At Gamescom 2024, I got the chance to try King of Meat, the debut game of British indie studio Glowmade. The developer was founded a few years ago by former industry veterans who worked on high-profile games like Battlefield, Fable, and Horizon Zero Dawn, and they signed a publishing deal with Amazon Games three years ago.
King of Meat is a colorful cooperative action game styled after survival game shows. It is set in the world of Loregok, which seamlessly blends traditional fantasy elements like dragons, trolls, and skeletons with corporate commercialism. Contenders join the so-called Komstruct Koliseum in a risky bid for glory, gold, and fame.
During the game, you race through the dungeons, hacking and slashing against all sorts of monsters while at the same time trying to impress the bloodthirsty crowd with your combat skills. Indeed, every action, such as dealing a certain amount of damage or looting treasure, provides a certain amount of points that go into the tally.
As for the combat itself, it’s pretty standard fare for an action title, with light and heavy attacks, dodging, and whatnot. There appears to be a strong focus on various types of environmental traps to avoid, including classics like lava-filled rooms, spinning blades, flaming balls of fire, rotating spikes, and more.
To be honest, I wasn’t too impressed with what I played. At first glance, everything seemed to be a little too vanilla to stand out in today’s increasingly crowded lineup of cooperative action titles, but King of Meat does have a feature that could make it much more attractive: user-generated content. It will come with a dungeon editor on all platforms, allowing the whole community to easily create levels and share them with the public. Needless to say, this feature could vastly expand the longevity.
After the brief hands-on, I had the opportunity to speak to Glowmade Studio Head and Co-Founder Jonny Hopper to discuss the studio’s inspiration for King of Meat, its feature set, and the post-launch roadmap (in broad strokes). By the way, the game is currently in Pre-Alpha and there’s no word on a release window. It will launch on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S|X, and even Nintendo Switch, though. Glowmade is taking tester signups on the official website, in case you’re interested.
How long have you been working on King of Meat?
About four years. We signed with Amazon at the end of 2020, although we had been working on it as a very small project for about a year before that.
What was your inspiration for this rather peculiar setting?
We were in the pub, and a few of us were sitting around just talking about the things that we love, the films and stuff that we really enjoyed. Adam, our art director, said he’s a big fan of Labyrinth, the David Bowie film with Jim Henson. He loves that, and Mike and Jim were talking about WrestleMania and that kind of over-the-top, spectacular sort of stuff, and then we just felt like, well, what happens if we try and take those feelings and put them into a game?
One of the main features is user-generated content (UGC). Will the ability to create dungeons be available on consoles, too?
Absolutely. It’s fully cross-play on all the platforms, so you can play the levels on any platform and create levels on any platform. The idea is that anything you make on any platform will work on any of them.
Which engine are you using?
It is our own technology. We built the whole engine ourselves.
You said there will be your own levels and dungeons, and the community can create custom ones.
Yeah, exactly. We’re sort of doing that already behind the scenes. The game itself, when it comes out, is going to have about a hundred levels that we made as part of the offering, and we’ve also got the community behind the scenes building levels for us already.
We’ve already got people kind of seeding those creations. The idea is that on launch, there’s going to be a lot of content. Quite a lot of official Glowmade stuff, but also some community-made stuff ready to go on day one.
Did the community already help you improve the level-making tools in King of Meat?
Yeah, they did. We got such great feedback from them. Also, we get surprised a lot, which is really, really cool because obviously we know exactly how everything works and how all the pieces work, but then somebody will make a level and you don’t know how they’ve done the thing that they’ve done with the tools, and there’s always really amazing moments when you go, how did he do that? There’s one level which is a magic library, with all these books flying everywhere, and I know theoretically how it’s done, but the complexity that the person pulled off is really amazing. Those are the things that really make us happy, actually.
I guess it’s a bit like LittleBigPlanet, where some people made astounding levels.
I worked on the editor for that some 18 years ago, so yeah, they’re very much alike. We want people to just actually feel good when they’re making levels and feel proud of the things they’ve made.
How will you feature creators in the game? Will players be able to rate the best levels?
That’s such a good question. There’s quite a few ways to do this. When you make a level, one of the things you can do is you can use a preset, which consists of different objects and enemies and styles to make certain levels.
