The chances are you’ll know developers Butterscotch Shenanigans from their Crashlands games—enormous open-world action games in which you fight, loot and craft your way to victory. However, if you’re an indie game developer, it’ll be their Coffee with Butterscotch podcast that’s most familiar, the long-running show dissecting everything indie for years. But today I draw your attention toward them for something far, far sillier: How Many Dudes is a forthcoming…I’m not sure there’s a genre title for this…game that asks, how many dudes does it take to kill 30 toddlers and a duck-sized horse? So yes, I spoke to them to see what on Earth is going on.
Butterscotch Shenanigans was created by three brothers—Seth, Sam and Adam Coster—and was originally best known for fun, experimental and superbly animated mobile games, like Flop Rocket and Quadropus Rampage. That is, until Sam Coster was diagnosed with stage 4b lymphoma, and the three decided that was the moment to work on something bigger and more substantial. The result was Crashlands, and it proved successful enough, after creating platform game and engine Levelhead, for the team to move on to Crashlands 2.
With Sam in remission (and, I’m delighted to report, now officially cancer free!), that sequel was a four-and-a-half-year project, with another six months of updates and new content after launch, leaving the three siblings and their newer colleagues really ready to do something else. Something smaller. Something incredibly dumb. Thus How Many Dudes.
© Butterscotch Shenanigans / Kotaku
The game plays something like an auto-battler, in which you gather an ever-growing group of dudes who must fight teams of enemies of various bizarre natures. You begin the game with a single dude, tasked with fighting a group of 10 toddlers. Yup, right out of the gate. At this stage you’re essentially an observer, watching the battle play out before you, and you’ll either be relieved or horrified to learn you’ll definitely win. As a result you gain $100 to spend on items you can deploy during battles, and also get to select a new dude to add to your team. In that first choice you can pick between a Knight Dude or a Paladin Dude, and obviously each of the many, many dudes has their own stats and skills. From then on, it’s all about picking the right dudes, deploying the right skills at the correct moments, and trying to save enough money to buy revives for all who fall in battle.
Having played an early build of the demo being released today, I chatted with Seth Coster about why I’d just spent so long punching crowds of toddlers to death.
“First of all, those toddlers are gonna be fine,” Coster assured me. “I have it on good authority that they’re happily munching on hay in a farm upstate.” So that’s a relief. But I still wondered how they got here. What process brings a creative team to an idea like this? “In the past, when starting a new game, we would start by asking what we wanted to play, and then we would try to bring that into the world. It has always worked for us in terms of quality—we’ve found that we can make whatever game we set ourselves on, and we can make it at a high level of polish and fun.”
We’re not out to prove anything about our skills or capabilities. We’re just making something fun.
Despite this, and despite routinely high review scores, Butterscotch Shenanigans has found it tough to get much attention. “It has always been very difficult to get players, press and streamers to notice our games and talk about them,” says Seth. “And I don’t blame them; there are a trillion games out there!” As a result, the team decided to try a new approach this time. “What can people not stop talking about?” they asked themselves, eventually landing on the internet debate about “how many dudes it would take to beat up a gorilla.”
“We didn’t even have an idea of what the game would be,” notes Seth, “we just wanted to make it about that. From there we iterated fast with no real roadmap or plan—we prototyped the game during the Game Maker’s Toolkit Jam, so there wasn’t really time to overthink it.”
Five days later they’d created something that felt to them like a mix between Balatro and TABS, a “roguelike thing,” and people’s response to the jam entry was really positive. “We thought we might’ve just struck gold. Or at least copper.”
As bizarre as it all sounds, from what I’ve played this appears to be true. While the first couple of rounds where you have little role might seem strange, it ramps up quickly as your decisions have more effect on the results. Which types of dudes you choose to recruit strongly changes your experience in any run, along with the upgrades and bonuses you pick, and with each battle lasting less than 30 seconds, it’s a quick and bloody process.
© Butterscotch Shenanigans / Kotaku
So how do you go about deciding the rules here? Who does the research to identify the correct amount of power and skill necessary to win in a fight with 30 duck-sized horses? “An anchor point in the game is the Regular Dude,” explains Seth Coster. He’s the one you start with, the average dude. “Everything in the game is orientated around him—how hard he can hit, and how many hits he can take. So when we’re designing a new enemy, we just ask, ‘Do we think this thing hits twice as hard as a Regular Dude? Five times as hard? TEN? And how many hits can it take compared to a Regular Dude?’”
