Chances are if you see a Kill Screener on his or her phone in the office these days, they aren’t texting. They are playing Punch Quest, the free-to-play infinite PUNCHER. The point of the game is that stuff keeps getting in your way, and you keep punching it. In a way it’s like you are a quest, of punching. Anyhups, we got on the phone with the man behind this orgy of punching, Kepa Auwae, one-third of the indie developer RocketCat.

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Kill Screen: How did you get into development?

Three years ago, I was a pediatric nurse and was working night shifts. I was playing indie games on my laptop because nightshifts are really slow. I just decided that I wanted to make videogames.

I went to a chat channel about Asheron’s Call and one guy was a programmer and one was an artist and I said “let’s make some games!” and they said “whatever!”

We made Super Quick Hook, which made enough money to allow us to go full time.

How did you get the idea for Punch Quest?

I wanted to do a more accessible game; the games we did before were hardcore platformers. These are very niche, difficult games.

We wanted to make a game that people could actually play, and wanted to try out free to play. This, though, may have been a mistake.

Why?

People aren’t buying the downloadable stuff. The game has made almost no money.

Can you rerelaunch it as a paid game?

That’s one option.

What were our inspirations for the game?

Roguelikes for the dungeon system.  Street Fighter and Final Fight for the combat; just fighting games in general. You know, there were Street Fighter tournaments where people master the game and people memorize frame times, but when I grew up playing Street Fighter I just jumped around and mashed buttons and I wanted to make a game that could be played both ways.

How did you arrive at the art style?

Originally we wanted it to look like Ring King; during the development process we got into a weird mix of Castlevania and River City Ransom.