At the edge of a marina on the shores of Dundee, Scotland, stands the building where the developers of 4J Studios work and the teams that have been enjoying their releases in recent years such as Ant Workshop and Puny Astronaut.
Among rooms whose furnishings tirelessly recall the porting of Minecraft to consoles, the work that allowed 4J to take flight, we were able to try Manic Mechanics first-hand on a console other than the Nintendo Switch, then taking advantage of the opportunity to chat with Chris van der Kuyl (president of the company), who not only told us what it meant to work on the game, but also revealed possible future plans for this title in the making.
You shouldn't fixate on innovation
Everyeye.it: When trying Manic Mechanics for the first time, the similarities with games like Overcooked are evident, but what were the inspirations that guided the development starting from its initial stages?
Chris van der Kuyl: I think titles like Overcooked and Moving Out, games where there are so many moving parts to keep under control, defined the couch co-op genre we wanted to work on. We turned to this type of product because they are slowly disappearing in favor of great single player works that tend to forget everyone else in the room… let's be clear, no one wants to stay and watch you play Starfield or a non-online FPS for hours, and we liked the approach of titles like Jackbox party which instead welcome everyone with a sort of TV quiz (here's the review of Starfield).
So we aimed for an experience like this, ending up doing something similar to Overcooked and others, games which, however, in our opinion were not capable of managing the balance: either they are extremely simple from the start, and therefore perfect to introduce to anyone but fun for a short time, or they are complicated and intriguing, but difficult to master if you are not an expert. We therefore set ourselves the goal of creating gameplay similar to the previous ones, but continually evolving in terms of mechanics and difficulty, and I think we succeeded. For example, if you suddenly jumped to one of the more advanced levels of the campaign you would certainly find it very complex, almost impossible, but when you get there with the normal continuation of the adventure you realize that this is not the case at all.
We didn't set out to create something completely new, but we wanted to stand out from the rest, so we thought the world of cars and mechanics could be interesting, we just twisted it a little to make it crazy and chaotic. I hear people say “these are the same mechanics as Overcooked” all the time, and sure, they are.
We can say the same thing about any FPS that has the same basic mechanics as Call of Duty, you don't necessarily have to create something new, it would be like building a car in which the pedals are reversed just for the sake of change.
What differentiates us from others is the balance, as I have already said, together with all the aspects that have already defined us with the launch of Minecraft on consoles, that is, a smooth and extremely refined gaming experience: at a certain point during the development we simply stop adding new quirks to the gameplay and just focus on improving what has already been included.
A passionate community
Everyeye.it: The game has already been distributed on Nintendo Switch, what has been the reception from the public?
Chris van der Kuyl: Really good. I was very pleased to read about people who still pick up Manic from time to time for a laugh, and this is because it is simple in its inputs, but still requires a good amount of skill and concentration to manage everything.
Everyeye.it: Has porting to other platforms always been your goal, or has something changed over the course of these months?
Chris van der Kuyl: The plan was always to make it multiplatform, and we discussed for a long time the possibility of releasing all versions together, but during development Nintendo was very helpful to us so we chose to release the mobile version first. Switches.
This allowed us to analyze the community's feedback, and in fact thanks to them we came up with the idea of including a Challenge mode: they asked us insistently and we saw them create a sort of competitive mode within the normal game stage. The will was unequivocal.
Everyeye.it: Are there any other introductions to the basic experience compared to what we have already seen on Switch?
Chris van der Kuyl: Apart from the Arena mode, not for the moment, even if Banshee Bay (arrived as DLC on Nintendo consoles) is already present in the adventure. We believe that competitive mode is a great incentive for players, and based on their response we already have many ideas to introduce something new, we just need to understand what the public wants most of all.
Everyeye.it: Now that it is present on multiple platforms, does Manic Mechanics support cross-play?
Chris van der Kuyl: No, absolutely no cross-play, and the reason is the same that convinced us not to introduce online matchmaking either. We're obsessed with gameplay balance, and that disappears when you're playing with or against someone who's using another controller.
We have not carried out any tests but we are certain that there are differences between the Switch Joy-Con, the DualSense and the Microsoft controller that can benefit you on the simple basis of command mapping.
Everyeye.it: As you have already said, this type of game seems to be disappearing, do you think there is still a future for cooperative titles?
Chris van der Kuyl: I'm convinced. Even though fewer and fewer of them are published, people love them. We already knew this while working on Minecraft and wanted to add split-screen to play with a friend, Mojang asked us “why would you?”.
We added it and it became one of the most popular features of the port. Split-screen and single-screen multiplayer in our opinion recall the wonderful sensations felt when playing GoldenEye, people still want this type of experience and we continue to love it ourselves.