SMG on how Death Squared came to be, why they brought it to Switch, ease of development & future support

A portion of a Nintendo Life interview with dev studio SMG...

NL: Going back to the beginning with Death Squared, how did the original concept come together?

SMG: Pat did a game jam, which is where you go to a location with other devs and make a game from Friday 6pm to Sunday 6pm. 48 hours and the theme for the jam is only revealed in the first hour! SMG has participated in all of these since 2010 but this was the first game we've taken further to proper release. The theme was "what happens next", and Pat wanted to make a game where every level surprised you. In fact some of the levels he made back in 2015 made it into the final game almost verbatim.

But we knew even after 48 hours this was a fun game and had potential. The cube design was a by-product of Pat working by himself over 48 hours, but we thought it worked well and it allowed us to focus on the game first then art.

NL: At what point did you become aware of the Switch, and were you immediately interested in bringing Death Squared to the system?

SMG: When we heard about the NX we thought wow, we'd love to be a launch title, and the timing seemed right. But as a new studio to console we didn't get in the launch. Luckily, through persistence, we'd see Nintendo reps at shows like PAX or RTX and hassle them there (nicely) too; we made it into the first few months of the Switches' life.
We feel Death Squared fits the Nintendo audience really well as it's gameplay first and a unique game. And the game fits the Switch perfectly.

NL: Do you hope to work on the Switch more with future projects?

SMG: Yes, it's by far the easiest Nintendo platform to build for. We'd also like to explore the gyro and IR of the Joy-Cons as there's a lot of interesting ideas we can do with that for Death Squared and other games.