Yo!

It's been a few months since Contract Rush DX released, and I'm still in awe of the reception. People have been so positive about the game, more than I'd expected since I was a little nervous about the launch.

Still, some people had a few issues and we've worked to try to address them. Overall though, we're very happy with how the game has turned out.

Though I consider the game fully complete as-is, we've still thought it would be fun to further add to the game with a content update! (Helps with promotion too heh heh..)

New Game DX

The core idea for this update comes from the 2 endings of the game. As you may get the default ending on your first run, you may want to play through the game again to get the true ending and complete side content. To keep this second playthrough fresh, we’re introducing New Game DX, an updated version of the current New Game + feature.

The main changes in New Game DX are as follows:

A new room in the cafe will be unlocked.

There is a “Fumbler machine”, where you can spend your gold to get a fumbler figure, with 70 total to collect! You may recognize these little guys…

(Fumblers will also be found hidden around the 6 main contract stages.)

Your fumblers will be displayed on the shelf in the middle.

On the right side of the room, you can find a VR headset. Here, you can play through 5 new challenge levels, one for each character! These challenge levels unlock new drinks with abilities more specialized to each character.

For example, this is the ability that Keel’s drink, “Bone Broth”, will unlock. 

GIF

(Currently work in progress.)

It replaces his regular sword swings with a much heavier attack that causes enemies to drop bones on impact, allowing for more frequent use of his sub-weapons.

These character specific drinks will change how you go about playing as each character to keep your playthrough fresh!

There will of course be other minor changes to New Game DX, so there will be more to share later!

(Do note that the intro and endings of the game are unchanged in New Game DX.)

Autumn Sale

For the Steam Autumn Sale, the game is 20% off! If you were on the fence, now is a great time to pick up the game, and if you really enjoyed it now is the perfect time to let your friends know about it!

And thank you again for playing, or even just being interested in the game!

Contract Rush DX is OUT! RIGHT NOW!

You can find it on Steam!

It’s been a long journey, much longer than we anticipated. What was initially a very small concept for a run n’ gun soon became a larger idea, with extra characters, levels, and story elements. It’s been a real labor of love, and still doesn’t feel real to be finished!

Melon and I have put so much into this game, and I hope it shows when you play it! 

ART CONTEST WINNERS

I’m not exaggerating when I say how hard it was to pick winners for this. When we started the contest, I thought “oh it’ll be chill! There will be some art, and we’ll just pick a couple winners!” but as it turns out, choosing 5 from over 90 entries has been INCREDIBLY hard. We genuinely appreciate every single one, and I’m just left staring at them like “wow…”

But 5 have to be chosen! It’s the rules! So here is our list…

1ST PLACE:

2ND PLACE:

3RD PLACE:

4TH PLACE:

5TH PLACE:

—---------------------------------------------

Yeah, it was hard to leave it at 5, so we each added one additional choice. 

FIGBURNS EXTRA PICK:

MELONS EXTRA PICK:

Insanely big thank you to everyone that participated! I’m going to be scrolling through these over and over for a while, and probably leaving more reviews on them now that the contest isn’t looming over!

Also, if you participated in the contest, feel free to post your entries to any other social medias! I wanted to retweet more, but many entries weren’t cross posted anywhere.

That’s all, ENJOY THE GAME! GO GO GO!

DISCORD

TWITTER

STEAM PAGE

After many years, Contract Rush DX will be releasing on JULY 30TH, so in celebration of that… We’ve decided it would be a great time to do an art contest!

Contract Rush has many characters, some revealed and some secret. I’ll be providing references on some characters you can draw, but anything you can find in screenshots/trailers is also acceptable! Use anything that appears to be in the game or related to it! (Mission Sin, Contract Rush Dress-Up, Neon Rhythm.)

RULES:

• Piece has to be Contract Rush related!
• No A rated content is allowed. Use Newgrounds standards for what differentiates between M and A.
• No AI content.
• Submit piece with “Contract-Rush-Art-Contest-2025” tag.
• Submit piece ON or BEFORE the 29th!

Note that GIF animations are allowed!

Melon and I will be judging the pieces in that brief window between the contest being fully wrapped up, and the game launching at 10am CST on July 30th! So the “GAME IS OUT!” post will also include the winners for this.

ALSO! If you'd like to be an event sponsor and contribute to the prize pool, use the donation option on the Supporter page and PM Tom a heads up you donated towards the Contract Rush Art Contest!

