Warstride Challenges Is What Happens When You Put Doom, Trackmania and Super Meat Boy in a Blender
Hi everyone! I’m Ludwig Dresh, Co-creator at Dream Powered Games, the small studio behind the frenetic first-person shooter Warstride Challenges. I want to introduce you to our unique shooter, and explain how we brought it to life.
Warstride Challenges is a high-octane fast-FPS in which you blast demons in satisfying one-minute massacres using powerful abilities and weapons. In each level you’ll die and retry to chase the highest score in solo, or chase other players’ ghosts in online mode. After 10 months in Early Access, today sees the release of the game’s v1.0! We hope you’re ready to blast demons at lightning speed.
As die-hard ’90s fast-FPS fans, our team of five really wanted to capture the essence of our favorite games, with a unique twist. Our prototype started out as a more conventional fast-FPS project with a campaign mode, but as we started playtesting with our friends, we noticed how much fun everyone was having speedrunning the levels. So we decided to take the concept of speedrunning further and make a fully-fledged game out of it!
We mainly focused on achieving a short, session-oriented game that offers a satisfying 15–20-minute run to let off steam! It needed to be fast, brutal, rewarding and allow you to enjoy short gameplay sessions. Our main inspirations all contributed to push each of these core aspects were: Doom, for the “ultimate killing machine” feeling; Trackmania for the time trial and short gameplay sessions; and Super Meat Boy for the difficulty and the die & retry formula. Warstride Challenges is very much the lovechild of these three titles!
We are a small team of five, who met years ago at university or more recently online. We are also lucky to count a few extra friends who provide precious help on specific aspects such as animations, characters, concept art, music… Of course, we don’t all share the exact same taste, but being a small number of people driven by a common passion makes our discussions pretty straightforward, and we easily find a common ground to design our game’s features.
We do sometimes need to consider the different directions formulated within our team further before agreeing. To do so, we create separate versions of the game to test each proposal and base our decision after doing some playtesting. Our discussions and playtests have proven really useful, as we have come to realize how much an idea can sound brilliant on first consideration but turns out to give a terrible result!
The most challenging aspect of working as such a small team is to keep the motivation going in the long run. Truth be told, it isn’t easy every day to work on a prototype for a really long time behind closed doors, without any player feedback. On the other hand, there is nothing more rewarding than finally seeing players discover the game and have so much fun in it!
So, whether you join us for the first time when Warstride Challenges exits Early Access, or are one of our early Striders, who have been taking part in our development journey over the months leading up to the release of the v1.0, we hope you are on your mark and getting set to go through demonic levels at lightning speed! Play Warstride Challenges on Xbox Series X|S today and try the demo for free.
