Rectify Gaming has gotten the chance to an interview with the guys over at MetalHead Software about Super Mega Baseball but this time we also asked the community to step in and ask questions! Here it is:
For everyone who don’t know about you guys, what are you all about?
We’re a small team started by software guys who had never worked in video games, but have since found some good help from folks who have worked in games. We hang out, typing and clicking a lot, in a small, hot office in a city called Victoria, which is not too long of a ferry ride from Vancouver or Seattle. Not all of us are sports fans, so maybe we’re not exactly the team you would expect to have made a baseball game, but I don’t think any of us knew that we’d end up doing this either!
@jim29160- any chance of adding online multiplayer or co-op?
I don’t want to say too much about what’s coming next since we are still in the process of deciding exactly what that is. What I can say, is that if we find ourselves working on more SMB in the coming months, we’ll be considering the fact that online is the number one most-requested feature.
ShihTzuOnYou- What other games were influences for the style of Super Mega Baseball?
We wanted to nail the accessibility of classic 90s-era sports games like Super Tecmo Bowl, Baseball Stars, RBI Baseball, NHL 94, and so on. As it turns out, I think the spirit of SMB stayed true to those games, but we ended up mixing that spirit with a more modern approach to game mechanics (and I hope that many people found that SMB brought a lot of new gameplay ideas to the table). Artistically we were actually looking at a lot of animated films and cartoons, more than other games.
HomieDrew- how long did it take to make the game?
Too long! More than four years. The two of us that started it had a lot of experience making other software, but not games, so there was a ton to learn. We also let our ambition run a little wild, and the scope of the game grew a little faster than the size of the team making it. Thank goodness it finally got finished though. I’m not planning to do another development cycle that long anytime soon!
Was there a reason that it came out on the Xbox One later?
Yes. We had full plans to ship the game on PlayStation, Xbox, and PC, if not more platforms, eventually, and would have loved for those to come all at the same time. We simply found ourselves in a situation, in early 2014, where there was just no way that we were going to be able to pull off a simultaneous release with the amount of budget we had remaining. We needed to get the game out there to start generating some revenue to fund further development. We had the PlayStation development tools the longest at that point, and that version of the game was by far the furthest along, so we simply said “let’s ship it on PlayStation first, and we’ll go from there”.
Why Baseball instead of another sport?
One main reason would be that baseball is the sport I knew the most about. We had briefly discussed other sports as well, especially football or soccer, but figured that baseball might be a little easier to take on initially. It didn’t seem to have the type of challenging animation/physics interactions that you have in football, nor the demand for a complex, dynamic AI that a sport like soccer, hockey or basketball demand.
Could we expect more games in the future from you guys?
At this point, now that we’ve seen the feedback and the sales that we’ve done with SMB, I can fairly confidently say ‘yes’ to that. The nice thing is that we’ve got a foundation to work off of now, and I definitely don’t expect that we’ll be spending anything near four years on the next one!
Hope you all enjoyed our small interview about Super Mega Baseball! Make sure discuss in the comments!
