Amazon Games and Glowmade are targeting the UGC (user-generated content) market with King of MeatThe next dungeon brawler is probably best described as the brainchild of Autumn boys AND Little big planet. Those with a penchant for opulence can take advantage of a delightful and downright deadly set of tools to craft their dungeons. Others with a taste for adrenaline can then take on the challenge alone or in groups of up to four players.
While the title will launch with a series of courses put together by developer Glowmade, the British studio founded by veterans of Media Molecule and Lionhead in 2015,King of the meat Ultimately, if the game is to last, players will need to embrace the idea of creating their own evil dungeons.
Speaking to a game developer at Gamescom 2024 about how Glowmade plans to stack up The King of Meat Studio co-founder and creative director Jonny Hopper explains that the team had a simple mantra: in Create mode, players can transform their dreams into someone else’s nightmares, with tools that engage and delight.
A consistent visual language is essential to empower creators
“It has to be hard to do something bad,” Hopper says. “There's a middle ground, which is where most of us can sit, where we can put things together and create a level. It has to be easy to do the basics and hard to do something that doesn't work.”
Hopper notes that Glowmade sought to create a toolkit that felt “tactile.” That means that each tool or item players can harness should behave in ways that fulfill, rather than subvert, expectations. “What we’re doing is giving [players] this tactile toolkit built around visuals,” he says.
“There are a lot of menus, but when you place a spinning spike trap, it always does what you expect. That's how we approached the visual language. You know, a button is a button. We chose to go the route of 'here's your button, it's a pressure pad,' rather than having players build all the logic to make their own pressure pad.”
In perfecting that visual language, the studio sought to Super Mario Maker for inspiration. Glowmade co-founder Mike Green believes the project worked because players approached it with an innate understanding of how items and abilities work in a Super Mario level. This subconscious knowledge made it accessible.
“In our first game, Worlds of Wonderwe had a really complete logic system. There were so many things you could do in that game, but that made it inherently more complicated. If you wanted to build a door, for example, you couldn't just put it down. You had to build a wooden thing and then put rotators on it,” Green says.
“But you know, with Creator of Marioeveryone knows Super Mario, so we all know what a green pipe does and how enemies work. What I like is that there's this consistency. It doesn't matter what level you go into, because you know how these things behave.”
Green explains that Glowmade is using the same technology it implemented in Worlds of Wonder to rapidly prototype tools and game objects. This means the team can iterate quickly, creating new objects before reviewing and refining them to create “better versions” that can be coded.
These upcoming additions are approved or rejected based on whether they are enjoyable to use and intuitive. Some of the most obvious red flags during this review process are the request for specificity and complexity over simplicity.
“I remember having conversations where there was a very specific request, which was very much along the lines of, ‘I need to solve this incredible edge case of a problem that I invented, and I want this tool to do that,’” Hopper says.
“At that point we have to take a step back because this is just adding complexity to a tiny, tiny edge case. Does it really solve a problem or does it just help you in [this one instance]? We need to maintain a balance between what a professional level designer wants from a full-featured level design tool and what we should offer to everyone else.”
Despite their insistence that UGC tools should be universally accessible, Hopper acknowledges that there will be groups of players who simply want to create, and others who simply want to play. With that in mind, he suggests King of the meat It takes about 10 percent of players to actually engage in creation to ensure sustainable success.
“If 10 percent of the player base [choose to create] then that’s great. If 10 percent of what they do is good, then you basically have more levels than you’ll ever need,” he says. “You don’t need 100 million players for that to be viable. That’s our metric for success.”
