Last month, indie outfit Butterscotch Shenanigans announced that its crafting-action-RPG Crashlands had sold more than 500,000 copies, 118,000 of them on the PC. This month, the studio revealed that it is now working on a new project called Scuffle Buddies, which may or may not be some kind of multiplayer esports thing with small animals and a ball.
"We were quite literally starved for resources and time when developing Crashlands. There were so many features we wanted to have in the game but had to drop, as well as so many proper platform adaptations we wanted to include for launch but weren't able to, due to being such a small team," Butterscotch brother Sam Coster explained. "Our PC launch reflected this in many ways—we didn't have multiple control schema out of the gate, didn't allow for proper Settings fiddling, and didn't have big resolution options. And players certainly picked up on it—the game didn't seem fully prepared for its PC debut. We corrected all of these post-launch, but the framing of the game in the market had already hardened by then,"
"Since Crashlands' launch we've doubled the size of our team, so we have way more game-making capacity. We've put extra time into tools development in the past year, leading not only to huge process improvements for our team, but also to a new animation engine that gives our creatures and characters more life ... And, frankly, our overall design approach is born out of a more PC-player focus this time around."
The developers aren't saying what Scuffle Buddies actually is at this point: The scufflebuddies.com website features a wallpaper, a catchy theme song, the obligatory mailing list signup, and links to a Discord and subreddit, where speculation as to the nature of the game is already well underway. The background image appears to be a large crowd of people milling about an arena of some sort, that's adorned with red, green, and blue diamonds; the Scuffle Buddies logo itself is capped with some kind of cyber-ball, and a robotic dog paw-print. Or maybe it's something else, I'm not sure about that one.
Butterscotch Shenanigans hasn't said when the new game will be revealed in full, but I would expect something fairly soon.