When you’ve published your level, it can then make its way into the sort of main league that the whole public can display as part of their game progress. Also, for every single player, we have this kind of tipping system. Every day as a player, you get like a hundred tips, and the only thing you can do with those tips is give them to creators to reward them. Using that makes you as a creator feel really good because you can see people enjoying what you made, but it also means we can do exactly as you said, feature the creator of the week with the most levels or the most tips. We can do those kind of cool leaderboards and tags and badges or something.
Also, when you were playing in the plaza, did you see the big banners? We can use those banners to be like, the creator of the week is Rebecca because she’s got, you know, a 1000 tips or whatever. It lets us show off the people behind the creations and make them feel good and part of the game as well.
With Amazon publishing, I bet it occurred to you that King of Meat could get big on Twitch.
Yeah, that would be great. It is sort of an obvious good fit for streaming. We’ve also had a bunch of streamers and content creators play the game already, and they really enjoyed it. They were screaming and laughing and just having a good time. We’re really hopeful that it can take off.
In the past, a few games have implemented Twitch functionality that allowed spectators to interact with the game. Did you think about doing the same?
Yeah, we’ve been thinking about that, but we’re not going to want to talk about what that is at the moment.
Fair enough. As far as what I played in the demo, King of Meat seemed to be a lot about avoiding environmental traps and fighting basic enemies, but will there be any boss encounters?
A boss fight is kind of what you make it. What we’ve done is we’ve given the tools to the creators to build bosses. There’s a really good example in as a level that you may or may not have played; I think it’s called Bombs Galore, and it’s got this really amazing boss fight that really feels like a climactic moment. But all we’re doing is providing those pieces to let a level creator make that kind of thing in the way they want.
What can you tell me about character progression?
In the game, you have something called the road to stardom. You’re ranking up through the levels, and as you rank up, you unlock new features, new moves, new weapons, and special moves, and then within that, you can rank up your weapon archetypes, and you unlock various different things there. The core game, even if you don’t engage with the UGC side of it at all, making or playing, what we’re delivering is a good 30 to 40 hours of campaign and progression.
So there’s also a campaign.
There are some single-player campaign levels that you can play, and that’s where we can do narrative development and story, as well as the League, which is your progress through growing fame.
You mentioned talents, right? Is there a player role system where you can be a support character, for example?
That comes with your loadout. There are different weapons that are better or worse at different roles. You have a system called trinkets, which are like buffs for weapons, and you can also choose your kind of special move loadout as well. The idea here is that you can choose what you like, but then you start a level, and there’s also like a little weapon locker, and it’s like a vending machine; you can then go and change it once you’re in the level if, as a team of four, you think you want to be more of a support type of character. So, it’s not a character class thing. But it’s more of an organic way to reconfigure your loadout.
I know King of Meat is a co-op game, but what if one player could be the Dungeon Master? Did you think of that type of asymmetrical PvP experience?
It’s not the game we’re launching with. I think there’s loads of game modes and ideas that we plan to do post-release, and we’ll talk about that more another time.
Speaking about the game’s post-launch live service, what kind of additions can players anticipate?
We’ve got a roadmap of one, two, and three years out where we’ve got a content plan for new weapon skins, weapon archetypes, more campaign levels, more example levels and cosmetics and so forth. We know what we want to do and how we want to do it, but we also want to listen to the community and see what they really want us to focus on. Do they want a new feature? Do they want a new creative mode? Are they really passionate about a particular skin or something that we can support?
Can you talk about whether these updates will be free or not?
We are not going to delve too much in there at the moment.
Is there going to be an in-game store with microtransactions?
It’s only for the cosmetics. We’ve all been very clear that we’re not doing a battle pass, and there is no pay to progress or pay to win.
So you’re not adopting a season system?
Not in the battle pass way.
Will you release themed updates, like Halloween, for King of Meat?
That’s the plan. We’ve got an event system in the game where we could have a competition on making the best Halloween level, and then at the end of the competition, we feature those levels on a rotation and then you go into the Halloween event, and you can play all the best levels. We’ve got a lot of plans for that sort of seasonal content.
With this event system, will you also add themed props, etc., for level creators?
Exactly, that’s perfect. Going back to the Halloween thing and maybe there’s pumpkins and Jack-o’-lanterns and skeleton outfits.
Thank you for your time.