Spareware coming to Xbox One

Who are you?

I'm Sako, the lead of this project and one of the founders of Rusto, a small game company in a dystopian town called Kajaani in Finland. We've been fighting the good fight for 4 years and during those years we've tried almost everything there is to do in game development. Now we are working on our dream game. You can learn more about us & the game here

How was Spareware born?

Some of the core mechanics originate from a online top-down shooter we did a few years back just for the fun of it. Afterwards we moved on to do other games, but the ideas we had at the time stuck with us.

After our not-so succesful foray into mobile space & whilst getting back on our feet with subcontracting gigs we started toying with some of the main mechanics you can see in Spareware today - like using two different weapons at the same time & building the player characters.

Being fans of console co-op games in general & having a special place in our hearts for top-down shooters we searched the marketplaces of the new generation of consoles in vain. There was an astounding lack of local cooperative bloodbaths.

Then it hit us. We realized that we should finally do the brilliant cooperative game we've wanted to do for years and for the first time aim for consoles thanks to the space having opened up to self-publishing.

We pitched Spareware to Microsoft and they got excited about the game and thought it would fit well to ID@Xbox. So now, here we are getting ready for release in a few months.

Who is Spareware for?

For groups of friends like us wanting to have a good time! We are making Spareware because we love these kinds of games. Our goal with Spareware is to make it a fun game for people who just want a fun little shooter to play while hanging out with friends - without compromising the challenge for the real hardcore players.

When will Spareware come out and what are the plans after release?

Spareware will be launched on Xbox One in Spring 2016. After the post-release bug fixing and polishing we'll keep on pushing even more content for the game in the form of free updates. After Spareware we'd love to develop even more co-op games for Xbox One!

We will give deeper insight to Spareware and its development in the upcoming weeks before release. Next week we'll go into the art and design decisions of the game's characters.