We’re big fans of indie developer Martin Magni around these parts, and we’re far from alone. Magni first popped onto our radar with the release of the fantastic physics platformer Odd Bot Out back in early 2015, a game he built entirely from scratch by himself through sheer determination over the course of a year. Not only did we enjoy Odd Bot Out in our review, but the game did rather well relative to Magni’s expectations and he talked a bit about that as well as the development process in an interview we conducted later that year. Then in 2016 Magni released his next project, an isometric puzzler called Mekorama. Again this game was built from scratch and crafted entirely by Magni alone, right down to the graphics and procedurally generated music system. While its set of 50 default levels were enjoyable enough, what really made Mekorama stand out back when it released was its fairly robust but easy to use level editor, as well as the extremely simple method you were able to share those created levels with others.
If you look at what Odd Bot Out was at the time, and then you looked at Mekorama in contrast, you could see that Magni was ultimately working towards something bigger. Odd Bot Out gave him a foundation for building a custom engine and physics system, and Mekorama gave him a foundation for creating and sharing content. The next step would be something called Fancade, a user-friendly app where you could literally build and share your own entire games using the tools it offered. The project has been in the works for the past few years, and missed several release windows, but at long last it’s all finally coming together. Magni has announced this week that Fancade will be arriving on iOS and Android devices on April 30th. Here is the trailer.
What’s so great about Fancade is that, yes it’s a very robust creation tool, but it doesn’t skimp out for those who are just looking to play games as opposed to create them. The game’s Quest mode features TONS of levels using games created by Magni with a nice progression system and a lot of variety in gameplay mechanics touching on types of games we’ve seen before and some that are brand new. Then there’s the Arcade mode which features games created by the community, and since Fancade has been in the works for such a long time there’s actually a plethora of things to experience here. There’s a simple play count and voting system so you can see what the good stuff is, and you can also sort by Featured, New, and by different categories. Then there’s the whole Build mode which can be either as complex or as simple as you want to make it. If you want to learn more about how creating games works, Mathias Elgaard has put up a bunch of tutorial videos on his YouTube channel and you can also find lots of helpful information on the game’s official website.
I’m playing an early version of Fancade and while I haven’t dove too deeply into the creation aspect just yet, I’m having an absolute blast playing through all the pre-made levels in the Quest mode and I’m finding tons of quality stuff from the community in the Arcade mode. Like Magni’s previous releases I think this one is going to be a real hit so be sure to check out Fancade for yourself when it launches at the end of this month.
