We’re working on a review for Neon City Riders, so I got in touch with Mecha Studios to talk a bit about the game. Come check it out!
PS4Blog: Hi! Welcome to PS4Blog.net. Can you please help us get started by telling our readers a bit about yourself and your work?
Thank you very much for the invitation. I’m Jorge Garcia, Director/Coder/Sd/and God-knows-what-else at Mecha Studios! We’re a small indie developer from Mexico. We’ve worked for three years on Neon City Riders, our first videogame, which is now available on all platforms.
PS4B: On that note, Neon City Riders is now out on PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch. How would you describe the game to someone who’s never heard about it?
It’s an action-adventure set in a post-cyberpunk decaying futuristic city where you need to explore, solve puzzles, obtain super-powers and fight through four different turfs to defeat their gang leaders to once again bring peace to the city. The fastpitch is its The Legend of Zelda meets Scott Pilgrim meets The Warriors.
PS4B: You mentioned it took you three years to make Neon City Riders? Where there any particular hurdles or challenges you had to overcome?
Yeah, it took us three years to complete it with three guys on the team. It was a pretty hard process because, even though we love videogames and have played tons of them, we had never worked on one before. The other hard part was developing this game in Mexico since the game industry is pretty new here, so there’s not a lot of support from the government. We basically funded the game from our pockets for the whole time.
We did a Kickstarter, but most of the money we’ve got went mainly for physical rewards and taxes. It’s also pretty hard for us to showcase our game outside of Mexico (going to events like PAX is pretty expensive!). Even when in Mexico, everyone loves a national project, but not many are willing to buy it, and even if they do, our currency is worth a lot less.
PS4B: You’ve been listening to gamers’ feedback since launch, and have worked on a patch for Neon City Riders that will be out on consoles soon. What changes or extra content will be added to the game from this patch?
Sure thing! Our priority is that each player’s journey through the streets of Neon City, so we listened to everyone’s feedback and lowered a bit the overall difficulty of the game, and added a new NPC that will allow the player to get the turf maps with basic annotations on them, making exploration a bit easier. Some minor bugs were also fixed, and almost 70% of the rooms’ designs were adjusted to be more approachable.
PS4B: And that’s all the time we have for today. Is there something else you’d like to add?
We want to thank you for the interview, and thanks to everyone who has shown an interest in and supported Neon City Riders and Mecha Studios. We love making games, and we hope you like our products as well!
