About
Street Heroes is a 2D side-scrolling retro beat 'em up for Facebook that updates a classic genre for a modern platform. It's completely free to play and invites you to customise your character and team up with your Facebook friends to take the city of New Luxem back from the wildly varied gangs that have claimed it. We're asking for your help in raising the £60,000 that we need to fund the remaining development of the game and believe that in it's final form it will shake up Facebook games for the better.
Our recent Street Heroes 'My City' teaser
Street Heroes is set in the city of New Luxem. Once a bustling beacon of industry, the city suffered mass unemployment following the introduction of robotic workers by the tyrannical and twisted electronics conglomerate: Smart Tech. Now many of New Luxem's denizens have turned to crime and havoc rules the streets as gangs run riot, laying claim to the city's districts. Enough is enough… it's about time someone stood up to the gangs and took Smart Tech down!
Street Heroes lovingly sits in the vein of classic 2D beat ‘em ups like Golden Axe and Streets of Rage but adds a slew of features including real time multiplayer for four players, infinite levels and deep personalisation. You can customise your character’s costume (hair, face, torso, legs), skin tone and an associated colour. For combat and performance, you can equip tons of melee and ranged weapons as well as special devastating ‘focus’ abilities, upgrade your characters health and focus bar and manage 5 stats: strength, defence, luck, speed and critical. Building up your character’s stats will greatly improve your chances at handling the tougher difficulty settings in-level.
As for the combat, you’ll use melee attack combos, gunfire, heavy weapon pickups, stat boosts, dodges, blocks and focus abilities to do battle with various enemy types and hulking bosses. Enemy types include heavies, ranged and teleporters. In fact there are 10 different enemy AI classes planned for the initial build of the game. In regular levels you have the choice of 3 difficulty tiers. Completing each awards you with a percentage of control over that level. Gain enough control and the boss will appear giving you the chance to defeat them and unlock their unique focus ability. Garner enough control over the levels in a district and the district boss will appear, giving you the chance to achieve full control and unlock special clothing, weapons and more. Each district also includes a horde level where you defend against waves of increasingly tough enemies and bosses for as long as you can on a limited set of supplies.
And then there’s the multiplayer. You can fight alongside 3 friends, or strangers, in both horde mode and the game’s main levels. You’ll earn greater rewards and show off your character’s look and abilities whilst enjoying features unique to the multiplayer, like the life pool and revive packs, that encourage teamwork. As you complete the game’s challenges you’ll unlock trophies that are displayed in your hub and these can be shown off to any visitors you receive in multiplayer. Playing with friends is more challenging, crazy and exciting.
Our recent Street Heroes 'A Fighter's Guide' teaser
Kickstarter was the obvious choice for us. It not only offers us the opportunity to raise the funding quickly, without having to make compromises or give up rights to publishers, but also helps us to foster a community whilst doing so, engaging with people who empathise with our vision and trading thank you gifts for your involvement and support. It’s a great place for a game like Street Heroes to be.
Why Should you be interested in Street Heroes?
Because there's nothing else quite like it on Facebook! The basic build of Street Heroes is already a big game: it has 9 levels spread across 3 districts. Each level has 3 difficulty tiers and each district has 4 bosses and a horde mode level… and our extended funding goals include a total of 5 additional districts! That’s another 15 levels and 4 horde modes! You can customise your character's look, stats, weapons, special moves and more. You'll run into a variety of enemy AI types hailing from many interestingly-themed gangs and listen to the awesome soundtrack by George Baldwin, inspired by retro game music, noir cinema and each district’s gang themes, as you fight to gain and maintain control of New Luxem… and there isn't a piece of crushable candy or farming equipment in sight! With Street Heroes we aim to bring a deep, challenging, addictive game to a platform that's largely reserved for puzzlers and management sims whilst exploiting the unique benefits of the Facebook platform to create awesome social and multiplayer features. Taking the city back alone is rewarding. Taking it back with 3 friends in real-time multiplayer is crazy fun.
The 'Old Luxem' area theme by George Baldwin
The 'Penningview' area theme by George Baldwin
Why do we want to build Street Heroes?
To offer an alternative in a marketplace saturated with casual games, because we love retro gaming and because we’ve poured our heart and souls into creating a game that we feel offers an interesting, diverse world and some really great gameplay and customisation mechanics. Street Heroes would also be a launch pad for ZyloWare. We hope that it’s success will be strong enough to support development of other games. We have other ideas and plans up our sleeves for the future, in different styles and on different platforms, and we want the opportunity to get out there and show the world just how creative and diverse we can be.
Street Heroes was a Facebook game from day one. The idea was born of frustration. Constant Facebook invites to games we just didn’t want to play. ‘We can’t be the only ones out there feeling this way’ we thought to ourselves. ’In fact, there are hundreds, nay thousands… nay millions of true gamers on Facebook!’. People who, like us, enjoy cooperative multiplayer. People who like to be challenged. People who play games for the action, the personalisation… the thrill! And that was that.
Facebook also offers a great free games market and our model sits perfectly within it. Anyone can play and complete Street Heroes at no cost but lux (in-game currency) packs and boosts can be purchased for those looking to advance through the game more rapidly. However, we’re very conscious of balancing the game in a way that ensures the difficulty and advancement curve is just right for those playing through the game without making premium purchases. Players will not be forced to visit the shop or penalised for not making premium purchases.
We're a group of creative individuals based in Brighton, England. Artists, writers, musicians, sound engineers… all working around the clock to make and launch Street Heroes. We opened ZyloWare in January 2013 with the ambitious aim of creating big games from nothing. Street Heroes is our first game but that hasn’t phased us since we all believe in the project and know we can succeed. As stubbornly dedicated and passionate individuals, once we sink our teeth into something it will happen and it will be the best it can be!
Our goal is to launch Street Heroes to Facebook in November 2014 with at least 3 districts, 4 horde mode levels, 49 full costumes sets and full 4-player multiplayer functionality. For this we need to hit our £60,000 minimum funding target but we plan for the game to grow even more later. However, if we’re lucky we might hit some of our extended funding targets listed below enabling us to bring our full vision of Street Heroes to fruition. Extended customisation, additional levels, new avatars, iOS and Android launches… it’s all below so please take a look and keep sharing to see if we can, by some miracle, launch with even more content!
We've come up with some really cool pledge rewards to show you how thankful we are for your support. They include getting your voice and likeness in the game, t-shirts, signed artwork and even the opportunity to design an entire district! Please have a scroll through below and, if you're in a pledgey mood, pick the tier that's right for you! Your pledges mean so much to us and any amount brings us a step closer to achieving our dream.
A'Tale of New Luxem'. If you pledge at the 'General of the Allegiance' level, one of these will be created for you and will be a collectible in the game.
Risks and challenges
There are risks and challenges that we may face in the development and production of Street Heroes. We may face challenges whilst building the multiplayer systems and in keeping the game's loading times short with the amount of content we are including. We are prepared to meet these issues head-on and dedicate time to solving them. Time and money within our five month planned development cycle has been allocated for buffering and for troubleshooting obstacles like these. That said, there is always the chance that we would need to push back our game launch date if the issues we face take more time than expected to resolve. We would much rather do this than release a sub-par product early and are devoted to making Street Heroes the very best game it can be. However, we do not foresee any major issues during development and are confident that we can finish the game in the planned time.
We are aware that this is the first time we have worked together on a project such as this and our project pipeline and planning will inevitably need to be updated and learned from as we go to accommodate bumps in the road, but we ask that you put your faith in our devotion, vision, passion and stubbornness to get Street Heroes out there!
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Funding period
- (30 days)