1st place: $100 + CRDX Steam key

2nd place: $50 + CRDX Steam key

3rd place: $25 + CRDX Steam key

4th place: $25 + CRDX Steam key

5th place: CRDX Steam key

I’ve updated the Team Ficus website to now have a special page for this contest where you can view a bunch of character references! 

REFERENCES HERE

The contest is started right now, so go go go!

 DISCORD

TWITTER

STEAM PAGE

On this day 5 years ago, me and Trent released Contract Rush, a short action web game that we had created as part of a personal game jam. Somehow, the game did pretty dang good! It's a little simple and rough around the edges, but I think the hook and style was enough that people generally enjoyed their time playing it.

We had then thought "Okay, this is a simple concept that we can expand to a few more levels and release on steam. We can even add a few more playable characters! surely we can finish it in 6 months!"

And thus started a 4 year journey that is finally coming to a close...

Now with 6 main levels, intro and ending level, revisit quests for all main levels, 5 playable characters, 24 drinks, 2 endings, and 29 sub-contract levels... the game will be released JULY 30TH, 2025.

Link to trailer

It will run you a crisp $20 bill, though it should have a launch discount set up! Frankly quite the steal in todays game market... Some testers DID suggest a $30 price tag, but I'd rather have many people play the game for cheaper, than fewer for more expensive. Also I rarely buy games past 20 bucks so i have to make a game I'D BUY!

We seriously hope you all enjoy the game when it releases, it's been a labor of love for so long and theres a LOT put into it. As you might've seen in the trailer, the FIFTH and final playable character was revealed, Bullet! She is a powerhouse character that rides in a mech, and uses a heavy sniper rifle for powerful charge shots.

She's one of the trickiest characters to learn, but also one of the most rewarding! The game is set up to where it's very fun to hop back into levels on a second playthrough as different characters, as they all approach the game differently. Her inclusion is one of the latest, and so I've been enjoying replaying a lot of the older content as a brand new character. Changes the whole thing up!

Also, one more thing to reveal before launch...

Contract Rush DX: Art Contest

July 16th - July 29th

We will be holding a fanart contest for the game, right here on Newgrounds!

Submissions will start on the 16th, and end as soon as it hits the 30th. Then, we will judge the entries and reveal the winners at the same time as I post a "game released" devlog here on Newgrounds on the 30th!

Prizes are not yet fully decided, but there will be game keys! The contest officially starting on the 16th is just so there's time for us to prepare for it (and you could even prepare your drawing ahead of time), so make sure to wait until then to post your drawing on Newgrounds.

More details on this (such as the tag to post art with, and additional character references) to come on the 16th!

CLOSING THOUGHTS

Who woulda thought we'd actually make it to this day... The game is, as I'd put it, 99.6% complete. Everything is in, it all works, and is just receiving some final bits of polish on top.

Somehow, we got it pretty close to being done a while before launch, so it actually ISN'T a month full of crunch leading to release day. Our crunch was the months leading to today, but July should hopefully be pretty chill!

Thank you for waiting so patiently, playing the demo, playing Mission Sin, or even just watching from the side lines.

I hope the game pleases everyone!

Hello! A lot to cover here so I’ll get right to it!

Me and Trent just released Contract Rush: Mission Sin, a short prologue where you can demo the character “Sin” and try out his moveset. 

We tossed around the idea of making a web version of the previous demo, but I think it’s more interesting to have this as a totally standalone game! Keeps the full DX game more of a surprise too for those that didn’t play the Next Fest demo. 

Go give the game a try and come back when you beat it! I’ll wait here.

Wow good job, welcome back. 

Now for the Contract Rush DX update…

We’re still working on it! What a dang shock. The past few months have been a grind to make all the endgame content. I said before on twitter that the game was playable start to finish, but that was only the normal ending.. We still had to create additional content afterwards for the TRUE ending. I’ve learned from Undertale Yellow that the best way to overscope and take too long is by having multiple endings, so of course we decided to do that.

Developing this final stretch does remind me of Undertale Yellow a lot, though I have a lot more categories of work to do this time. I sometimes go to Master Sword for advice and help since he’s been in these shoes before, scrambling to get everything together as director in the last months of a games development. 

We’re just about done with the true ending, we’ve got all perks and key items in, and nearly every sub contract. I’d place us at 93% complete with the game. There’s a very small amount of extra content to be made, and then just polish for the remaining months. 

