Nicoll Hunt on Fist of Awesome

It’s a warm, grey, muggy August day as I enter a pub in Soho, London. I’m here today to talk to Nicoll Hunt about his forthcoming game, FIST OF AWESOME, and to find out whether its alluring blend of old school sensibilities and a thoroughly modern streak of sublimely silly self-knowing wit can justify its fully capitalised name.

This isn’t the first time I’ve met Nicoll, nor is it the first time he’s been featured on the good ship Ready Up. Having previously been part of the small team behind 2011’s Hard Lines, which Dan was very fond of, I also attended a talk Nicoll co-hosted as part of the Develop Conference’s Indie Dev Day a short while ago.

Now though, Nicoll is a matter of weeks away from launching FIST OF AWESOME, which he describes as “an upcoming time-travelling lumberjack-’em-up, heavily inspired by games like Streets of Rage, Final Fight and Double Dragon.”

One of the biggest influences was last year’s Valentine’s Day.

Players take on the role of Tim Burr, a lumberjack who, for reasons too good to spoil here, seeks revenge against of army of violent bipedal bears and other woodland animals via the medium of punching them until they fall over… and kicking them if they get back up again.

I start by asking Nicoll the reasons behind the PETA-baiting concept at the core of FIST OF AWESOME. Has he ever been wronged by a vengeful moose, or does he just have a general hatred of bears? “It’s not so much inspired by events in my own life,” he says with a grin. “There’s a lot of different things that have gone into making FIST OF AWESOME what it is. One of the biggest influences was last year’s Valentine’s Day.”

Nicoll smiles, picking up on the blend of confusion and intrigue on my face. “So on the 13th February 2012, I’d not got my girlfriend a Valentine’s Day present because I’d been too busy with my head down trying to make an indie game… only to see it was six o’clock at night – all the shops were closed, and I couldn’t even sneak out anymore without being asked where I was going and why. So I decided to do something a bit different. I locked myself in the office / spare room and made a computer game in four hours. That computer game was a really heavily pixelated version of me with a big gnarly beard…”

Nicoll stopped suddenly. Fearing that one of the bears he could have a feud with was stood behind me, seeking revenge for slander or some-such, I turned to find that in fact a friendly member of the pub’s staff was politely asking if we could sit elsewhere, as the function room we were sat in had been booked for a party of 80 people with, thankfully, not a single grumpy grizzly in sight.

Taking our seats outside, Nicoll continued. “So I made a pixelated version of me with a big gnarly beard, walking from left to right on the screen, the background scrolling behind me, with a progression of different bears coming towards me… and after I’d punched this entire army of bears – an army of, like, five or six types of bears – I find my girlfriend. We meet up, we have a little kiss and I say ‘Happy Valentine’s Day! I hope you like your present.’ ”

It turns out that Nicoll’s elaborate interactive love letter didn’t receive the initial reaction he had in mind. “I took it to Cat, gave her it, and she was like ‘Have you made me an iPad game for Valentine’s Day? You know that’s a terrible idea for a gift’… she tried it and she relented and she was actually very happy with it.”

“So I’ve got this Valentine’s Day game and I thought ‘Ah hang on a minute – this whole punching bears thing, it’s actually a lot of fun.’ An iPad game where you can punch bears… before I knew it I had a prototype up and running and this was way better than the game I was making at the time. So I got ridiculously excited with myself and started making FIST OF AWESOME. It’s grown from there into this big massive project, and I never meant it to be… now it’s something else entirely, but it’s brilliant.”

In the 20 months following that initial Valentine’s-fuelled playable proof-of-concept, FIST OF AWESOME has picked up quite a following. Time Magazine’s ‘Tech’ blog declared it the ‘Most Surprisingly Awesome’ game of E3 2013 and a total of 951 Kickstarter backers were so enamoured with the game that they put their money where their mouth is; Nicoll’s gratitude is as palpable as his enthusiasm.

“Yes! It became something bigger than I ever thought it’d be. I asked for £5000 for the goal, over 30 days, and reached that after about two weeks. And by the end of the campaign, I had about £12,000 pledged through Kickstarter – it was amazing. Almost a thousand backers for this, what I thought was this silly little niche game about punching bears. So it was amazing, it gave me such great motivation to continue with this idea, and build the best game I could possibly make. And that’s what I’m trying to do right now.”

