Hardcore Gamer recently had the chance to sit down with Move or Die creator and Romanian ambassador, Nicolae Berbece, about the future of his game, current success and more. Highlights include what could potentially make Move or Die a better party game than Smash Bros., the difficulties of creating a game almost single-handedly and if we'll eventually see merchandise from the game pop up.

[Hardcore Gamer] Are you the only developer on Move or Die?

[Nicolae Berbece] No, before the game came out, there were two of us. After the game came out, now we're four, and what I do is come up with programmers from around the world and I take care of everything else.

So you're the head honcho, you're the driving force.

I have to wear a lot of hats, which is why development has been quite slow, but I make sure that things are high quality.

What are your basic inspirations for the game? What did you draw from?

Well, I was literally thinking that there's no game in which your health drains if you stay still. So the funny thing is it started off as a completely different type of game. It was a single-player, story-based game. And one night I was like "What if it had three more players?" And it turned out to be very, very fun. Incredibly fun. And then we kind of went in that path. And there are a lot of party games, especially with a lot of fast and furious party games coming out. And they all focus on a specific thing, so I thought "Why don't we take ALL of those things, and make it into a game?" So basically, we threw everything in a blender, and what we came out with is multiple mini-games every round.

It seems like a true party game where everyone's very animated, making a ruckus when it's being played. Is that what you were going for when you decided to make it a party game?

It's the kind of game you would put on the screen at a party and people can just pick up the controller, and you don't have to go through any kind of annoying tutorial. Because with Smash, you can't really do that, unless you literally smash buttons. Like, you'll have to know a bit of strategy. But with Move or Die, you can just pick up the controller, and if you know the name of the game, you know how to play it. And that was the idea. And also, it's very easy to spectate, so other people can gather around, start yelling at each other and ruin friendships in the process. That was the focus.

Can you talk about the latest update? What exactly did you want to bring to the table and are you happy with how it came out?

Right, so first of all, we do plan to make a lot more updates because the game came out in January, and we plan to push free content updates that bring new features to the table, and we recently released the mutator update, which kind of spices things up. The way it works is that every game has a different mechanic, and now you can add extra on top of that. So every few rounds, a player picks a new mutator, which means you add in a new thing like everybody having jetpacks, double jumps, evebody being invisible while they move, and stuff like that. And aside from that, there are new characters, new game modes, new levels, we added a new thing called announcers, which is amazing voice actors mocking you as you play, it's just quite fun. And in general, bug fixes, and the ability to drop in mid-games.

Mid-game?

Yes, you couldn't pull that off when the game came out, so we had to add it after. You can drop into game already playing, and you can have multiple local players on the same PC play with other people online. Because people asked for that.

With all of these fixes and polishing, is it safe to assume you have active fans who reach out to you?

Yes, we do encourage that a lot. One thing we used to have at events were these little fliers where people could make their own characters, and we also had contests online, and people make their own characters and we implemented some of those in the game because community content is very important, and I got into development by modding games, so modding is a very, very important thing, and that's why the game's initials are M.O.D. And it was built from the ground up with modding in mind. There's also Steam Workshop support there, and it's great to be able to play with characters from Sonic and Undertale and various others, somebody added Deadpool a few weeks ago, and it's crazy, right? And it's awesome to see people come up with new things, and I also hang out on the Steam forums a lot, and people ask "Hey, maybe you should add more maps to this mode" and then we just go and do that. Because after all, the game is for people to play, not for us, so they have to be happy.

What games did you draw inspiration from for the gameplay and art style?

That's a very tricky question, because it's like for the art style, the art is made in Adobe Flash, because I come from a browser game background, so I made a lot of flash games, and it's just something I'm comfortable working in. And it kind of has that simplistic vector art style to it, so I kind of roll off with that. But I did play a lot of platformers. The game gets compared to Super Meat Boy a lot, strictly because the character silhouette is vaguely similar to Meat Boy's, even though there's no wall jumping and it has nothing to do with Meat Boy. But yeah, it is similar to meat Boy in terms of very, very tight controls. And that's something we put a lot of focus on. But not many other games come to mind. I mean, you can look at any other party game, and Move or Die has a little bit of that in it.

Are you going to bring the game to any other consoles at all?

We do plan to bring it to consoles sometime later this year, we don't have any dates in mind, nothing specific, but it is something we're trying to push for because right now it's on PC, Mac and Linux, which are quite unintuitive platforms for a party game, right? So consoles would be a great environment for such a game, so we're looking into that.

It feels really good with a controller too.

Yeah, we made sure all controllers work on the PC version, because you can't play with four people on the same keyboard. It's really not recommended, but if you're brave enough you can do it.

That'd be a fun party, though.

I tried, it's weird. It's a social game within itself, so awkwardly touching people...

Well when you say it that way, it sounds gross. Do you see Move or Die as a persistent platform? Would you just like to keep updating it for a long time, or would you like to move on or make a sequel to it?

So the biggest mistake I see all developers do is think that the work is done once the game is out, which is the biggest misconception ever. But no, we don't see the game as something you release and forget about it. We see it as something you keep updating, so that's why we went into Early Access. The whole development was with the community and we keep pushing updates and we plan to keep the game updated for quite a while. And not only fixing bugs, but adding new content constantly, and listening to what the community wants, and bring that to the game. Because it's a game that constantly evolves, specifically because of its structure. With the mini-games being individual standalone things, we can just add more and more and have the game get bigger and bigger over time.

Our readers have asked if there will be any merchandise for the game. Is that something you'd like to see?

I do have little things like plushies I have made at home, but we don't have anything planned yet. But we definitely want something like that in the future, especially like a blank character that you can draw on, like a 3D character, that would be great. Because there are so many opportunities and possibilities with branding, marketing, and merchandise with Move or Die, it's like a tiny little canvas, and you can project your creative side.

What's next for Nicolae Berbece? Do you just want to keep focusing on Move or Die for the next year or two, or do you have any other games in the works?

I do want to keep focusing on Move or Die for a while and make sure it's very, very stable and becomes better, and bring a lot more content to the table. And we don't really have any plans for future projects as of now. Eventually we'll do something, but I don't have anything in mind right now.

Hardcore Gamer is going to be the among the first to check out exciting new Move or Die news during PAX East, so be sure to keep glued to Hardcore Gamer for all the juicy details in the coming days and read our full review here in the meantime.