Push Me Pull You

People keep asking how they can be notified when PMPY is released. Well now they can “read all about it” in The PMPY Post, a not-really-a-newsletter that will probably consist of a single edition when the game comes out.

You can sign up here or by clicking the link at the top of our site.

Look at this. Look at these things.

Look at their little armbands!

These were made by our incredibly talented friend Marigold Bartlett. You can look at other amazing stuff she makes on her tumblr.

One of our earliest design goals for PMPY was to let players create their characters. This was initially a little hard to justify, considering how small we were trying to keep the scale of development - this was a totally aesthetic decision that’d take a lot of time to get right, and wouldn’t do a lot to enrich the mechanical complexity of the game - but we quickly recognised how much a customisation system could magnify the competitive spirit of local multiplayer games.

Local multiplayer games - especially ones that you play over and over with the same group - are really good at fostering attachments to your favourite character. After playing as Luigi more than a few times in Mario Kart, you come to identify with him. Rather than offering a handful of bespoke characters to choose from, we wanted to make this an expressive choice: giving players a bit of agency and breadth in deciding how they’d represent themselves is meant to make the game feel a little broader in scope, and hopefully a lot more inclusive (i.e. this is a game that ANY sports-monster can play - not just these few pre-made characters). This all sounds very basic and self-evident, but it took us a while to really identify how a choice like this was going to affect the tone of our game (or, to put it more simply: sometimes you don’t know why you’re working to put a comb-over haircut in your character customisation, you just know that it’s the right thing to do).

The other thing that happens with regular play and consistent character selection is that you end up with an intuitive understanding of how your opponents are represented onscreen. The four of us are so attuned to each others’ respective characters in Samurai Gunn, Towerfall, and even Hokra, that we don’t need to spend any time figuring out how the characters in-game correlate to their players. If I behead the orange demon in Samurai Gunn, I don’t need to do any mental legwork to know that I should be gloating at Nico - I get to gloat at him immediately and unrepentantly. Once these character-player relationships are internalised, games immediately become more readable, and (importantly) more sociable - hopefully, through our character creation system, we’ve made it a little bit easier to enable this internalisation.

- Michael

We’ve been kind of slack with posting these, but here’s a collection of nice articles people have written about Push Me Pull You.

When GDC came this year, we had only been working on Push Me Pull You for about three months. We had no plans to attend, so were hugely grateful when Melbourne game superhero and Stickets creator Harry Lee offered to show the game off on the conference floor, and couldn’t believe our luck when Brandon Boyer sent us a message and we saw our names on That Wild Rumpus & Venus Patrol Party lineup. At that point, PMPY had been played by a few dozen of our friends, so having the game played in rooms full of videogame bigwigs was terrifying, but thrilling.

The day after That Party, we were super excited to read Destructoid’s Hamza Aziz call PMPY “without a doubt, the weirdest and best time I’ve had with a videogame in a long time.“

Chloi Rad from Indistatik played PMPY on the conference floor with Harry, then found it again at That Party. We loved her description of the “the gross interjections and silly names for formations and strategies”, and were so pleased to see our favourite formation, “the snail” recorded in black pixels for all to see.

Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s Nathan Grayson wrote a wonderful piece about PMPY after playing it at Unwinnable House. He describes first witnessing PMPY, and “immediately [feeling] two things: 1) revulsion, 2) the truest love I’ve known in all my life” and goes on to articulate how PMPY has “the local multiplayer-centric appeal of a Nidhogg or a Towerfall, or perhaps even something in the Sportsfriends collection - just, you know, with even more laughter.”

Jeffrey Matulef of Eurogamer described playing PMPY with Pippin Barr, Harry Lee and Steve Haske, and said “it ended up as one of the highlights of the entire show (even though Barr and I lost both rounds).”

You know when someone just seems to get you? Andrew Todd from Badass Digest is that person. We laughed a little too hard when he wrote “The fact that the game’s Melbourne-based development team House House consists of four people either provides a devastating insight into their collective psychosexuality or a charming look at the closeness of their friendship.”

Ars Technica included PMPY in The Ars indie showcase: 30 games to watch in 2014, compiled by Sam Machkovech and Kyle Orland. We were all thrilled and honoured to see that “Push Me Pull You stands out as the best—and certainly weirdest—in the [couch-sport] genre’s newest wave.”

Thanks to everyone for taking the time to say lovely things about PMPY!

This weekend the sports-monsters are escaping the rain and icy winds of Melbourne and heading to an Italian summer to take part in the Summer Games Party. Organised by Playing the Game, the party will cap off the ENTER: Intersections of People and Technology festival in Padua. Summer Games Party will fill a piazza with a dozen indie and retro games ready for the public to play.

If you live in Padua, or know anyone who does, (tell them to) head over to Piazza Mazzini on Saturday evening and play some PMPY for us! While you’re/they’re at it, play one of our favourites: J.S. Joust, along with Molleindustria’s Arcade Bike Polo and many others!

We’re also very excited to announce that PMPY will be a part of Seattle’s arts and culture festival, Bumbershoot. The festival’s videogame exhibit Bumbercade, curated by Sam Machkovech, aims to “celebrate multiple styles of new-wave gaming to enlighten and enthrall the medium’s uninitiated”. PMPY will be featured alongside the phenomenal Papers, Please and Gone Home among others.