Super Meat Boy Forever won't meet you this April, boy
SQUELCH!
Super Meat Boy and Bandage Girl may dash ever onwards at a steady pace in Super Meat Boy Forever, but the's game development isn't so simple, and developers Team Meat are delaying it from the planned April launch to... when it's done. Team Meat big cheese Tommy Refenes told our roving reporter Katharine, during PAX East this weekend, that the auto-running sequel to Super Meat Boy is coming along nicely but they just need more time to make all the gamestuffing.
Super Meat Boy Forever will be a mega-deadly platformer, like its predecessor, though this time our jumpman will keep on running without any input. It's a little more complex than many auto-runner games, mind, with its two-button controls giving us a jump, jump attack, dive, and slide. I assume Katharine will have something to say about the game itself. For now, here's the bit of her chat about the delay:
"Oh yeah, I think it's in a good place. We were originally going to hit April, but we're not going to hit April, so now we're going to say after April, because I don't want to say May and then have to go 'Oh, I didn’t hit May.' The next thing we'll announce is the day you can actually buy it, rather than 'around here' because that's really a lot of pressure to be like, 'Oh crap, now I've got to tell everybody.' I'm glad I don't have Kickstarter backers or have taken money from anyone because oh man, that would be terrible.
But the game itself, the only thing that's holding us up, I mean it's the same thing that always holds us up, is content. With Super Meat Boy Forever, levels are randomly generated, but they're randomly generated in a way that we sort of brute force it, and every level has a pool of 100 smaller levels that we smash together eight of them to make a level. So all that math, that's like 7200 levels that we're making. And then I wrote a ridiculous story and hired a bunch of animators, so we have like 30 minutes of real high quality animated cutscenes that are being done, so it's all just like, we're almost there, yeah. But I've very much underestimated when I made that trailer – because I was like, April's far away. It's far away but not so far, but it definitely wasn't far enough away."
Katharine had plenty more chat with Refenes, which she'll share with us all once she's got home, slept for several days, recovered from the double jetlag caused by the clocks changing, and, y'know, written it up.
Super Meat Boy Forever is coming to the Epic Games Store when it's done, then to Steam twelve months after that. It was among the first games to sign up for a year of Epic exclusivity, in December 2018.
Edmund McMillen, the co-designer and artist of the original Super Meat Boy, has long since split from Team Meat to do his own stuff. Along with The Binding Of Isaac and so many remakes and expansions with Nicalis, he's released spiky platformer The End Is Nigh with Tyler Glaiel, is working on The Legend Of Bum-Bo, and might even finish Mewgenics.
