Investigating the Grey in Black & White Bushido
We have here another Digital Forensics, a great looking game from Great Catch, called Black&White Bushido.
The game is a pretty cool concept, a 4 person brawler that is based around subterfuge, misdirection and good ol’fashioned maiming your opponents. As they say in at the start of the of the articles, A couch brawler with a unique stealth twist.
The postmortem is refreshing, its a successful and well made game from an established studio.
The postmortem is separated into clear What went Right and What went Wrong sections. They are pretty short and sweet so I will not cover them in depth, although I suggest you read the postmortem itself to get the most out of it.
Working with love, creating fans and a unique style.
The team started with a concept that everyone was on board with, if your team loves what they do then it really helps to round out some of the edges that development can have. With the choice in style they took, it seems like an easy concept to fall in love with.
The style choice gave them a game that stood out pretty starkly from other titles. It worked to their benefit whenever they decided to take the game on the road and attend game conventions. This netted them a great marketing angle as well as piquing the interest of contacts that may have otherwise passed them over. This lead the team, indirectly; to partner with Green Man Gaming as their publisher and get their game to market faster and with less mess than they would have found with the Steam Greenlight process at the time.
Marketing, Multiplayer and the lack of Research into both.
The online multiplayer was the biggest problem the team tackled. Due to some false impressions in regards to the popularity of it, they suffered a bit. When I was looking into this personally, that was the biggest culprit for bad review scores. It seems as if the said scores are based on the LACK of activity on the game servers rather then the quality of the multiplayer itself. Something of a lose lose unfortunately.
The lack of research into key areas showed, but the strength of the game itself was enough to push past that and its success lead to the team creating their own studio.
Marketing ended up being another hiccup. While they gained a solid core following from conventions, they made the mistake of waiting too long to start marketing. There was little hype surrounding the game so that even though it was well received, not many knew about it.
I feel like this will be a repeating theme, especially on a team’s debut efforts.
The game looks great and it stands out with a unique aesthetic and a fast paced play-style. Whenever I get a Switch, it will definitely be high on the list of games to grab. I see it as a great couch multiplayer game for me and the roommates to play.
Black & White Bushido is on Steam, Xbox One and the Ps4 as well as the Nintendo Switch.
Please go and read their actual Postmortem here:
This article was only a brief overview and I cannot reinforce how important reading these are to developers of all kinds. These articles will always serve to be a highlight to these postmortems. They are invaluable to us all and everyone should go read them! These minefields have already been swept by those that came before and while you will likely find some on your own, you can at least avoid the ones that have been shown
