A Game That Makes Games: SuperMash is Available Now on Xbox One
Hey, Xbox gamers!
A game that somehow “makes games.” Does that sound crazy? Unbelievable? Boring? Exciting? Unrealistic? Well, which is it?
Yes.
As developers, we love crafting things. Tuning, balancing, and playtesting over and over until we create the exact experience we imagined. We’re all trained to do this, and the longer you make games, the more ingrained it becomes. Creating SuperMash was a process of undoing years of experience with controlled crafting and asking ourselves, “What’s possible if we don’t” instead of “What’s possible if we do?”
I know that probably sounds a little bit confusing, but SuperMash doesn’t act like most games. When the player says “jump,” instead of asking “How high?”, the game just rotates the screen, spawns an enemy, or gives you a coin. The game itself is making unique decisions on what events are tied to your core mechanics, specific enemy behaviors, goals, and so much more. This enables the game to create scenarios that you haven’t experienced in a video game before…for example, a platformer where collecting any coin will kill you. Or a JRPG where killing an enemy other than your target will end the game, requiring you to run from every random encounter. A space Shoot ‘Em Up where the game assigns you a sword instead of a laser cannon.
In order to enable this, we focused on the underlying systems to provide freedom, often at the expense of balance and hand-crafting the experience. Each time we saw the game produce something weird, we faced a decision where we had to either change the rules so it couldn’t happen or embrace it. Thousands of these small decisions made SuperMash what it is today. To this day, there are times when I cringe while playing the game, and there will always be mashes that, when judged as a standalone game, are just bad. But that is the cost—the joyful burden that SuperMash bears.
SuperMash is a game that is experienced within these unique mashes but is so much more than each experience it produces. It makes these short, zany, sometimes beautiful games which you are the first person in the world to experience. Sure, you can share them with your friends via the Mash Code system, but the joy of completing something that is unique to you is what we’re most proud of. On behalf of the rest of Digital Continue, we can’t wait for you to check our SuperMash and share your crazy, unbelievable, boring, exciting, impossible, but wholly unique mashes with us.
SuperMash
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