?
The premise is pretty simple. Build a team of fighters with different abilities and power-ups and enter the arena to fight different enemies and bosses. For me this game has it all:
- Balatro-level of power creep
- Impactful decision making
- So much economies
- Great art style and hilarious copy
- A proper amount of gore
- Enjoyable difficulty curve
- RNG, but not too much
Those characteristics all lead toward a game with great replay-ability. Mastering lower tiers unlocks characters and power-ups in higher tiers creating a perfect “loopback” system where I want to 100% the lower tiers before moving on. A full round takes around 20 minutes but you can stop and start it effortlessly like a good casual game.
I could go on forever about the power stacking economies in this game but it’s the little bits that impress me the most. Like how the characters don’t have proper walk animations and instead rotate and bob as they shimmy their way across the screen like a paper cutout on a popsicle stick. This may seem like corner cutting but on a screen with 1000+ combatants, particle effects, blood splatter, and explosions… I bet limiting characters to a single low-frame combat animation cycle is a critical ingredient for good performance.
Then there’s the characters themselves. With nods to other game franchises, movie tropes, and popular (but litigious) dungeon crawling tabletop systems, the game about memes builds on cultural memes to add depth. And even though these characters don’t talk, interact, and you don’t technically control them, the hilarious copy hidden within the power-ups and item pick-ups gives a game with a lot of characters a ton of character.
I will confess some bias; Butterscotch Shenanigans is one of my favorite gamedev studios and I’m internet friends with their CEO Adam Coster (he’s even been on my podcast). It didn’t start like that. Before knowing Adam, I watched their GDC talks and mentioned their studio in a post I wrote about a GMTK video essay. I like their approach to prototyping a lot but what I like most about Butterscotch Shenanigans is that they have that old-world #indieweb ethos of sharing what you know. They have a blog for detailing their process, a podcast, and offer open source tools for GameMaker on GitHub. If I ever pivoted to gamedev, I’d want to build a studio like theirs. A big inspiration for me.
Anyways, that’s my review of How Many Dudes? If you like deck-building rougelikes or button mashing power fantasies, I think you’ll like this game. And here’s my Dude tier list in case you’re wondering…
