Drunken Robot Pornography

Ichiro Lambe started Dejobaan Games in 1999, and since the studio's humble beginnings, they've published a variety of different games. Their signature style isn't limited to a particular genre, instead perhaps, it's that they push in different directions and try new things. They're well known for the base-jumping AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! (Force = Mass x Acceleration), and recently we've also been playing what could be considered its spiritual successor, Drop That Beat Like an Ugly Baby.

But it's their most recent game, Drunken Robot Pornography, that we're talking about today. It's a bullet-hell shooter pitched in a 3D environment with jetpacks and power ups and bloody huge enemies to take down. It's also hard as nails, and it wasn't long after starting the game that we run into more challenging levels that demanded several replays.

The jetpack really makes the game in our opinion, adding movement and verticality to the action, and offering the player a chance to get out of even the most tricky of situations (albeit doing so later on in the game takes some skill). The colourful futuristic-themed stages are dotted with multi-levelled platforms and launch pads that spring you into the air, and movement is a necessity; stay still too long and it's game over.

It's frantic, moreish stuff, and the pumping soundtrack that underpins it is like the cherry on top. Basically, it's crazy, and the madcap action is held together by an even more madcap story that involves a newly-sentient bartender called Tim that's gone rogue, and twelve Centrefold robots (that also used to work for you) that need to blown to smithereens. With such a unique story and premise, it makes sense that DRP's origins are similarly unique.

"DRP started off as an April Fools joke back in 2010," Lambe told us. "The core concept had been spinning around in my brain for a while, but it was about two years ago that we began development in earnest."

It was an idea that came from a number of different inspirations. "Oh! I loved Smash TV, Warning Forever, Tribes, Quake, and their ilk. Smash TV for its relentless horde of enemies. Warning Forever for its bosses. Tribes for the jetpack action, and Quake for its fast paced FPS-ness. DRP's most strongly based on our 2004 jetpack FPS, Inago Rage. That game focused more on arcade-style enemy swarms and power-ups than DRP's boss battles. We include Inago with every copy of DRP, for folks to check out."

Normally bullet hell games are played from a top-down perspective in order to accommodate the huge amount of enemies faced. We then asked how they worked the formula into a 3D, first-person format. "Bullet hell in a shmup is about area denial, so with the third dimension, we made it about volume denial," Lambe explained. "The "arc columns" were, I think, a good example of this - you got these taaaaaaall volumes of energy you had to weave around. Dodging one isn't a problem, but a dozen gets trickier."

As mentioned earlier, the story in DRP is very, very silly, but it fits with the aesthetic and tone of the overall. "We like to have fun with our games," Lambe told us, before explaining how it was put together, and what the starting point was. "For DRP, I mostly sat in a darkened room with (Dejobaan creative minds) Dan Brainerd and Alicia Fontaine, and we brainstormed. "It should be about giant robots, but what are they called?" "The main character should have a doofy name." "Reuben!" "He's fighting against 12 Robot Centerfolds." "I like the name 'Moobidiah Jones'..." "What if this took place in the same world as our other games?""

The boss enemies that you meet along the way are massive, and defeating them means taking down power-ups to increase firepower, and then blasting away at highlighted areas on their huge robotic exteriors. We ask Lambe to describe the process for designing all the different Titans, and wondered how they kept things fresh. 

"Much credit during production goes to our level and Titan designer, Ryan Chadwick (with whom we worked on previous projects such as our BASE jumping title, AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAA!!!), but also to the Early Access players. When we started building the game, many of our Titans were these sorta spidery-looking things (Omnidroid from The Incredibles was an inspiration), but when we saw these crazy dragons and other things the players were creating, our jaws collectively dropped, and we committed to experimenting as much as we could. Our 3D modeler, Amy Mazzucotelli, did great there; in her design, you could tell she was thinking, "Hey, these Titan's don't all have to be boring arachnid things." I could swear she made a chicken once."

Then there's the soundtrack. "We licensed a lot of that from third parties, but a few tracks, such as the DRP theme were Yours Truly. There's also a semi-hidden track called "Gertie on the MSTA," written by Dan and our tech lead, Elliot Borenstein, over a weekend. Because hey, why not!"

Given what we know and what we've seen of DRP and other games from Dejobaan, it's clear that the studio has a unique ethos: "I have a mantra in the back of my mind: unique, joyous interactive entertainment."

"Unique, because treading existing ground never helped anyone. It lets us come up with games like Elegy for a Dead World, in which you visit long-dead worlds based on the works of British Romance-era poets, so that you can write about them. I don't think that one's been done before. Joyous, because I want people to come away from our games and say, "Man, I'm so glad I played them. They make the world a little bit more interesting."

So what else are the studio working on? "There's the aforementioned Elegy, and also we're looking to shortly complete our music game, Drop That Beat Like an Ugly Baby. Ugly Baby is the story of Azumi Pentak, a woman who skydives through the City of Boston scooping up data in an attempt to recreate the entire thing in a virtual simulation."

It's up on Steam Early Access now if you want to take a look. In fact, Early Access is something that the studio has really embraced. We asked what they think the benefits are. 

"Players are really good at telling you if you're on the right track or a terribly wrong one. Early Access just gives you an unfiltered view of what folks think of your game to counter the traditional approach of launching and hoping people like it. You don't have to sit there and pray on launch day: you already know if people like it!"

There's a surprising amount of content on offer in DRP, and that's on top of the 52 level story campaign. There's a survival mode and weekly challenges, plus level editor and robot building tools for those who want to make their own robotic creations. There's certainly plenty to keep fans happy.

We've played Drunken Robot Pornography for a few hours, and we liked what we've seen so far. It can be brutally difficult at times, and perhaps a little overly punishing at others, but it's pick up and play and has an old school challenge that lots of people will enjoy. It's oh so silly, but has fun with that daftness, which is why it works. If boss battles with giant robots and jetpacks sounds like it's up your street, you can grab the game on Steam for £11.99.