They made Super Meat Boy to be ”difficult but not frustrating.” Reward for completing chapter 1 is getting to play the next, no ”little medal” needed.
”I think a lot is missing now in games with regard to the feeling of achieving something,” said Team Meat co-CEO Edmund McMillen.
”I’d say that the majority of games can be beaten pretty easily. And that’s a marketing strategy - there is a reason why games are easy now. And I think with that easy difficulty, comes this emptiness. Things just aren’t as memorable as they used to be and you don’t feel like you’ve achieved anything,” he continued.
”With Super Meat Boy we’ve kind of looked at that and thought, ‘how can we bring back the feeling of accomplishing something, where you actually feel good because you’ve done well and it’s not like a hand-holding thing?’.”
”We thought about how we could make it difficult but not frustrating. So we went through and chopped it up. We removed lives, kept the levels really tiny, made sure the player was rewarded after they finish a level, both visually as well as through unlocking things in the game.” This mentality applied to Xbox 360 Achievements as well.
”We tried to avoid the obvious ones, like the ones you get for beating chapter one, chapter two and so on. Like, duh you did. The reward for beating chapter one is getting to play chapter two! I don’t think giving someone a little medal for doing something that you’re supposed to do is really much of an achievement.”
”We tried to use the Achievements to encourage players to do things they wouldn’t normally be doing, like trying to unlock hard to find characters, collecting unlockables, 100 per centing the game and so on,” they continued.
Team Meat also question the DLC culture. ”I’m not for that stuff. Like unlocking another coat for your character in Street Fighter IV – it’s already in the game but you just pay to unlock it. That’s super-questionable. I’m not a fan of that stuff. I understand the business side of things but I’m not a business man and I think it cheapens the game,” they said.
Super Meat Boy launches today on Xbox Live Arcade, and on WiiWare and PC later. Do studios reward us too much for simple little things? Should we be busting our gamer gut to earn those coveted gamescore points and unlockables?