For the release date… Pretend to be shocked when I say we’ll slip from the “spring” date ever so slightly. Why? Well, I was always planning to be cheeky with the spring date, and release it around the literal last day of spring. Upon hearing some advice to be wary of June release dates for indie games, we reconsidered and thought about it a bit more. 

Long story short, it will be more so Q3 than Q2. A lot of this time will be dedicated to polish. We likely COULD make an earlier date, even May if we really aimed for it, but it’d be a mess. This additional time also allowed us to make Mission Sin, so hopefully that’s an okay apology! I can’t give a solid date right now, but it won’t be long until we can. 

In other news… I can now introduce Team Ficus! This is our studio name we’re working under now, and the team we will be releasing future games under. Nothing has really changed, it’s currently still just us two, but think of this as a commitment to still creating games in a similar style for (hopefully) many years to come.

We have a website, and a Steam developer page (do give it a follow, that helps a ton! It’s like wishlisting, but for developers.)

The plan for Contract Rush DX is the same. No publisher, just us. We hope that if it’s successful, we can continue being totally independent and maybe bring in others to work with us! Who knows what the future holds, but it is exciting to be at the beginning.

That’s all, maybe my longest devlog I wrote yet. Thank you for reading!

Hello!

I was meant to write this like last week, but I'd been way too busy, and focused on working on the project, to get around to it. whoops...

We recently wrapped up with our Steam Next Fest demo, which was a short trial of 2 of our levels to get feedback and help market the game during the festival. The reception was VERY positive, better than I'd expected, and I'm feeling more confident in the final game than ever before! There was of course feedback and criticisms, and we're doing what we can to make adjustments based on those, without changing what's core to the game. There some elements i'm stubborn on staying the same though..

Launching the demo was almost like a small game launch itself, and I feel like it better prepares us for the full game. Shockingly we barely had any bugs at all in it! Hopefully that carries true for the full thing.

Speaking of the full game.. We're currently working on the FINAL BOSS. We just finished designing the final level, and everything leading to the boss, and now we're pushing onward with this and the ending. Within a few days, the whole game will be playable start to finish! It feels like such a huge milestone. Just looking back at all the work that was done on the game, its hard to believe the stuff we were working on in 2021 will launch at the same time as the stuff we're working on now. Like dang this is all the same video game!

Once the final boss and ending are finished, we're not quite done yet. There's still some bonus content, and then extra time to polish everything up to our standard. We've done a lot of polishing as we go, so this hopefully shouldn't take too long.

We're not quite ready to give a release date, though next delvog for sure will have the day locked down. For the time being, we are still aiming for this spring, or ever so slightly past it. It's getting damn close to being done though, so no matter the date it will be launching this year! Might be more in the middle of the year than this early half of it though lol.

That's all for now I suppose. Last night was a near all-nighter working on this endgame content, but I'm feeling very happy with how everything is turning out. I think the game will be super special once its finished, so I hope you look forward to it!

DISCORD

TWITTER

Heya!

Honestly I just wanted to write a post spouting whatever, most of my posts here have just been specific trailer drops, so what about a general LIFE update?

New Year

i didnt know i could put text in the center woah thats cool

2024 was solid for me. Made some big life moves, met many friends out of state, and ended up going to 3 conventions! I’d like to do much of the same this year, but more. I’m hoping to read more, experience more, and meet lots of new people. If I’ve never really talked with you before, what’s up how’s it going?!?

Maybe it’s lame, but i made a dream board for this year with goals written on it. I went fairly realistic, so I’m hoping to be able to accomplish most of them. I've got it pinned in my room so I see that shit every day!!

COOL POSTS

I'm always crazy inspired by art I see here. I'll often just scroll through the frontpage for inspiration on posing and rendering when drawing.

some of my favs recently!:

shorbo dorba.

by JestQuest

Just so many characters

by Doogler

ShinGodzilla

by mrFROST27

Ascending the Tower of Heaven again!

by ENErgyArtt

some stuff I've worked on recently?!

I'm always working on something these days. Balancing freelance with personal projects is something I've both always done, and ALWAYS struggled with. Either one or the other is on the back burner at any given time, so I'm hoping to become better at that this year.

• I did the sonic character creator section for fulpware! Many thanks to RGP for inviting me onto the project. I procrastinated finish my section for SO long, but I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. Also there's a contract rush section in there by TheShammah which is CRAZY.

