The Bard once famously wrote, “There are more MMOs in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” And we are reminded of this once more as our attention was drawn to an online game that (a) we had never heard of, yet (b) has accumulated over 75 million players since its launch.
This game is Transformice, an indie platforming MMO that launched back in June 2015. In Transformice, players become little rodents obsessed with finding and retrieving cheese. Players have two minutes in each round to get the cheese or die, but physics and ever-changing rules lead to hilarious consequences. Once players get enough cheese, they are granted shamanistic powers to help or hinder other players during subsequent levels. Also, there are hats.
Creator Melanie Christin gave a postmortem on her game at GDC 2017, sharing how this game that was developed in three weeks was leveraged into a massively successful MMO. Her talk candidly discusses some of the challenges and mistakes that the team experienced in the journey from an unknown indie to a powermouse title. Check it out below!
