Death Road to Canada an indie game take on The Walking Dead, with Mounties and Elvis
In the grim darkness of a zombie-infested future, Canada is the only hope.
This is the setup for Death Road to Canada, a just-launched video game by a tiny team with somewhat unusual resumés for indie games developers.
Death Road is a mix of old-school pixel art, moody lighting, twitch-based reactions and off-the-wall humour. It features moose-riding Mounties fighting off zombies with hockey sticks as well as a wide swatch of recruitable characters: from a dog that can learn how to drive the team's Winnebago to Elvis himself.
"You have a car full of jerks on a road trip from Florida to Canada," the last place on earth not overrun by zombies, explains Kepa Auwae, head of Rocketcat Games.
Death Road is a collaboration between Auwae and Madgarden, otherwise known as Paul Pridham of Kitchener, Ont.
"The story is a humorous take on how America sees Canada, as thought up by someone that lives in Kitchener," says Auwae.
The team's path to game development wasn't straightforward. Auwae, for instance, started tinkering with games while working as a pediatric nurse on the night shift in Washington. "There's not a lot to do after work at 3 a.m.," he says.
He formed Rocketcat with Jeremy Orlando, a programmer in Detroit, and Brandon Rhodes, who was then a pizza delivery guy in Arizona.
Pridham previously worked in technical fields like industrial networking.
"I realized that was bullcrap and I should be making games," he says. The Canadian moved into-full-time development as Madgarden in 2010.
Navigating indie success and frustrations
Rocketcat found its stride when they teamed up with Pridham to make Punch Quest, an endless runner game similar to Temple Run or Sonic Dash, released in 2012 and since been downloaded more than 3 million times.
Rocketcat followed up with Wayward Souls, a moody treasure hunting and exploration game that has been compared to hardcore gamers' favourite Dark Souls.
Death Road is the collaborators' first game to launch on PC instead of smartphone, a move that has allowed them to avoid the struggle between making a mobile game profitable for its developers and fun for players at the same time.
"How free-to-play games work is that you're counting on people to get annoyed, and then having to pay to reduce their annoyance," says Auwae.
"Anyone who's played Candy Crush Saga, run out of turns and felt the pull to pay for a few more to finish a level will understand this anguish."
Rocketcat and Madgarden designed Punch Quest against this "pay-to-win" sensibility, but as a result, the number of players paying for items, such as additional attacks or hats to customize your character's look, was so low that the quartet wasn't making any money.
Auwae says he was able to increase the price of items to make Punch Quest profitable enough to support the small team's continued work — without adjusting the game to make these items mandatory.
Death Road to Canada launched Friday on Windows, Mac and Linux computers, but the developers are already working on several other projects, including Dad by the Sword, a humorous take on the prevalence of fatherhood themes in modern video games mixed with slapstick humour in the vein of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
"Dad games make tons of money," Auwae says, citing popular titles like The Last of Us and Heavy Rain.
"I saw all these dad games and thought 'I also want to be a part of this billion-dollar dad wagon.' At least, I wanted to make fun of it."
