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Indie Game Spotlight: Super Meat Boy Forever

This week’s Indie Game Spotlight shines a, uh, light on one of the most anticipated sequels of the year. That’s right; we’re talking Super Meat Boy Forever, people!

Tommy Refenes (@tommyrefenes), who handles everything and anything from production to writing to business stuff at Team Meat was kind enough to spill some beans on Nugget and what exactly will be different about the sequel from the original.

We still don’t know precisely when Meat Boy and family will debut this year on PC, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One and PlayStation 4, but hopefully, this will satiate you until then.

What is Super Meat Boy Forever?

Super Meat Boy Forever is the sequel to Super Meat Boy. Levels are randomly pieced together from “level chunks,” which are small levels we design that are about the size of an original Super Meat Boy level…we’re making 7200 of those. Those are randomly pieced together to create a new Meat Boy experience each time you play.

Where does the story pick up from Super Meat Boy?

Meat Boy and Bandage Girl now have a little girl named Nugget. Dr. Fetus has not changed at all and is still a dick so he kidnaps Nugget after knocking Meat Boy and Bandage Girl out with a surprise shovel attack. Meat Boy and Bandage Girl have to get Nugget back!

What kind of challenges did you encounter designing the game with randomly generated levels?

So we were smart about this. Instead of trying to write algorithms that make compelling levels, we hand designed and decorated compelling levels, ranked them by difficulty and gave the game the ability to smash them together like LEGOs. You can’t beat a human (especially Kyle Pulver, one of our game designers) when it comes to designing compelling levels.

Are there any unique stories to how you created a certain character?

At the very end of 2016, my wife Shannon and I were starting to plan our family. Also around this time, I was trying to figure out what the story for a Super Meat Boy sequel would be. I didn’t want to do the same thing over again and I wanted Meat Boy and Bandage Girl’s relationship to be familiar to me and I wanted the Super Meat Boy Forever story to reflect what I was going through. So, I created a daughter for Meat Boy and Bandage Girl named Nugget and the story became Meat Boy and Bandage Girl fighting to get Nugget back from Dr. Fetus. Writing Nugget is a lot of fun because she gets to be Dr. Fetus’s opposite. He is a complete dick all the time and Nugget is nothing but pure joy and he doesn’t understand it.

What can we expect next from the team?

We have plans!! There’s another Meat Boy game in there but it’s not what you expect. We have our collectible card game Rival Rush that we’re going to keep expanding on and we have some non-meat boy games that are going to start production soon after Forever is released. Things are happening.

Who would win in a fight: Meat Boy or Thanos?

Meat Boy. Thanos can snap all he wants but Meat Boy always comes back.