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Red Rust is an action packed game for PC about fighting robots and travelling through time by direct orders from Comrade Stalin!

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Imagine a combination of a classical beat 'em up and a Contra-style shooter. That essentially is the idea behind Red Rust. Simple concept yet polished gameplay, great art and animation and cool characters. Characters like Red!

Red is a ruthless KGB spy who's been chosen personally by Comrade Stalin.

In the year 1985 Comrade Stalin still rules over the Soviet Union as a cyborg and a beloved Secretary of the Communist Party. 

It all begins in Berlin. Once Red lands her ballistic missile, she must locate the time machine and proceed with her secret mission.

The game consists of several time zones, and each time zone has several levels. 

Levels in turn hold all sorts of dangers including epic confrontations with mechanical monsters!

$22K – Interactive Comic Book Style Cutscenes

The easiest way to show the story progression is through simple text or dialogs within the game. But a much better method would be an interactive comic book style sequences! That means producing substantial amount of extra art assets and possibly even expanding the story. 

$30K – Flying Levels

Remember we were talking different gameplay situations? This is it! 
In the old days flying shooting levels were almost a mandatory thing for an arcade game and for a good reason: they are fun and they help to shake things up. Here you will be riding a Soviet ballistic rocket shooting enemies with your trusty Makarov pistol!

$40K – Driving Levels

How about having a driving level as well? That is really a dream come true! Just look at the concept design. Here you will be either chasing someone or escaping from a threat, like this giant robot! That can be even turned into a crazy boss battle of its own!

$65K – Branching Story

That’s a tough one, because that complicates the level design and expands the scope of development. But it certainly adds to the replayability.  Remember how in Contra Hard Corps at the end of some levels you could choose the direction the story takes? That’s super cool, but if we want a similar thing in Red Rust, that requires more levels and a reworked story.

Make no mistake, we really want to do it!

$75K – Printed Artbook and Soundtrack on Vinyl

The game development process generates a ton of cool art assets, like concept designs and test renderings of 3D objects and characters. It's such a shame that often in gamedev these piles of extra art end up collecting virtual dust on some hard drive somewhere. We can't have that! We are already offering a Digital Artbook as a perk, but nothing beats a physical printed Artbook. Printed artbook will have even more stuff!

Concept designs, character models, sprite sheets, background art. We want to publish an Artbook that will tell the tale of the development process and show the evolution of the game. 

This won’t be just pictures, there will be stories to read in this book too. We have plenty of stories!

It's also a chance to contemplate the progression of the project and to see all the designs that didn't make it into the game.

 

Both the Artbook and Vinyl Soundtrack (if funded) will be available for the backers at a significant Discount!

 

Get in touch with us directly.

We are a small development studio based in Prague, essentially a family business and we have the vision. For many months we've been pouring every spare ounce of time and money into this project, but we can only do so much without additional financial support.

Get in touch with us directly.

We want to see it through and make sure the game does not only see the light of day but is also good. And to make this happen we need to put more focus on it. Look at all that we've done while bootstrapping, and now image what we can accomplish with your help!

We envision Red Rust as a fun and addictive action game with great character designs, snappy animation and a story which is interesting, sometimes funny and sometimes heartbreaking. 

And most importantly, we want to get the community involved in the development process of the game. 

There are perks available that let you essentially join the effort or leave a permanent mark in the world of Red Rust!

A side-scrolling fighting game and a shooting game are two fundamentally different beasts. They have different mechanics and different pacing, but both genres are fun. We've decided to double the fun by mixing fighting with shooting in such a way that they don't upstage each other.

In other words there are parts of the game which are just about fighting and there are those which are about shooting. A typical Red Rust level is not just one monotonous stretch. It has a number of fighting and shooting situations and at least one boss battle (sometimes two). We put huge emphasis on bosses because we like developing and animating robotic monsters. It is tremendous fun!

Right now we have the prototype, it's still glitchy in some places, but we have the basic game mechanics up and running. The fighting system and the shooting system are working. Now we need to clean up the code, get rid of those bugs and create more content: more levels, more characters, more animation. 

We plan to release the game around November 2022. Red Rust will certainly be out on Steam and Atari VCS. 

Fun fact: Red alone has about 40 individual animations already done!

Boss battles are an integral part of Red Rust, because each mechanical monster not only has the potential to look really cool but also to introduce a fresh in-game situation.

Our prototype here has two shootouts with bosses and several more bosses (for other levels) are already in development.

We plan to have one or two boss battles per level (depending on what we can afford). Each one is presented as a 3D character, meaning that it has to be designed, modeled and animated.

Get in touch with us directly.

We went with somewhat unusual combination of 3D characters and hand-drawn backgrounds for the majority of levels.  Red Rust is a heavily stylised game with bright colors and we wanted  it to look like an interactive cartoon. 

2D backgrounds are not only more expressive than 3D, they also allow us to produce and test levels quicker. And we want to have a reasonable number of levels.

All characters are manually animated (no motion capture) and even the effects are mostly hand drawn!

Music is the soul of any game, we firmly believe that! Especially a game with any type of narrative. To make sure Red Rust has a soul we joined forces with two amazing composers: Michael Sobin and Roman Jelínek.

The Rewards we are offering fall into 4 major categories: those we can deliver very soon (within 1 – 3 months) and those which take longer to produce (like the game's entire soundtrack, the artbook and the game itself). And also there are digital and physical rewards. 

Physical rewards are naturally limited and they include:

-wall posters signed by the team;

-T-shirts with Red Rust characters;

-collectable figures;

Few words about the t-shirts and collectable figures

We've ordered a few test prints of the t-shirts. They are of a very high quality and you can select the size and the color of the t-shirt:

But we are still working on the frontal designs so you will have to give us a little time to finish those. And we will reach out to you so you can pick the design you like best from the selection of several. 

Physical collectable figures come in two flavours:

-4.5-inch figures (in height OR length) covered in metal paint and varnish;

-large 7.4-inch fully colored hand-painted figures; 

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Both types are produced on demand so again it will take few months for us to deliver. 

If you are getting one or more of the figures, you will be able to pick any character done so far. We will get in touch with you personally and give you the choice of currently available characters. 

Hand-painted figures are more sophisticated. They are produced by us inside the studio. First we make individual elements (it's easier to paint that way) which are then carefully colored and glued together. It's quite an undertaking therefore we only have a VERY limited number of those. But again, you can pick any character.

And talking about the characters!

All too often characters in arcade games are an afterthought. It's not the case with Red Rust. We are very methodical when it comes to designing the game and designing the characters. We go through multiple sketches and iterations (you will see them in the artbook), we consider the backstory of each regular enemy so everything can fit the narrative.

These are the game-ready characters completed so far:

Remember, right now it's just the prototype of one level, so we will have many more characters.

Even if you cannot contribute money you should know that even the mere fact of you reading this means a lot. Thank you so much! 

If you like Red Rust and want to help us more, please, share the Campaign on Social Media. Post it on Twitter and Facebook/Instagram, talk to your friends and maybe they will jump on board and sail with us towards a better, shinier future! 

Red Rust Web-Site

ArtSource Digital Web-Site

Get in touch with us directly