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Nexon, the publisher behind MapleStory, Combat Arms and a few other free online games, has a new project on the brew up in Vancouver BC. Humanature Studio and Klei Entertainment have been working on Sugar Rush, an online fighting game with a manic pace, goofy power-ups and a ton of community involvement. We at NeoSeeker went on-site with the development team to check out their space and get the goods on what's going on with this game as it heads to the end of closed Beta and gets ready to face the big, bad, scary world full of people like you.

To kick things off, here's a bit about Sugar Rush from Jeff Agala, the former art director for Atomic Betty and current creative director and art lead behind Sugar Rush.

Sugar Rush lets you become one of Broda's chosen champions, warriors with mad skills who can battle the robot Chromies to save the world of Bashew. Playing as either a Brawler, Ninja or shape-shifting Morph, you clobber robots, or other players in three or five minute matches won by whoever grabs the most Spark. Winning earns you Experience so you can level up and boost your stats (Attack, Speed, Defense, Focus) and Bash Cash you can spend on customizing your character. You can change your appearance and weapons, neither of which change your fighting skills, or upgrade your special moves for a big battle boost!

Matches come in three flavors - Team vs. Chromies, Team vs. Team or Free-For-All. The games are all peer-to-peer so there aren't any huge servers to connect to. Instead, everybody connects to the host player. But, the host's computer doesn't get their CPU overloaded. There may be an extra bandwidth load to keep the game organized, but nobody was willing/able to comment on that yet.

Here's another one of the developers, this time it's Ryan McArthur from Nexon's Humanature studio.



FYI - Ryan doesn't normally have a stache, he's growing it as part of a prostate cancer charity thing. Charities are great, but let's face it, combining moustaches and prostates is time for some brain bleach. O_o

Next up, the future of Sugar Rush and how you can be a game developer.