So yes, a horse “can probably take lot of punches.” (I hope my mum doesn’t read this article.) A horse-sized duck is the game’s first boss fight, for instance. “Weight classes exist for a reason, and horses are HUGE,” observes Seth. “Plus you gotta get past its flailing legs. Our sophisticated calculations have shown that a horse has 35 times the HP of a Regular Dude, which equates to about 70 seconds worth of regular punches.” Uh-huh. “Trust me, the math is sound.”
I wondered, given the nature of that bar discussion topic of how many people it might take to fight a hundred worm-sized tigers and so on, whether the game might also pitch the enemies against one another to decide other natural questions. Who would win in a fight between a horse-sized duck and 100 toddlers? “The game isn’t about the answer,” says Seth very wisely, “it’s about the question. Because the answer to the question can only be, ‘It depends.’ The reason there’s ever a debate about ‘who could win in a fight’ is that the debate is actually about assumptions. How much prep time do the various parties have? If we’re talking about mythical creatures (like lion-sized ants), what kids of liberties are we taking with their capabilities?”
He’s not done. “If we’re talking about Dudes versus a gorilla, what kinds of Dudes are we talking about? Olympic gymnasts? MMA fighters? Accountants? Marines? And do the Dudes have prep time, or are they just all thrown into the ring with the gorilla without warning?”
I’m regretting the question.
“The fun of the debate isn’t in having an answer, it’s about exploring all the possibilities. So that’s really what the game has ended up being about! We have LOTS of different types of Dudes in this game, each with their own unique capabilities and limitations. And then we throw them into the ring with a whole bunch of weird opponents to see what happens.”
So will the game let the enemies fight, too? No, I’m not asking again. Moving on, I wondered what motivated this return to a smaller, sillier idea, after the success of the Crashlands games. Was it something Butterscotch had missed?
Players will never stop asking for more sequels and more features and more updates, but that’s just them expressing that they love a thing and want more of it.
“Certainly!” says Seth. “When you work on one thing for longer than it takes to get a college degree, you go a little crazy. But also, that one thing tends to take on an outsized importance. When you’re committing that many resources to something, you start to get in your own head about how everything has to be perfect. Especially if you’re trying to make a game that has a big story and lots of world-building.”
But in this case? “How Many Dudes exists for one reason only: to be fun and stupid. It’s not trying to say anything important. It’s not trying to be anything other than what it is: a goofy game. So whenever we think of something that makes us chuckle, we just throw it in there. We don’t have to ask about the story implications, or whether it ‘fits’ with the world, or how it’s going to integrate into some larger vision for the game.”
© Butterscotch Shenanigans
Butterscotch Shenanigans has always been a very mobile-forward developer, but also one that charges a price for its games instead of littering them with ads and IAPs. Given just how dire things feel in mobile spaces for premium games, I wondered if this is still viable. “I’m not gonna lie…” says Coster. “It’s rough. Over the past nine years, our mobile revenue for new premium launches has declined by about 90 percent. I’m not sure whether others are experiencing the same thing, but that’s one data point for you. On the flipside, Google Play Pass and Apple Arcade do offer much clearer paths to success for a premium game—provided you can get into either of them.”
This is why the company has shifted to cross-platform launches. “We plan to launch How Many Dudes on Steam, Google Play and the App Store,” says Seth, “and maybe Xbox if the Game Pass team reads this article and wants to give us a call…”
© Butterscotch Shenanigans / Kotaku
I highly recommend those Crashlands games, by the way. They feel perfect on a tablet, playable in short bursts, and come with hours and hours of stuff to do. And their daunting scale certainly does suggest a daunting amount of work. Do those games put pressure on the studio to have to match them, or even go bigger, spend more, raise ambitions ever-higher? “There are always expectations and demands,” says the Coster brother, “but that comes with the territory. Players will never stop asking for more sequels and more features and more updates, but that’s just them expressing that they love a thing and want more of it. In a weird way, those player demands don’t create pressure; they just create guidance on possible next steps.”
The real pressure, says Coster, comes from within the team. Previous games have been about proving something to themselves, proving they’re capable of making long-lasting “hobby games” (Levelhead) or big and intricate games (Crashlands 2). “But in both cases, those were pressures we put on ourselves. How Many Dudes, on the other hand, feels pretty light by comparison. We’re not out to prove anything about our skills or capabilities. We’re just making something fun.”
You can get the How Many Dudes demo right now from Steam, and go slaughter ducks and toddlers to your heart’s content.
