Become the most popular Martial Arts stuntman Hollywood has ever known, while learning real Kung Fu techniques and fighting in movies!
In Kung Fu Superstar players follow the amazing journey of Danny Cheng, a young action cinema enthusiast turned international movie star.
Through his eyes, players will take part in explosive fight sequences across a multitude of movie scripts and movie sets, using real Kung Fu and other Martial Arts techniques. Players are taught these techniques in an intuitive and engaging training mode integrated within the game’s main story.
Sure. Here’s our “5 Commandments” as it were…
Good question! Well, the people who started Kinesthetic Games previously worked on some pretty high profile games. Here’s some of them:
So we’ve got a good deal of experience doing this sort of thing!
It’s been just over a year since we left our jobs and started working on Kung Fu Superstar full time. Since then we have been living off our savings. Absolutely everything you have seen and will see in our videos, we have accomplished with zero funding and through a lot of hard work, passion and love for the vision.
Why are we pointing this out? Because if you think that’s impressive wait till you see what we can do with some actual budget behind us. We think that says a lot about our ability to carry out the project, even more so than our hardly negligible portfolio of past games worked on.
We couldn’t agree more! And that’s usually why most creators take to creating, because they really want something to exist that doesn’t yet!
Honestly, why it hasn’t been done yet? Our (somewhat pretentious sounding!) stab at an answer is that so far there hasn’t been a team like ours that has tried doing it!
OK don’t roll your eyes and click your tongues! Let us elaborate.
We think that in order to realise a project like this and make an actual good game out of it you need to:
- Have the required amount of experience on how to technically achieve the vision. We covered this in the previous question.
- Have the required amount of experience on and love for the subject matter (in this case martial arts). Key members of the team have many years of martial arts experience, have studied various different styles and have even won a few tournaments! Oh…and we all like Kung Fu movies
- Lastly (and this is very important) have the required amount of love for the vision. And we’re not talking about love of the idea that your finished vision might be the next big soulless cash cow (there definitely seems to be enough of that love going around!). We’re talking about the love of the idea of making a game that will delight people because of a deep emotional connection with the creative vision and its execution. Don’t know about what you think, but we believe kissing your decent paying job at a nice and stable environment goodbye to focus all your efforts and personal finances on your creative vision could be considered as a pretty substantial act of love towards it!
So to answer the original question, “why haven’t we seen this yet?” We believe it’s because there hasn’t been a team that combines all 3 of the above attributes. Maybe 1 or 2, but definitely not all 3 of them. And you need all 3 to make it happen.
Ok so there’s two things that you will mostly be doing in Kung Fu Superstar.
- Learning Martial Arts
- Fighting in the movies
The way we are approaching it though is that these are not two seperate modes. They’re both part of the single player story, which unravels in both of these branches of the game.
The training gameplay will be very different to what you’ve come to expect from most “self development” type games. It will be a very story driven and interactive experience. The teacher character, probably the most important character in the game, is likeable, believable and comes with his own distinct personality and back story, which Danny discovers over the course of the game. He is also very clever and observant as he will utilise motion control technology to provide meaningful and accurate feedback to the player. This will be an authentic, engaging, story driven and highly interactive experience.
The fighting gameplay follows Danny’s stuntman career in Hollywood and Hong Kong as he starts off small, taking on low paying jobs in b-budget movies and works his way up to international stardom. In the single player campaign Danny will work through the various fight choreography sequences from the different movie contracts he will be auditioning for. In the Director’s cut mode the fight choreography script is fixed, so Danny has to make sure he sticks to it. In the Improv mode things are a bit more freeform (and challenging) as Danny gets to choose how to approach each situation to achieve maximum combat efficiency and drama. Fighting is possible either with traditional controls or motion controls and players can even swap between control devices on the fly!
We LOVE Kickstarter! Ultimately, we’re creating this game for YOU and there’s nothing that’s ever connected creators with their audience in quite like the way Kickstarter does.
Not only can you help us get the project properly off the ground now, but in the months to come you can also keep a close eye on the development and together we can make sure that when it gets in your hands, it will be a game that you will love playing.
At the same time, it’s a scary (and rather new) process for us to show you all the hard work we’ve been putting into the project at such an early stage. A lot of things are unfinished, others will be changed completely and many many things are yet to be done. In the traditional way of developing games it would be MONTHS before we would dare making such a step!
However we are confident that you will appreciate where we’ve taken the vision so far and the potential of where we can take it in the future!
We’re glad you asked because we spent AGES working on the Kung Fu Superstar rewards. But we think it was worth the effort as we’ve come up with some really cool stuff!
