Jools Watsham, co-founder and director at Renegade Kid, announced via Twitter yesterday that the company are heading in a rather different direction following their Kickstarter campaign to fund development of episodic FPS Cult County fell short of its goal.
As part of our healing process after the KS failure, we’re developing a new experimental 2D game for 3DS. It has pixels and stuff. No cults.
— Jools Watsham (@JoolsWatsham) May 4, 2014
Renegade Kid are perhaps best known for Dementium: The Ward and Mutant Mudds, two games that were released on Nintendo handhelds to critical acclaim. It came as something as a surprise when development on Cult County for the 3DS was shelved in favour of a more ambitious game for home consoles, PC and the PS Vita. Fan response to this decision later persuaded Renegade Kid to add the promise of 3DS development to their campaign, but it perhaps came too late.
Nevertheless, despite the apparent end of development—at least for now—of the long-gestating and rather promising Cult County, fans of Mutant Mudds will no doubt be happy to hear that Renegade Kid are returning to 2D games, as well as having the 2D Treasurenauts to look forward to later this year, and a sequel to Mutant Mudds coming in 2015.
NintendoLife reports that Watsham has already stated Renegade Kid will not attempt another crowdfunding campaign for their new title. Given that it seems far more in line with their previous work, and at present has only been mentioned as being in development for 3DS rather than several platforms at once, this is perhaps unsurprising.
However, the thought of this new project being ‘experimental’ will no doubt have fans of the studio eager to hear more. With games like Moon and the aforementioned Dementium: The Ward, Renegade Kid have proven themselves quite capable of pulling off unlikely genres, styles of gameplay and even distribution methods on both the Nintendo DS and 3DS. It’s certainly promising to see that their unsuccessful foray into crowdfunding hasn’t dampened their inventive spirit.