Handcop is a work in progress “fist person shooter” that’s just as neat as it is horrifying. This wacky prodecurally-animated cop hand has three legs and chest hair for goodness sake. I can’t decide if three “legs” is better or worse than three finger “arms”. Oh, and of course officier Michael McWrist is running about carrying a giant gun. It’s relatively early days for Handcop right now, it sounds like, but its wacky animations are already catching the internet’s attention.
Developer Jeff Ramos chatted about Handcop with IGN this week after his handsy detective gathered quite a lot of attention on Twitter and Reddit. A real good gif does have a way of spreading.
“Different from most comedy games, the shooting is for real here,” Ramos old IGN. “It is very satisfying and the headshots are superb.” Not only that, but he’s really taking the gloves off for this gag. Ramos is planning for McWrist to be able to chuck his gun at enemies, use melee combat, and wear rings to boost his stats.
Behold.
Ramos, also an animator at Bossa Studios, has been working on Handcop in his spare time for a while now. It began as an animation test gag about hands playing finger football, then later turned into a game jam project, the neon disembodied hand shooter Hand Of Pain! It was well-received enough that Ramos decided to keep working on it, leading to the current iteration of Handcop.
As is a common refrain for indie developers though, Ramos had run into issues getting his silly shooter noticed. Just earlier this month, he posted on Twitter lamenting the time spent attempting to promote it in the #screenshotsaturday hashtag with little payoff. “It was stressful and I missed quality time with my wife and my baby. I decided to never do that again” he told IGN.
Despite that, officer McWrist might have a bit of monkey’s paw in him because Handcop sure has gotten noticed now. The internet is a fickle crowd and decided to skyrocket Ramos’s animation onto Reddit’s front page not long after. “This weekend I couldn’t sleep because my phone didn’t stop, [I had so] many messages from people saying they want to make a game with this, this should be a game, or how weird this character is,” he said. With all that attention, Ramos is hoping he might be able to court a publisher and some extra hands for a development team to realise his dream of actually directing a game.
Handcop doesn’t appear to be anywhere near a release date yet, but I imagine we may see plenty more gifs of it in the future if this sudden spark has renewed Ramos’s faith in the #screeshotsaturday exercise. Keep an eye on his Twitter profile for more of that. In the meantime, certainly one worth keeping a finger on the pulse of.