When Mekazoo popped up on a handful of video games news sites at the end of January, very few gamers were familiar with it. The Good Mood Creators, Mekazoo's dev team, are hopeful the product of its childhood gaming desires will ultimately make Mekazoo one of the industry's next great platforming franchises.
But who exactly are The Good Mood Creators?
In the beginning, The Good Mood Creators were James Hoag and Jarrett Slavin. Founded in 2012, the two-man team paired together to explore its creativity and build games that ignited its passions. In time, the duo was joined by close to a dozen fellow Digipen student and it wasn't long before The Good Mood Creators set up shop in their own Seattle office.
"One of our big philosophies is that we want everyone to be thrilled to come to work,“ said TGMC creative director Jarrett Slavin. “We want everyone to feel like they’re doing their dream job and to never want to leave. And we feel like we can do that.”
Mekazoo, the studio's first commercial project, has similarly humble origins.
The idea for Mekazoo can actually be traced back to an otherwise uninteresting art project for one of Slavin's classes. A professor asked TGMC's creative director to create art assets for a dirt mover; the large, yellow machine that can frequently be spotted on construction sites.
Rather than build a machine resembling his classmates' conventional designs, Slavin elected to create a mechanical pelican that could move large quantities of dirt via its beak.
"I was thinking, 'What could move dirt?'," Slavin explained; during a recent interview with iDigitalTimes, "I got the idea and I ended up with this really cartoon-y looking pelican."
The idea stuck. It wasn't long before the team, not yet an official studio, began to iterate on what would eventually become Mekazoo. Pulling from the expertise of its various team members, The Good Mood Creators had a small stable of animals they were ready to design, along with special abilities for each.
“Each animal is basically its own game. And then each combination is like its own other game,” Slavin said. “We want to have enough animals so that you could unlock one on each world. To have that sense of progression”
The pelican didn't make the final cut but the original artwork lives on via Slavin's personal website. When asked whether fans could expect to see more than five animals, Slavin said the Mekazoo team had ideas for other creatures but says it wasn't realistic to try and add more. To put it simply, The Good Mood Creators were "already over-scoped with five totally unique animals."
So don't go expecting any new animal announcements before the game's launch. Or any sorts of surprises, in that department, after the Mekazoo campaign begins.
That isn't to say the studio has already shown its complete hand. Both Slavin and The Good Mood Creators' PR representative assured me the studio has several unannounced features in the works that it's confident will appeal to the Mekazoo audience.
Slavin shot down the idea of releasing a level editor for the game and wouldn't say much else about what other features might be included in Mekazoo at launch. He did say that a Hard Mode is being designed for the game; which would require much faster reflexes from the player, but that's as much unannounced news as he was willing to share.
Of course, without the ability to craft new levels for the game, some might assume that a new Mekazoo project, and/or DLC for the first game, are already being designed by The Good Mood Creators. But, according to Slavin, that's actually not the case.
"We'd like to jump right into development of the second Mekazoo, and also mobile versions," Slavin said, "But not at the expense of our other projects."
While the studio would absolutely like to see Mekazoo become an ongoing series, complete with the usual merchandise tie-ins, The Good Mood Creators apparently have quite a few other ideas that they'd like to pursue as well. More importantly, Slavin says the team is more than willing to put its full weight behind those ideas -- just as it did with Mekazoo -- even if they won't all become fan-favorite franchises.
As a relatively young studio, The Good Mood Creators also have the good fortune of being able to learn from the mistakes of others.
With all the recent discussion surrounding The Order: 1886, and the length of the game's campaign, iDigi asked Slavin whether TGMC was factoring the dollar-to-content ratio into the design process. It's an issue the Mekazoo team approaches with cautious optimism.
“People are very judgmental about hour count,” Slavin said. “We are absolutely trying to maximize the amount of content we can have [in Mekazoo], while being able to polish all of those moments and not drive our team into the ground."
The Good Mood Creators aren't ready to offer a specific estimate, of how long it will take to complete Mekazoo, but Slavin did point out that the game will undoubtedly be significantly less expensive than most triple-AAA releases. The studio has yet to settle on a specific price for Mekazoo but Slavin says it will be in line with what people expect from indie releases.
Mekazoo is being developed for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Wii U and PC. The studio expects to release Mekazoo before the end of 2015; however, there’s currently no specific timeline for the game’s debut.
Be sure to check back with iDigitalTimes.com and follow Scott on Twitter for additional Mekazoo coverage throughout the game’s remaining time in development and for however long The Good Mood Creators continue to support Mekazoo after launch.
Are you looking forward to the debut of Mekazoo? Think you'll go out of your way to stop by The Good Mood Creators' booth at GDC Play and/or South by Southwest? Going to wait until the studio releases a bit more information about Mekazoo before getting too attached to the project?
Let us know in the comments section!
