Cousins make spiritual successor to Tetris Attack, attempt to reclaim the fun of retro puzzle games with Super Plexis.
Gabe and Andrew are likely the only game developers in their city Naples, a corner of south Florida with a disproportionate elderly population. Aged 26 and 19 respectively, the cousins saw a chance to fill a niche that was sorely lacking in today’s mobile game market: a fun, fast, skill-based puzzle game like the ones they grew up playing on the Super Nintendo. Super Plexis was their response to the slow, greedy, lowest-common-denominator match-3 games that plague mobile app stores today.
“As console/PC gamers ourselves, we wanted to bring something new to the table . . . something we would actually want to play on our phones,” shared Gabe, the artist and sound designer for Super Plexis, “We reflected back on what we loved about Super Nintendo games, they were fun and welcoming but with hidden depth and challenge.” The premise of the game will sound familiar to fans of Tetris Attack or the Puzzle League series: Versus-style battles with match-3 puzzle mechanics. Blocks can be moved freely so there’s no stopping and scanning for possible moves; instead, you have to think fast set up your own chain reactions to trigger more powerful attacks. Players can also choose characters with specific stats, abilities, and counters. Gabe thinks this excitement is what’s missing from modern puzzle games, “We enjoy games like League of Legends and Starcraft for that competitive adrenaline rush, so including online multiplayer and matchmaking was a must.” But a full-fledged single-player “Adventure” mode also exists for players not ready to hop online straight away.
The team has big plans for the future of Super Plexis, the first of which involves bringing the game to other devices. “The response from players so far has been very positive, along with lots of demand for a version for Android phones,” said Andrew, the lead programmer and engineer of the team, “We built our game engine from scratch so restructuring all the code to go multi-platform is no small task.” To support themselves during this next stage of development, the team launched a campaign on Kickstarter. Andrew added, “It’s an uphill battle in the mobile market, its very stigmatized, but we think after 2 years of work, we’ve really got something special if they’re willing to give it a try!”
Super Plexis Beta on the App Store: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/super-plexis/id1155953418?mt=8