It’s a well-known pitfall that ports of classic scrolling beat-’em-ups suffer especially from the shoehorning of ill-suited and obvious touchscreen control schemes, so Nicoll designed a solution that retains the precision and immediacy essential to the genre, while sharing some control similarities to the hit Infinity Blade games and the iOS version of Mirror’s Edge.

“I’ve come up with a gesture-based control system and so, for example, if you want to punch, you just tap the right-hand side of the screen, anywhere, and you’ll do a little punch. Wanna jump up? You swipe up. Kicking: you swipe forwards; stomp when they’re on the ground: swipe down. If you hold down you do stronger [charge] attacks. And then I’ve linked them together, so you can stun people, grab them and throw them in all directions. It’s just a really instinctive way of doing it and, even though the game works with controllers as well, I actually kind of prefer the touchscreen [controls] now, which is weird, for the kind of game it is – you wouldn’t think touchscreen is the best way to play it, but I kinda prefer it now.”

Having played the game’s first level, I can wholeheartedly vouch for FIST OF AWESOME’s control scheme. After a brief adjustment period – made easier to digest thanks to a tutorial sprinkled with just the right amount of silly – I quickly found myself unleashing flurries of combos upon my timeline-distorting animal assailants. Punching, kicking, stunning, grappling and throwing, interspersed with flying kicks and stomping on downed opponents – all delivered via satisfying flicks and taps of the screen and, importantly, all delivered precisely when I wanted them to be, rather than when the controls thought I wanted to.

“I’ve tried my absolute best to capture the feeling of what you remember those games to feel like – the visceral feel when you punch things and everything reacts – and I think I’ve captured exactly what I felt in my brain as a child… I tried to make a game that I remember, not the game I really played, if that makes sense, and I think I’ve done a pretty good job with that.”

One of the key aspects in communicating this retro ‘feel’ is, of course, the game’s wonderful visual style; chunky pixel art aesthetics, equally ‘of their time’ and yet timeless, and designed solely by Nicoll. Though he is quick to correct me when I ask if FIST OF AWESOME has been an entirely solo endeavour.

“I had some help. The soundtrack has been done by an amazing musician called Brendan Ratliff, who’s also called ‘Echolevel’ and ‘Syphus’. He’s incredible, he’s made what I’m calling a masterpiece of a soundtrack for this game. And I’ve had a little bit of help on the animation side of things. All the [visual] design’s mine – but there’s so many frames of animation, I just had a little help finishing that all off. But it was very much just me trying to plough through and do everything on that game.”

“It’s not obvious – but one of the biggest influences for me is South Park, ’cause… I love South Park so much. I think you’d be hard-pushed to say that, technically, it’s a pretty-looking show – but it’s exactly what it needs to be. There’s so much humour and attitude – I love that. I’ve tried to, in a much more haphazard hack kind of way, do that in FIST OF AWESOME.”

With his humble uncertainty, Nicoll’s abundant pride in what he’s made is well-deserved. From my time with the almost-final version of the game, I can tell you that FIST OF AWESOME is a delight, a fantastic blend of old and new that will compel you with its action and stick in your heart thanks to its seemingly effortless charm, charisma and humour. Its origin as an elaborate love letter is felt immediately, with continually great visual gags, plentiful pop-culture references and an attention to detail that feels like it’s been handmade for you personally because, well, it has. And yes, its fully capitalised name is entirely justified.

A broad smile forms across Nicoll’s face as I ask him what he’d say to someone sat on the fence about potentially buying FIST OF AWESOME. “I think… if you’re not interested in the idea of punching a bear in the mouth, you’re an idiot! Like, dude, what is not cool about that?! It’s not even a real bear – you’re not hurting anything – and it’s so much fun! Also, there’s more to the game than just punching animals in the face. I keep this quiet, but I’m a vegetarian and I’m very pro-animal rights; in this game there’s a very good reason behind all this animal violence and it’s all redeemed in the end. But… I don’t want to ruin too much.”

“If someone’s sat on the fence, they should come to the Eurogamer Expo on the 26th to 29th September at Earls Court in London, and they can play FIST OF AWESOME in the Indie Games Arcade. I am personally going to be there, ravaging my voice and my entire health for the benefit of this game, so that people can play it and enjoy it.”

Due to launch on iOS, Android, Ouya and GameStick in October, with PC and Mac versions to follow later in the year, you can find out more about FIST OF AWESOME via ifightbears.co.uk and keep your eyes peeled for our forthcoming review here on Ready Up.

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