• I did some cutscene animation for Friday Night Funkin! It was for the Weekend update, which released early last year, but for some reason I never made a proper post about it here. It was an incredible experience working with Phantom Arcade on it, and I'm grateful to have been able to contribute to the project. I still gotta play the pico playable character update so I think I'll do that right after I post this :J

• If you like Undertale Yellow, we recently put out a free digital artbook! I contributed new artwork for the cover and end of the book, as well as commentary on tons of my older work for the game.

• sorry about all the links its just so satisfying to add them. this shits like a tvtropes page

That's about it i think?!?! Most days I just spend working on one thing or another, I'm hoping to strike a better balance this year in general! Don't wanna get burnout, but also don't wanna miss deadlines.. what do you DO

As for Contract Rush DX… steam nextfest is coming up so stay tuned…….

Long time no see!

Contract Rush DX is entering its last quarter of development, or around that at least. We're wrapping up Contract 6 of 8, so we are definitely reaching the end! Sorta almost. nearly. There's also upwards of 50 Sub-Contracts with smaller levels and challenges we also need to finish up so... It'll be a busy year.

Recently, we put out a trailer that has lots of new footage in it, including an animated portion I did. damn it took way longer than it should've but it turned out pretty rad so ITS ALL GOOD I GUESS.

Also as I was writing this I thought I should release something specifically for this news post so here is a LEVEL THEME woahh. This plays in the Rooftop Suburbs level, which you can see more of in the trailer!

Anyway, that's all for today. Remember the best way to support the game is by wishlisting on steam, and following on twitter! I always appreciate the support!

happy bday tom fulp

Kind of a late post but Undertale Yellow came out! WOOOOOO!

Well, maybe not everyone here knows what that is. Undertale Yellow is an Undertale fangame that I have been helping out with for the last nearly 8 years. We released a demo in 2016, which got pretty positive reception at the time, and continued to work on it up till release, which was on the 9th of this month.

The game was a big part of me progressing in artwork, and all of my Newgrounds uploads were posted AFTER I had already started working on it. I recently posted the launch trailer animation on here, but also here is a gif of a key shot that I animated in the trailer that didn't make it into that upload:

Also having worked on the game is Spasco, who is the co-creator of Neon Rhythm. If you enjoyed that game, there might be some little touches you'll notice in UTY.

It'd mean a lot to me for the folks on here to check it out! A lot of things I've learned from working on this game are being carried over to Contract Rush DX, so you can see where a lot of the DNA comes from.

Speaking of Contract Rush...

The game is still making great progress! Now with UTY out of the way, we will be able to work on it much more. We plan to stay quiet on it until we release the next trailer which shouldn't be TOO far away, so stay tuned.

That's all I've got for now. time to get back to the GRINDDD

Yo! It's been a while since I've talked much about the development on Contract Rush DX, especially here on Newgrounds. That means its probably a good time for a DEVLOG.

Where we're at: Right now, we are implementing systems for Sub-Contracts. These are challenge levels that have a variety of objectives, upon which completing you get a lotta CASH. There is a star ranking system, with different qualifiers for getting the stars.

The objectives for these levels can be anything from getting to the end of a short level in a time limit, breaking targets smash bros style, or beating special bosses. It's our way of adding lots of new gameplay types in without deviating from the general run n' gun style of the main levels.

The money you get throughout the game can be used to unlock CHARACTERS, of which we're aiming for around 5. Starting with only the protagonist, Cynthia, you'll meet new characters throughout the game who you can then hire onto your team. They'll then hang around the Cafe when not being played in a level.

Speaking of the cafe...

This is the Cafe, Caffeine Rush. It's the hub area of the game where you can talk to NPCs, or shop.

There's more to the area that isn't quite ready to be shown yet, but we've been making strides in adding all the extra padding to make it feel more like a real game. The title screen, file select, and pause menus have all also been mostly completed.

I also recently put up some more music from the game, so check that out!

The game has definitely gotten much bigger than it was originally planned, which I guess tends to happen with games.. Still though, I'm very happy with how its turning out. The overall structure is coming together, and even the STORY is being added in more. Haven't talked a whole lot about that, but there are plenty of story elements to tie everything together.

It's come a long way since the original newgrounds version. Things like shooting up, a melee attack, and crouching weren't even in there!

That's it for now, if you haven't yet be sure to check out the steam page for the game. I updated it recently and I'm thinking of putting this devlog there in the lil steam updates section or somethin. I wont add this part to it though this is just between you and me looool

SEE YA