A Kumité Player Asked for Fighter Faces That Bleed in Stages. Polytricity Added Them to His New Commodore 64 Karate Game 18 Hours Later.
Kumité is a free, brand-new full-contact karate tournament for the Commodore 64. A player asked for bloodied portraits in the comments; 18 hours later all eight faces went from clean to cut, bloody and battered.
At 00 UTC on October 21, a player called nezumi77 left a wish under the Kumité beta. He’d already “finished it so far around 20 times today,” and he could think of one thing that would make it better: “portraits of fighters (knowing how good your graphic skills are). And adding blood to them as they get damaged say 3 phases… Ah, one can dream,” he wrote.
Beta 3 went up at 18 UTC. “All eight fighters’ faces have been redrawn from the original concept art,” the devlog says. “As their energy drops, the faces go from clean to cut, then bloody, then battered: split brows, nosebleeds, split lips and a swollen eye by the end.” The same build added a flying kick, punches that alternate arms, and a final boss who “now uses both jump kicks, so watch the skies.”
The next fix took less time. At 18, a player called bluecursor pointed out that in the video, “the characters are further apart when a hit is detected.” Six minutes later Polytricity replied, “I noticed it too and can tighten it up.” At 19 he posted Beta 4: “Quick fix to leg and collision distances.”
The game is “a full-contact karate tournament for the Commodore 64,” set in “a no-rules, invitation-only tournament held in an underground dojo,” per the game’s page. You fight five opponents, each with his own style and outfit, then Chen Lo “on the blood-stained mat of the final battle.” Land a flying kick near the edge on a weakened opponent and he goes off the mat for a RING OUT. Win the tournament and you unlock Roy Jensen: “slower, but he hits twice as hard.” The disk image is 170 kB, the PRG is 49 kB, and the page lists VICE, the C64 Mini, Maxi and Ultimate, and SD2IEC.
The finale post ends on the next deadline: “Onto finishing Pumkinville for Halloween!”
When the person writing the game also wrote the editor, the distance between a player’s wish and a shipped build shrinks to an afternoon. More retro games built that way will lean on the comments section as their design meeting. The next test of that idea is already on the calendar: whether Pumkinville makes Halloween.
