First, the good news: the human race managed to stop climate change, avoid nuclear Armageddon, and achieve world peace. The bad news: they wiped themselves out in the process. Omelets and eggs you know. They accomplished this feat in the most human way possible: by being lazy and arrogant. They stopped caring about any truth outside their own and let reason take the backseat to knee-jerk reactionism. This opened the door for the Supernatural, who swooped into this world, killed all the humans, and settled down to live happily ever after.
Or did they?… (Spoiler: they didn’t.)
RESEARCH and DESTROY takes place in a world where Supernatural creatures have crushed humanity. However, some people were smart enough to go (literally) underground during those dark times and teach their children the only thing that might restore humanity someday–science!
Generations later, a trio of Super Scientists emerge from the underground bunker with their RADvan. Having learnt everything they can from their old science books, they’re hungry for knowledge with a craving for some intense field work.
RESEARCH and DESTROY is set on a continent resembling Europe and Northern Africa, the traditional home of Vampires, Trolls, Werewolves, Mummies and many other Supernatural creatures. You’ll visit a variety of creepy castles, vile villages, deadly deserts, freaky forests and dilapidated dystopias to do some guerilla science fieldwork and attempt to wipe out the Supernatural threat.
The Super Scientists can’t do proper research inside their van. That’s just madness. They must build Universities where they can work and process the data from their field trips. But with the Supernatural hordes raging across the globe, don’t expect the Super Scientists to be able to study there in peace!
While there are only three Super Scientists in this world, it’s possible for players to join with others from parallel dimensions through the futuristic technology of simultaneous co-op play! Each player controls their own team of Super Scientists with custom appearances and loadouts. We’ll go into further detail about how to play with friends either online or splitscreen in an upcoming blog post.
Inspirational Influences
X-COM was a huge influence for us in terms of gameplay. RESEARCH and DESTROY started as a super simple prototype of an X-COM-like co-op game, but almost immediately evolved into this more action-oriented Turn-Based Action game (as we like to call it).
We also wanted to incorporate something like the research and global strategy systems from X-COM, so we actually changed the original setting. Going with a weird science setting would allow us to come up with all sorts of unique weapons and fascinating gadgets while adding a healthy dose of humor to the game world.
Of course, if you’re developing what you know is going to be a pretty big game with a very small team, it helps to keep the art style relatively simple to get the job done. The weird science theme lends itself to a cartoony art style, which is something we’ve wanted to do for a long time.
Visually, the game draws from a wide variety of 20th century comics and TV cartoons for inspiration. I don’t really have to mention Ghostbusters, do I? Or Scooby-Doo, or any of the other mystery-solving teens from Hanna-Barbera? The character designs for both the Super Scientists and the Supernatural creatures in RAD are deliberately kept simple to make them easy to recognize and extra memorable. And like all cool action heroes from that era, our Super Scientists have a really sweet ride.
The bright and simplified colors of the environments are inspired by cartoons like the Pink Panther, the artwork of Josh Agle (a.k.a. Shag) and Tim White to name but a few.
We hope you’ll enjoy this bright, colorful, post-truth, post-apocalyptic world-as-you’ve-probably-never-seen-it as much as we’ve had creating it.
