Save the World Today in Fortified for Xbox One

Inspired by 1950’s pulp fiction, Fortified is a unique blend of bombastic third person shooting, and uncompromising co-op base defense gameplay. We’ve always wanted to make games that marry intense strategic gameplay with great multiplayer action that requires coordination and teamwork; Fortified is the first step in that direction. The dev team here at Clapfoot has been working hard for the past two years to bring it to life on the Xbox One.

One of the biggest challenges we faced while developing Fortified was building a co-op multiplayer game with only seven core team members. How do you properly playtest with such limited resources? After taking early prototypes to a few local conventions, we found it was such a positive experience that we decided to get the game into people’s hands as often as we could. Events like PAX became vital tools for us in validating design decisions and helped us to identify elements that didn’t work. Even that, however, wasn’t enough; as the mechanics evolved during development, we needed to expand our playtesting even further.

We reached out to a nearby college and suddenly we had more people willing to jump in and play the game than we could really handle. By the end of development, we had gotten the game into the hands of hundreds of gamers across North America. Testing and rapid iteration are extremely important during the development of a multiplayer game. Without the hours and hours of playtesting that provided vital feedback, Fortified would be a very different game. It was a valuable lesson that we aren’t soon to forget.

When Fortified was originally conceived, it looked very different. Originally, it was thematically very dark and quite serious. This never really melded with the gameplay that we were prototyping which was fun, loose and quite ridiculous at times. We quickly became inspired by science fiction in the 1950s due to its light hearted nature. As we dove deeper down that retro rabbit hole, we thought ‘wouldn’t it be cool to meld 1950s invasion movies with a pulpy-comic vibe?’. This all translated into the heart of Fortified.

Heavily inspired by the likes of “War of the Worlds” and “Magnus Robot Fighter 4000AD”, our game became a love letter to pulpy post-war fiction. We went to great lengths to research artistic tropes from the Fifties, and we brought in Marco D’Alfonso to illustrate the cutscenes. Marco specializes in comic book and pop-culture parody illustrations that range from golden age comics, classical art to modern marketing. His stylistic integrity brought a truly authentic feeling to the motion comics in-game. We wanted everything to feel dated, yet still modern by today’s standard and great care was taken to achieve this when designing all the elements of the game, from the characters to the weapons and enemies.

Fortified is all about making tactical choices as a team, leveraging the abilities of each of the four playable characters, and blowing up goofy looking robots. Jump into the pulp-inspired world of Fortified today on Xbox One!