'It's got to be hard to make something bad:' How Glowmade is building UGC tools in King of Meat

Amazon Games and Glowmade are gunning for the UGC (user-generated content) market with King of Meat. The upcoming dungeon brawler is probably best described as the offspring of Fall Guys and Little Big Planet. Those with a penchant for pageantry can leverage a delightful and downright deadly set of tools to craft their very own dungeons. Others with a taste for adrenaline can then run the gauntlet solo or in groups of up to four players.

Although the title will launch with a set of courses cobbled together by developer Glowmade—the UK studio founded by Media Molecule and Lionhead veterans in 2015—King of Meat will ultimately need players to buy into the idea of crafting their own devilish dungeons if it wants to go the distance.

Speaking to Game Developer at Gamescom 2024 about how Glowmade intends to stack King of Meat's Create Mode—which is where players can turn their own dreams into somebody else's nightmares—with tools that compel and delight, studio co-founder and creative director Jonny Hopper explains the team had a simple mantra.

A consistent visual language is key to empowering creators

"It has got to be hard to make something bad," says Hopper. "There's a midline, which is where most of us can sit, where we can put stuff together and make a level. It has to be simple to make the basics and hard to make something that's unworkable."

Hopper notes Glowmade sought to create a toolkit that felt "tactile." That means every tool or item that players can leverage should behave in ways that meet, rather than subvert, expectations. "What we're doing is giving [players] this tactile toolkit built around visual things," he says.

"There are a bunch of menus, but when you place down a spinning spike trap it does what you expect it to do every time. That's how we approached visual language. You know, a button is a button. We chose to go down the route of 'here's your button, it's a pressure pad,' rather has making players construct all the logic to make their own pressure pad."

In honing that visual language, the studio looked to Super Mario Maker for inspiration. Fellow Glowmade co-founder Mike Green feels that project worked because players approached it with an innate understanding of how items and abilities function in a Super Mario level. That subconscious knowledge ensured it felt approachable.

"In our first game, WonderWorlds, we had a really comprehensive logic system. You could do so much in that game, but it made it inherently more complicated. If you wanted to make a door, for instance, you couldn't just put a door down. You had to build a thing out of wood and then put rotators on it," says Green.

"But you know, with Mario Maker, everyone knows Super Mario so we all know what a green pipe does and how the enemies work. What I like about it is there's just this consistency. It doesn't matter what level you go into, because you know how these things behave."

Green explains Glowmade is using the same technology it deployed in WonderWorlds to rapidly prototype gameplay tools and objects. That means the team can iterate quickly, building new items before reviewing and refining them to create "better versions" that can be coded up.

Those impending additions are approved or rejected based on whether they're enjoyable to use and feel intuitive. Some of the most obvious red flags during that vetting process is the demand for specificity and complexity over simplicity.

"I remember there have been conversations where there has been a very specific request, which is very much a case of 'I need to solve this incredible edge case of a problem that I have invented and I would like this tool to do it," says Hopper.

"At that point we need to step back because that's just adding complexity for a tiny, tiny edge case. Does it really solve a problem, or is it just helping you in [this one instance]? We need to keep that balance between what a professional level designer wants in an all-encompassing level design tool and what we should offer to everyone else."

Despite their insistence that UGC tools need to be universally approachable, Hopper acknowledges there'll be groups of players who simply want to create—and others who purely want to play. With that in mind, he suggests King of Meat needs around 10 percent of players to really commit to creation in order to deliver sustainable success.

"If 10 percent of the player base [choose to create] then that's great. If 10 percent of what they make is any good, then you've basically got more levels than you're ever going to need," he says. "You don't need 100 million players for that to be viable. That's our success metric."