That post ignited the imagination of the NeoGAF community. Soon enough there was fake box art, concept images, and even an opening scene. Eventually it became apparent that Dudebro II could be something real, so a team got to work on making that happen. And while the project has hit its fair share of snags since that initial post in December 2009, last week the team launched a new gameplay trailer, showing that this bro still has some life in him.

The new trailer provides a good sense of just how ridiculous the game is. The main character, John Dudebro, is seen fist bumping a polar bear and wielding a gun with an absurd number of barrels. There’s an option to "skip shitty mini-game" and phrases like "you can’t keep a true bro down." Instead of a health gauge, Dudebro has a "brodiocity meter" that fills up when he kills bad guys, rescues ladies, and chugs beer. The game seems to be doing a good job of keeping the feel of that original, ridiculous title, but the 2D side-scroller on display in the trailer wasn’t the original concept for the game.

Initially Dudebro II was slated to become a top-down shooter, and given the sheer number of volunteers, the team decided to be ambitious and make it 3D. At its biggest the crew had 130 members. But, as tends to happen when people are donating their time for free, people soon left. The turnover became so problematic that eventually the 3D concept was scrapped for something a little more manageable. "Having an entirely volunteer based team has been one of our biggest challenges throughout development," admits producer Sil Demmer.

Creative director Andrea "Jocchan" Nicolo says that everything went smoothly for the first year or so before members started leaving the project. Eventually these losses forced the team to miss a deadline to release a new trailer in time for E3. "This was the breaking point," Nicolo says. "It was apparent we were too understaffed to continue, and so we decided to switch gears to a simpler design, one that wouldn’t need nearly as many members to get completed and to achieve good quality."