After accidentally selling millions of copies of a video game about a chaotic goat, lead designer Armin Ibrisagic wanted to keep exploring games’ sillier side. So he made his own studio: DoubleMoose Games. His first title, out later this week, is the result of a partnership with Pewdiepie, the YouTuber who helped turn Goat Simulator into such a big deal in the first place.
Ibrisagic isn’t trying to replicate the immense success of Goat Simulator, though: He just wants to keep making weird games.
“I was part of a team that caught a very big fish once,” Ibrisagic told Kotaku. “Yeah it would be cool to catch a big fish again, but mostly, I just really like fishing.”
Animal Super Squad, his next game, is seemingly made for the Twitch and YouTube era. Like Goat Simulator before it, it’s all about the hilarious ways things can and will go wrong no matter how hard you try. In Animal Super Squad, you play as a vehicle-riding critter trying its damnedest to get through traps and environmental obstacles:
According to Ibrisagic, Felix “Pewdiepie” Kjellberg helped him design the core concept of the game and provided feedback and creative direction throughout the process. As an example, the pair originally came up with the idea of letting a chicken ride a washing machine, but the device ended up feeling too bulky given the game’s focus on physics.
“‘What is the second funniest thing a chicken can ride apart from a washing machine on wheels?’ is an example of the hard and brave questions Felix and I have discussed during the production of this game,” Ibrisagic said. Voila: The chicken-on-a-toilet idea was born.
The rest of the game is similarly absurd: You can play as a sloth or a blowfish, if not wear a dead octopus on your head. And since it comes packed with a level editor, the hope is that players will build ridiculous contraptions.
“I could probably give you some Zuckerburger PR fluff about connecting people’s vibrational soul energy and smearing creativity across the world, but our custom level editor is for making intensely frustrating maps that mess with people’s minds and drive them crazy, which we think is great,” Ibrisagic said.
“Our game is a game about overcoming hardships and reaching your goals no matter what happens, even if the whole world is against you,” Ibrisagic joked to Kotaku. “Our user research on millennials has shown that players can best relate to a chicken riding downhill on a toilet on wheels being barely held together by duct-tape.”
Animal Super Squad releases to early access on November 3 on Steam.
Comments
8 responses to “Ex-Goat Simulator Dev Teams Up With Pewdiepie To Make Bonkers Physics Game”
Ex-Goat Simulator Dev Teams Up With Pewdiepie To Make Happy Wheels Clone
I feel like teaming up with Pewdiepie might be drinking from a tainted well at this point. I appreciate the game was probably in development before all his drama hit fever pitch but it still feels a little discomforting.
I don’t really like Pewdiepie all that much, but his shenanigans are sort of blown out of proportion by the general media snowflakes IMO. Society full of ULTRA sensitive people where 1 little miscalculation in judgement and your thrown on brimfire.. sad.
Yeah, because calling someone the n-word in a livestream is a little miscalculation.
He’s a loud obnoxious twat and as loud obnoxious twats often do, he puts his foot in his mouth a lot. People definitely overreacted as they like to do these days, but to call it a miscalculation seems to imply there was any calculation at all 😉
I just wish people would stop paying attention to him so he goes away.
Oh shenanigans, boys will be boys, he’s just having a lark.
It might be more accurate to say that people are upset by a single misjudgement because it is the latest in a succession of misjudgements reaching back over the years that indicate an antisocial pattern of behaviour.
There’ll come a time when people stop trying to defend or rationalise a person’s shitty repeated actions as innocent, or absent-minded, or ignorant – those cards only get to be played once before they, and the person playing them, lose integrity.
Level editor? Sold.
…Oh. PewDiePie’s supporting it?
I don’t care, and neither should you. Judge the game on its merits instead of some dude who said a bad word or made a bad joke that one time.
The context of a work matters though. A painting could be the best work of art ever but if it was made by Hitler I’m not going to hang a print in my house. It’s your choice if you want to take works in isolation but it isn’t wrong for others to consider broader factors. You wouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but you’d certainly judge it by its author.