What is Fist Puncher?

Fist Puncher is a retro-styled, side scrolling beat ‘em up with RPG elements and plenty of button mashing goodness. It follows a group of vigilantes as they fight their way through the streets of a lawless city. We like to think of it as Double Dragon meets Castle Crashers. We’ve already been working on in for 18 months and this Kickstarter project will get us the last bit of funding we need to see it through to completion. We are developing this game in XNA, so we’re targeting a release on Xbox LIVE Indie Games and PC.

Who are you guys?

We’re two brothers, Matt and Jake Lewandowski, who’ve been making and playing videogames together since we were kids. You may know us best as Team Fist Puncher from IGN’s ‘The Next Game Boss’, a reality show that pitted six teams of indie developers against each other as they raced to complete a fully functional game over the course of one week. We won that show with our game Washington’s Wig, a platformer starring George Washington’s fictional dog, Dogsworth McFreedom… wearing a powdered wig of course. Hopefully this proves we’re not just a couple buffoons, we’re legitimate indie developers with legitimate indie beards.

How do we know Fist Puncher will be any good?

We’d like to think it’s already pretty good, but we’re perfectionists and we don’t want to release a game that isn’t all it could be. There are currently 8 playable characters, including Dr. Karate, Steroid Jackson, Kid Justice and Hella Fistgerald. Each has their own unique backstory and move set. There are also over 30 levels, hundreds of unique enemies and tons of hidden and unlockable content. Not only did we win IGN’s Next Game Boss competition, we showed the latest build of Fist Puncher at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) this year. For three straight days we put Fist Puncher to the test with media, industry professionals and hardcore gamers – and the reception was overwhelmingly positive. We believe we have a really fun game on our hands here, a perfect mix of old school aesthetics and modern playability. We’ve tried to infuse our unique humor and personality into Fist Puncher, but we believe gameplay comes first!  Check out a few Fist Puncher trailers or take a look at some gameplay footage from GDC below:

What do you need $10,000 for?

So far this project has been 100% self-funded. We’ve already spent thousands of hours bringing Fist Puncher to the point it’s at now, creating every piece of pixel art and every line of code from scratch. Since we both have full time day jobs it can be slow going creating a game on nights and weekends. $10,000 would let Matt quit his job and devote his time to making sure the game gets finished by this summer. The money would help us officially setup a company, deal with business licensing and start our game studio the right way.  It would also give us extra resources to find a publisher so we can get Fist Puncher to the masses.

What do you still need to add?

Even though Fist Puncher is fun and fully playable as it is, we want to make it amazing. This is what we plan to add and improve over the next few months:
• Better Boss Battles. We have bosses but we haven’t had the time to sit down and make them a real focus. Beat ‘em ups need to have memorable bosses and we intend to give Fist Puncher some of the best.
• Improved Level Design. Beat ‘em ups have not always been famous for level design, usually they just involve waves of enemies for you to button mash your way through. However, we’re committed to fine tuning the pacing and strategy needed to make our levels more interesting.
• Finish the RPG Elements. You can already gain experience, level up and assign skill points to each characters’ various categories, but making the RPG elements really shine takes time and balancing.
• More, More, More. We already plan on adding more levels, enemies and unlockables, but we want Fist Puncher to be deeper. Any funding we obtain in excess of our goal will be used to add as much content as we can.

Keeping you up to date.

We’ll post weekly updates and video footage of our progress. You’ll get to see what we’re working on and offer feedback on what we’re doing. Your input matters. Since we’re just a two man team, if you convince one of us something belongs in the game, there’s a good chance it will happen.

Thank you!

We’re passionate about making games and we’re excited to put the finishing touches on Fist Puncher and get it out to a wider audience. Thanks for reading our pitch and we hope that you’ll consider supporting our project.

For more information about us and Fist Puncher, our website is www.team2bit.com.

You can follow us on Twitter (@Team2Bit) or like us on Facebook (Team2Bit) for development updates and other news.  http://www.facebook.com/pages/Team2Bit/203966066317329
http://twitter.com/#!/Team2Bit

You can find more of our videos and game trailers on our YouTube page: http://www.youtube.com/user/team2bit/videos

Email kickstarter@team2bit.com if you have additional questions for us.

Thanks again!