Cuphead devs entirely rebuilt the game after E3 2015
Bring out the expensive china
You probably recognise Cuphead [official site] because you’ve been hearing about it for years. The action platformer was first announced at E3 2014, and it’s finally out on September 29. In between, the developers at Studio MDHR quit their jobs, remortgaged their homes and essentially rebuilt the game.
Until 2015, Cuphead was a series of boss battles with a distinct, 1930s-inspired cartoon style, not the platformer that we’ll be able to play in a few months.
“The truth is that we started Cuphead as a three person team, just working on the weekend,” lead designer Chad Moldenhauer told GamesRadar. “With such a small team we knew to keep our scope small; there were just a few bosses and a couple of weapons and everything was just less insane.”
But feedback from a 2015 demo revealed that players were hoping for more. So were the developers. They had originally envisioned a much larger game, but decided on a more conservative scope. After E3 2015, they went back to the drawing board.
“We realized that there were a lot of people out there that wanted what we were doing,” Moldenhauer said. “My brother and I quit our jobs, remortgaged our houses and began expanding the team. This was our chance to actually deliver the game we wanted to make all along, rather than the cut-scope game we originally planned with a three person team.”
Since then, they’ve added large, scrolling levels and a host of enemies for the eponymous Cuphead to fight as he repays a debt to the devil.