Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl is Passion Project Platform Fighter

Summary

Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl has been a passion project for two studios that love platform fighters and Nickelodeon’s characters.
They took their expertise for the genre, blended it with Nickelodeon, and threw as many Easter eggs and references they could fit.
Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl releases on Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S on October 5 and is available for pre-order today on the Xbox Store.

Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl is coming to Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S very soon and we here at Ludosity and Fair Play Labs can’t wait to get into everyone’s hands. I am Joel Nyström, CEO at Ludosity, and you’ll also hear from Fair Play Labs’ game director here as we share excitement for players to finally be able to knock each other out in Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl.

We released the platform fighter Slap City a few years back and got some very positive reception. Nickelodeon reached out to us and asked us to see if we wanted to do something in that space together. We put together a prototype and showed it to our publisher, GameMill Entertainment, and here we are! Following that, Fair Play Labs came on board to help us create the game. Most games with this amount of content and scope have more than one studio involved. I think we’ve worked closer than most cases perhaps, but it’s been more fun and rewarding to work together. Our little, small studio could have never managed this project alone, and I think Rodriguez and Fair Play Labs agrees. “It’s been great working with Ludosity, both studios have had a common goal from the beginning, to deliver a fun game which a lot of people can enjoy.”

An of course, the fourth member of the team is Nickelodeon. They took the initiative to do this, and they have continued to encourage us to push our own creativity on the character movesets and overall design of the game. Everyone involved wants this game to be a success.

At its heart, Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl is a platform fighter. It’s all about ringing out your opponents by fighting hard and outmaneuvering them on the stage. It’s easy to get into, but the gameplay mechanics go deep and hopefully will be rewarding also for the competitive players out there. It was important to us and Rodriguez at Fair Play Labs that the game be playable by anyone, but also feature depth. “We have put a lot of effort to help create a game that appeal to newcomers and competitive players while trying to stay true to all the shows we are including into the game.” We’re really excited for players to see how smooth Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl plays while still being deep and competitive.

The characters are a big part of the experience and getting the chance to work with so many of Nickelodeon’s characters has been amazing. It’s hard to say who has been the most exciting, but realizing both SpongeBob SquarePants and the Ninja Turtles were going to be in the same game was mind blowing. For Rodriguez, though, it’s all about Invader Zim. “Zim hands down. I have been waiting a long time for having the opportunity to play as Zim.” In terms of actually playing, Rodriguez is a Zim main, but I still feel like I am learning SpongeBob. He’s one the most all-round characters and the perfect starting point to get into the more technical stuff like tech-landing, wavedashing, perfect blocking and smart positioning. I also struggle against April. We’ll have to keep an eye on her. It will be fun to see the meta play out and we’ll keep a close eye on that for future balance patches.

The reception to the game has been incredible, and it was completely unexpected. We had a feeling Slap City fans would be interested in our next adventure, but neither Rodriguez or I ever expected this level of hype. “It has been amazing looking at all the reactions and how excited people are in general.” We’re hopeful that both Nickelodeon fans, fans of platformer fighter, and the fighting game community embraces the game. Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl releases on Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S on October 5.