Designing Moving Out 2 to be more fun, diverse and inclusive
With Moving Out 2 coming to PS4 and PS5 just a day away, we thought it would be interesting to go through some of the big additions we made to the game, how we carried across the inclusiveness and diversity from the first game and talk about how our design process enabled that.
The biggest request we had from Moving Out was for online multiplayer and we’re very proud to say that in Moving Out 2, players from all over the world play together with cross-play! We had to rewrite the game engine and core physics completely but now there’s no excuse to jump in and start yelling PIVOT! at your friends.
We didn’t just stop at online multiplayer, either. The size of the game is also 2x the original, with over 50 levels across five different dimensions.
We’ve also introduced a whole new diverse cast of movers to play, plus we’ve brought back everyone from the first game as findable movers in the world. That’s a total of 38 different characters to choose from, each with two additional costumes to unlock.
We made sure to bring back the very popular feature of having any character represented in a wheelchair. Our main movers are joined by Mel (Melbourne is where the game was made) who joins Sidney (Sydney is where SMG’s HQ is) as the main human characters on our box art. Even for the non-humans we thought it was important to have a large variety of gender neutral characters which were representative of our art team and the greater shift culturally.
When it comes to designing games, SMG is very mechanics driven and design-led. We start with ideas for interesting ways to play and then find the gameplay from that. We always keep in mind accessibility and approachability to the levels and the game itself. A game isn’t fun if some people
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