Making of Super Mega Baseball No.1 – Intro

Hi! I'm Liane. I've been helping the gang at Metalhead with a bit of marketing/community work this year. One of my projects begins with this very post - a blog series about how the team at Metalhead went from this…

(Super Mega Baseball – 2009)

to this…

(Super Mega Baseball – 2015)

Let's kick this off by chatting with the founders, Christian and Scott, about why we're doing this blog series in the first place.

Liane: What are we doing here today?

Scott: We figured we’d put together a pretty massive set of blog posts and tell this sort of weird story about making this game.

Christian: We’re going to show everyone why it took us five years to make this game. And we’re going to take you through the whole process of where we started, what our idea was, and what it ended up as.

Scott: And the very odd adventure of jumping into an industry that we’d never worked in before.

Liane: What are you guys going to talk about during the series?

Scott: We’re going to talk about the ups and downs, and the trials and tribulations of all the things we went through. The specific development challenges, the people challenges, the people that we ended up working with and how our team ended up coming to be. And the whole process of lining up third-party and external support we needed to get the game done.

Christian: We’re going to talk about some of the challenges we faced and some of the decisions we made, and why we made them. We’re going to talk about why it took so long and we’re going to show you what it takes to go from a two-man inexperienced game development studio to a studio that actually managed to release a game on multiple consoles.

Scott: And there’s a bunch of funny, behind-the-scenes stuff that we’d never get to show anyone if we didn’t do a series like this.

Christian: We sincerely hope that you find it entertaining.

Liane: Why would anyone be interested in reading your story?

**Laughs**

** More laughs…**

Scott: People are interested in some pretty weird stuff...

Christian: I think if you’re interested in video games you’re probably interested in how they’re made. And it’s a lot of people’s dreams to make video games - the reality might be a little more harsh than you imagine.

Liane: How long is this going to last? When will we get new posts?

Scott: We’ve got more than a dozen posts in mind, but we’re just going to have a shot and try some different formats and see if anybody’s reading it. And if people are reading it and enjoying it, we’ll do more. We’re going to try and do at least one a week.

Christian: Well, you guys know where the story ends – which is the game actually getting released. So it goes from the beginning, until the game actually ships. However long that takes us.

Liane: What’s with this image?

**Laughs**

Scott: That is Super Mega Baseball circa 20…11? 2010?

Christian: 2009, man. That was Super Mega Baseball 2009. That’s an image of about 6 months in. This is the first showing, our plan was to get a baseball simulation running with primitive graphics and to get the gameplay nailed down. So what you’re seeing here is our attempt at this - we had our technology going well enough to render this beautiful field, with beautiful players on it.

Scott: That little small rectangle by home plate is, in fact, the bat. And if you look towards first base, that is the ball. And there was an incredibly deep physics simulation here, in which you could hit the ball and gravity would affect it and it would go out over the edge of the green rectangle for a homerun. The fielders didn’t move at all. And that was the extent of our baseball simulation at the time.

Christian: And you could actually swing the bat. The bat would go up and down – the square that it was – and if you timed it just right, you could hit the ball.

Scott: So this is what we were showing our families after a few months, telling them that it was going to be a console game...

And five years later, it actually happened! Stay tuned for the next post, highlighting the first few months of the project.

This was reposted from our blog.