A bunch of white dudes sit in an office, all of them wearing black suits and white collared shirts. Everyone sits in the same lime green swivel chairs. For a video game, Last Man Sitting sounds really boring. Add shotguns and ragdoll physics, though, and you have a recipe for the only battle royale game left to make.
Background music provided by Kotaku and not currently part of the game.
Short footage of Last Man Sitting sprouted up on Reddit over the weekend and spread from there. People didn’t know if the game was real, but it sure looked cool. The basic premise is sticking a bunch of people in a small room and watching them try to shoot each other while flying backwards every time they pull the trigger. It turns out the source was designer and artist Kevin Suckert, and the game is very real.
i got asked “dude, how do you move if you don’t have a gun?”… pic.twitter.com/WQuqPSVf9n
— KevKev (@Der_Kevin) November 21, 2017
“The Idea came when I was working on a different idea,” Suckert told Kotaku in an email. “It was more or less an old-school-top-down GTA Clone.”
Suckert says he was messing around with the shooting in that game and kept seeing characters get knocked over by the recoil. He decided to delve deeper into it and use shotgun shooting as a sort of teleportation hack. From there he stumbled into what would become the game’s key mechanic:
I started only moving around using the gun instead of the normal walk. I liked the idea but it looked stupid because the character was more or less moonwalking all the time. So I just placed him on a chair and that resulted in this weird GIF which somehow reached over 10k likes on Twitter and 100k upvotes on reddit.
Suckert’s previous game started in a similar fashion. Footbrawl took recent FIFA and Pro Evo Soccer games and recreated them using small fields and jumbled piles of polygons that moved more freely than their AAA counterparts. It was a fun experiment that led to a lot of funny GIF-able moments.
As for Last Man Sitting, Suckert said there are currently two different game modes planned: Team deathmatch and, of course, battle royale, inspired by the recent surge of interest sparked by PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. Unlike the sprawling scope of that game, however, Suckert’s project is close quarters with limited camping. It’s just a lot of messy office bros flying every which way.
Last man sitting – a game about trust, friendship and the endless question about the meaning of life…
Nah, just kidding, your booty is mounted on a chair and the only way to move is the recoil of your gun#gamedev #screenshotsaturday #madewithunity pic.twitter.com/TcfxWOgxmq— KevKev (@Der_Kevin) November 18, 2017
Suckert described the juxtaposition of white collar productivity with sloppy, over-the-top video game violence as a “weird and somehow also a not correct idea, guys in suits shooting in an office”, and likened what he wanted to do with Last Man Sitting to movies such as Snakes on a Plane and Sharknado. Suckert is also thinking of adding a version that substitutes Nerf blasters for those who feel the game’s handling of real concerns over potential workplace gun violence might be a little too glib.
Currently the game’s alpha is planned for January, with local four player co-op to be followed by online multiplayer, a level editor, and custom chairs with unique stats in the months after.
“It’s insane how such a little brain fart idea can make such a big wave and I can’t wait to see people playing the alpha once it’s ready.”
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