At the Nintendo Press Summit last week, there were about a dozen games being shown, but one kept grabbing my attention: "Super Meat Boy." I'd seen the game before, and played a bit of an early build on the PC, but holding the Wii Remote sideways, NES style, brought me back to a simpler age of 2D platformers, which were the inspiration for the game. True, those games didn't involve punishing difficulty, gallons of blood and a fetus wearing a tuxedo, but the basic concept is the same: Jump at the right time or you're dead.

The developers of "Super Meat Boy" are known as Team Meat. It's a two man crew made up of Edmund McMillen (who is in charge of level, art and game design) and Tommy Refenes (who is handling all the programming). That's it, just those two guys. The basic framework of the game has already been finished, and now the level creation must start. That duty falls to McMillen, who has probably made thousands of platforming levels over the course of his career. So how does he plan to come up with hundreds of new levels for this game? Don't worry, there's a formula.

Step 1
Edmund starts a level by introducing a mechanic. The example he gave was shooting saws. "The introduction level has to introduce how the shooting saws work with the player," he explained. "So it's gonna be something simple, like it's going to go horizontally across, jump over it, you're done."

Step 2
But there are many ways to use shooting saws, right? "Now I want to also introduce the fact that these shooting saws can also come down vertically, down or up, so there's another level with that."

Step 3
Those are just the basics. Once the player has those concepts down he can really start to mess with them. "Later on in the game we'll introduce that I can control how fast saws shoot and randomize the shooting and complicate things."

To Summarize
"So it's all about introducing the mechanic, exploring the mechanic and later revisiting it in a new way. So that way the player doesn't get bored. In each chapter you're gonna find three new things that aren't in anything else, but the existing things that've been established from the previous chapters will still exist in those."

Drunken Prom Date 2
What happens when you're at the final chapter of the game and every mechanic has been introduced and layered on top of one another? That's when you get to the nightmare level that's tentatively titled "Drunken Prom Date 2." The original "Meat Boy" featured "Drunken Prom Date," the one and only level created by Tommy Refenes, who decided to make the most frustratingly, face-punchingly difficult level imaginable.

Once Tommy's programming duties are out of the way, he has one task: Create "Drunken Prom Date 2." According to Edmund, that can only happen when the entire game is finished: "In order for it to be created, the game needs to be done, because you need to see how impossible it needs to be."

In case you're wondering, Tommy only finished the first "Drunken Prom Date" once, and he created the damn thing. He promises that the second one will be nothing short of Hell on Earth.