How to stay hard:Team Meat talks game difficulty design

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Super Meat Boy is fun, even when you’re dying. In fact, some of the most exciting, funny, and surprising parts of the game come from your own death. Just like in the best survival-horror games/movies, witnessing the protagonist being graphically and grossly dispatched is big part of Super Meat Boy‘s appeal. Screwing up in the game leads to both a punishment and a reward. That didn’t come about by accident.

Edmund McMillen, Super Meat Boy‘s artist and co-designer, has laid out his philosophy towards designing the game’s reward/punishment system and multiple difficulties, and it’s pretty smart stuff. Budding game designers, or anyone interested in understanding how videogames work, are sure to be entertained. Not only does the post give us an idea of what makes Super Meat Boy compelling to play (and replay), but it also gives us good look at how difficulty was handled in the 2D platformers of the past (with illustrations to match). It also definitively explains why child abuse is not good, but is in fact, bad.

Just another reason why I like Edmund McMillen one-hundred-million-billion-trillion times more than Carlos Mencia.

Why am I so… Hard? – [SuperMeatBoy.com]


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Jonathan Holmes
Destructoid Contributor - Jonathan Holmes has been a media star since the Road Rules days, and spends his time covering oddities and indies for Destructoid, with over a decade of industry experience "Where do dreams end and reality begin? Videogames, I suppose."- Gainax, FLCL Vol. 1 "The beach, the trees, even the clouds in the sky... everything is build from little tiny pieces of stuff. Just like in a Gameboy game... a nice tight little world... and all its inhabitants... made out of little building blocks... Why can't these little pixels be the building blocks for love..? For loss... for understanding"- James Kochalka, Reinventing Everything part 1 "I wonder if James Kolchalka has played Mother 3 yet?" Jonathan Holmes