Described as a “stylish and intense twin-stick brawler” on its Kickstarter pre-launch page, Bad Boro was called Scrap Bringer until a rebranding on December 15, 2021. That Kickstarter has been in the works for some time, but PseudoZap co-founders Peter Mosur and Konrad Messyasz (known as Zals online) are self-described “perfectionists” who have been waiting to complete work on a demo as well. Mosur is past the point of offering prospective fans an estimated time of arrival, but is still “fairly confident with our game.” Game Rant spoke to Mosur and Messyasz about the history of their work on Bad Boro and where it’s headed.
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The Family That Plays Together
Mosur said video games have been “my main thing” his whole life, and it’s how he bonded with Messyasz - his younger cousin - growing up. The two were raised in New York City, Long Island and Brooklyn respectively, though Mosur is about 10 years Messyasz’s senior. “Our relationship was always defined by video games,” Mosur said, pointing to family gatherings where he would play World of Warcraft alongside Messyasz playing Sonic Adventure 2 on GameCube.
However, while Mosur was interested in creative endeavors like writing and music from an early age, “nothing really panned out.” He felt game development would be too hard and went to school for business management, then received a Master’s in Emergency Management. Yet the idea of being a programmer was always in the back of his mind, having taken classes covering basic Java and C++ in high school. “My issue was that I never had anything to work on,” Mosur said. “I wasn’t the type of person who could just study and have it stick, I needed something to build.”
Then one day he needed to work on 50 percent leave at work, and decided to go a self-taught route on learning to program with his other 50 percent. He began spitballing ideas with Messyasz, and they “crammed every day” that summer to prepare a demo of Scrap Bringer for the indie game festival Play NYC in August 2018. This was just before Messyasz began attending college, following in his father’s footsteps to become an illustrator.
The game is entirely made with 2D drawn assets by Messyasz, from characters and backgrounds to effects, with Mosur ensuring it “looks exactly how Konrad wants it to look” while programming in GameMaker Studio; layering objects and shaping hitboxes. Mosur also handled music for its Play NYC demo. They were both burnt out by the endeavor, leading to Messyasz taking a break to focus on school. However, when they met up that Thanksgiving, Mosur said his cousin decided to drop out and develop Scrap Bringer full-time. “I was like, ‘Oh no, his parents are going to hate me,’” he said.
A Rose By Any Other Name
Though Messyasz is primarily focusing on PseudoZap, Mosur still has a full-time job combining web development with emergency disaster management. They’ve made steady progress, with Mosur praising the GameMaker Studio community for its “rich forums” and YouTube tutorials. However, he feels they bit off more than they could chew with a demo featuring a whole overworld neighborhood, the first “dungeon,” and a boss and mini-boss; even with a musician who specializes in UK garage helping their soundtrack capture its 1990s electronic vibe.
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That aesthetic bleeds into the whole game. The story PseudoZap has crafted over four years will center a futuristic “megacity,” designed like New York in the 90s and covered in graffiti inspired by his love of urban exploration, that gets taken over by a rogue AI meant to usher in a society where everyone’s needs are met. “Coming up with ideas for this kind of futuristic sci-fi scenario is one of my favorite things in the world,” Mosur said.
Even though the cousins fell in love with Scrap Bringer as a representation of this premise before work began, they decided to change it because many people associate the term “scrap” with scrap metal. In November 2021, Polygon highlighted Scrap Bringer in a weekly roundup of in-progress works that emphasized this “trash” angle, and PseudoZap followed up with a Twitter poll to gauge whether its title conveyed the idea Mosur and Messyasz intended.
“That made us realize if we wanted to change things, we should really do it now,” Mosur said. After brainstorming over 100 names the duo settled on Bad Boro for its alliteration, “punk vibe,” and the way it sounds like a troubled city borough. Mosur feels the rebranding reveal went over well ahead of its nebulous demo release and crowdfunding push.
Bad Boro Moving Into the Future
That crowdfunding is still planned to go through Kickstarter as of Game Rant’s conversation with PseudoZap in mid-January, with the intent of hiring help for art and sound design, as well as optimizing the code and hopefully re-hiring the musician working on Bad Boro’s demo. Planned Kickstarter rewards will likely lean in the direction of backers designing graffiti or other in-game elements like NPCs, enemies, and mini-bosses, because “we love when games do stuff like that.”
Over a year ago Mosur said he and his cousin floated the idea of offering NFTs as backer rewards when the idea broke into the public consciousness. It was decided against thanks to negative press and the ultimately “silly technology” that would be redundant for already limited backer bonuses. A lot of indie developers also bristled at last year’s announcement that Kickstarter would be developing an “open-source protocol built on a public blockchain” in 2022, ultimately moving its website onto this crypto-based framework. Mosur said, “It’s something I’ll have to look into, so we can see if it will affect us.”
Bad Boro is currently in development for PC.
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