Announced during Gamescom Opening Night Live, King of the Flesh is a hack-and-slash game for 1-4 players that plunges players into a series of bizarre dungeons. Made by Glowmade in collaboration with Amazon, King of the Flesh is set in the fantasy/science fiction world of Loregok, where people seek their fortune by participating in the titular gauntlet, which is broadcast worldwide on television.
Based on the reveal trailer alone King of the Flesh looks like an incredibly vibrant and fun co-op game, and it’s clear that the developers have a lot of passion for their project. That passion was clearly visible when Game Rant sat down with two members of King of the Flesh‘s development team: Studio Head Jonny Hopper and Creative Director Mike Green. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
The origins of King of Meat
Q. Where does the name “King of Meat” come from?
Funnel: I love that question. Nobody knows! Nobody remembers. The game was called King of Meat, then there was a document called “What if we didn’t call it King of Meat?” All the ideas in there were bullshit, so that’s the truth! We don’t know, but it works. I think it’s the right name for the game.
Green: I think we always thought it would change. This is just so ridiculous, but it could never be anything else.
Funnel: We had a few partners who said, “I like the code name, what’s the real name?” and we said… that’s the name.
Q. See King of the Flesh as the kind of game where there would be a lot of collaboration?
Funnel: That’s definitely something really interesting. The game has a style all its own. Everything is really coherent, but it’s easy to imagine how it could incorporate other things. We wouldn’t talk about that today. The most important thing for us is that everything stays in the world, it fits the IP and the branding of the game, but we have a few ideas of things we’d like to do. We’ll see!
I don’t know if you know much about WWE, but “Meat” is a common slogan. There’s a guy named Big Bronson Reed who is made entirely of meat. Ever since I heard King of the Flesh‘s name, I couldn’t separate the two. He must be in the game.
Funnel: It’s funny you say that. When the game started, we were sitting around and asking ourselves what we loved. One of the things was David Bowie and Jim Henson’s labyrinththe other was WWE. That was about six years ago. We thought, what if we put those two things together? It’s great that you made that connection!
What shaped King of Meats’ strong sense of humor
Q. How would you King of the Flesh‘s approach to humor?
Funnel: Mike is the creative director. When we play the game and a new idea comes up, Mike often says, “That’s really stupid, let’s put it in!” I think that’s quite British in the way we approach things. By that I mean, we look at games like fable and that kind of humor. We don’t take ourselves seriously. We don’t want to do satire, we just have fun with this world that we like to play around with.
Green: A lot of it comes from the team too. I love British humour, especially when it gets a bit dark and offbeat. We have a lot of ideas and we always try to take them in a certain direction, but the team has the game under control. It was easy to pitch something, people got it. It’s like, ‘I think we should do this,’ and they say, ‘I think you’re right, I think we should do it.’
Funnel: For example, you have a jump. Then someone said we need a double jump. Then they said, “What if we had a triple jump?” And then, “What if the triple jump was a belly flop?” It’s a stupid idea, but it’s pretty fun. Then Sam, our game programmer, says, “What if the belly flop does damage?” Then I say, “If you get poisoned in the game, surely you have to do a belly flop to get rid of the poison?” All these fun ideas come from these systems.
Green: It took a long time to get the jump right. We had a Luigi jump and a Yoshi jump. We went through all of them.
Funnel: Going back to the humor, I think the commentator is a really important part of it. This guy called Al Doyle is the voice actor. A lot of it is improvised. Originally he would go to the pub with Lewis, who does the sound, and they would just chat and he would come up with these things. It actually really added to the tone of the games.
Green: There was a recording a few weeks ago where he was just gargling. I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous, it was absolutely brilliant.
How King of Meat’s user-generated content works
F. User-generated content is a big part King of the Flesh. How granular can this system be?
Funnel: The idea of the system is that it’s very hard to do something bad. That’s the baseline: you start by placing rooms, and that’s essentially a play area. It’s a room, it’s got a configuration, but you can change all the floors, add a bunch of bad guys, add a bunch of traps. Then you can redecorate all that and mess up the logic. If you want, you can go ahead and go – room, room, room, room, go – and that’s a level. It’s a legitimate level. It’s not a very good level, but it does the job!
Then you can go back and think about changing the floors. You can set everything on fire and add some hammers and spikes. Then you can go right into it. You can start your level there and test it right away, so you can iterate and test without ever feeling like it’s working and go into logic mode where everything is connected.
This is where you can set the conditions and the reaction, but it’s not mandatory. We want to have this for experts, but we also want to make sure that every time you place the object, it does what it’s supposed to do easily and without a lot of fuss.
There’s a giant spinning spike trap that you can just throw down and it’s cool. There’s a hammer that you just stick in there and it swings and knocks you down, but if you want, you can set it to be triggered by something or to spawn bad guys. It’s detailed, but we don’t force you to really delve into it.
Green: The hope is that someone who is not so confident can build something relatively quickly, but an expert who really enjoys tinkering will make the most of it and do things we can’t or haven’t thought of. It will be exciting.
F. Is King of the Flesh Is the gameplay the most important thing, or is there more backstory than meets the eye?
Funnel: I don’t know how many characters you’ve met, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There’s so much we can do with this world. Moment-to-moment gameplay is crucial, as we can create as much world as we want, but if I’m not having fun in the dungeons, what’s the point?
If you step back, we have these crazy characters, we have these companies. One of the things we can do as a live game is plan out these narrative beats over time to explore some of that, like changing the plaza, doing new campaigns or new events. There’s a lot of scope. We definitely have a lot planned.
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King of the Flesh is currently being developed for Nintendo Switch, PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.