Our goal first and foremost was to create rewards that you would love owning and you would feel justified spending the money on. So we think you will agree we’ve priced everything VERY competitively and we’ve tried to create aLOT of different options to suit all the different budgets.
That did have the side effect of a rather lengthy reward system, but if you get confused, fret not, that’s exactly why we created the Kung Fu Superstar Rewards Table, handily also found at the top of the page.
In short, depending on your budget (and how much you want to support us!) you can go either for a:
- White Sash Reward
- Brown Sash Reward
- Black Sash Reward
- Legendary Reward
In the White Sash Rewards group you can find the essential rewards like the download of the game, soundtrack and artbook. We really love physical rewards over here at Kinesthetic so we crunched the numbers and made the impossible possible: we included the physical copy of the game in the White Sash Rewards group!
The Brown Sash Rewards is where you’ll find Limited Edition physical items like the Kickstarter t-shirt and hoodie, various really cool books, a collectible figurine of Danny and the USB Butterfly Sword, our very own design and an item we are really proud of!
The Black Sash Rewards group we created for fans who take their Martial Arts seriously. Here you can find really premium Kung Fu items like the handcrafted Baat Jaam Daos and the tailor made Kung Fu outfits. These items also come with exclusive premium in game content.
The Legendary Rewards are once-in-a-lifetime type things like video calls with the game’s developers, studio visits and immortalisation through in-game character likeness.
As we standardise the specifications for the various physical rewards over the coming days, we will be sharing more details on them including concept images or photos where possible. In the meantime rest assured that each and everyone of the people we’ve reached out to for the rewards are experts in their specific fields and provide only top quality products.
We wanted to come up with a really special way to thank those fans who really want to extend their early and long term support to us. These LIMITEDreward tiers were created exactly for that reason!
For each of these rewards, you basically get
- ALL White Sash Rewards
- Plus a selection of the Limited Edition Brown Sash Rewards
- Plus ALL Black Sash Rewards (at the Grandmaster tier)
- Plus the full scale Kung Fu Superstar game which will be developed right after Kung Fu Superstar: Origin (the Kickstarter game) at practically no extra cost.
These rewards provide maximum value for money at their respective price points and we hope they will act as a great way to say Thank You for your invaluable support!
We’ve seen so many awesome projects and beloved old games, be revived from their slumber on Kickstarter (we actually backed most of them!) and that’s incredible to see and be a part of!
With Kung Fu Superstar we are trying to create something completely new. A new gaming genre effectively where you will be able to pick up the controller and frantically mash some buttons to take out the baddies or jump up from your sofa and pull off the most elaborate martial arts moves!
We’ve all been part of restoration. Now we invite you to be part ofinnovation!
Stay tuned as this is only the beginning of this campaign and we have a lot of surprises in store for you and do send us your questions! We’re only a small team who have taken on a pretty massive challenge, but engaging with YOU, our fans, is currently our #1 Priority so we’ll do our best to answer all your questions!
We will use this section as a general information dump on our rewards so anytime we’ve got some more details for you on a specific reward this is where you will find them.
Keep in mind that everything you see here is for illustration purposes only and the final product you will get in your hands may have slight variations. That said, never forget that the people running this campaign are gaming geeks themselves, so when it comes to our rewards… we’ve got pretty high standards!
If you’ve got any comments or questions with regards to any of our rewards, just get in touch!
RISKS AND CHALLENGES
Learn about accountability on Kickstarter
RISK: The ambition and scope of this project are not to be underestimated. We’re trying to innovate across multiple different fields (gameplay, storytelling, genre diversification, technical, art) and we have to make sure we don’t spread ourselves too thin while developing Kung Fu Superstar
MITIGATION: We already have our hands full breaking new ground across so many different areas, that re-inventing the wheel is the last thing we’re interested in. This is why since the very early days of development, we took the decision to build our tech on top of the best Engine and Tools pipeline for games development currently available: the Unreal Engine.
Using Unreal ensures we don’t spend time building infrastructure and instead have more resources free to focus on what really matters: making the most innovative fighting game ever. Also the wide adoption of the engine across the industry means we’re never sort of people with enough know how to jump straight into developing Kung Fu Superstar when we need the extra help.
Even so, making Kung Fu Superstar the best and most versatile fighting game ever is a massive undertaking and there may be times when the ambition will need to be adjusted in order to ensure the quality of the experience is not compromised.
Our goal first and foremost is to make sure what’s there works well and is fun to play (and we’ve already achieved that to a large extent). This is something that we intent to always maintain and never compromise, as we grow the project in order to achieve the full vision.
