appealing while maintaining the playful and minimalistic style of the previous games. We went through many iterations of the environment, water and sky before settling on a final art style. It’s a difficult thing to achieve, and we weren’t willing to settle until we found an art style that met our standards.
There have been bridge-building games themed around Walking Dead and Portal in recent years. Was licensing an IP ever something you considered as a means to refresh the series? This isn’t something we have considered. Poly Bridge stands on its own merits as the leader of the bridge building genre, and doesn’t need to be built around a trendy theme to be a great game.
The original Poly Bridge was something of a viral hit. Is that kind of visibility just as necessary for the third game, or is the community such that you don’t have to worry too much generating that kind of interest? Having an active and enthusiastic Poly Bridge community definitely helps with driving interest and awareness of Poly Bridge 3. We still need to work hard on getting the word out about
Poly Bridge 3.
If Poly Bridge 2 was more of a foundational renovation of the first game (physics), would it be fair to characterise the third game as more of a structural upgrade (open world, graphics)? Poly Bridge 2 was a full rewrite of the original Poly Bridge. A custom deterministic physics engine was a huge improvement over the original, but everything else was new and improved as well. Poly Bridge 3 was able to build off the solid Poly Bridge 2 codebase, so we have been able to iterate and improve everything from the start of development. This has allowed us to make huge improvements in the game visuals, but there are other new systems that we think players will really enjoy. One in particular is the decor system, which allows players to decorate levels with a wide variety of objects. We are looking forward to seeing how players create unique and beautiful levels with this new functionality. Our goal with Poly Bridge sequels
is to preserve the core gameplay and essence of the original, while making everything better with each new version.
What’s been the biggest challenge during the creation of Poly Bridge 3, or one that wasn’t as pressing during the development of the earlier titles? How did you overcome it? A big challenge for Poly Bridge 3 was evolving the art style to be visually
42 | MCV/DEVELOP June 2023
Does the Poly Bridge community continually surprise and inspire you? What is the most impressive puzzle or solution that a player has submitted? The Poly Bridge community continually amazes and inspires the team. We have an active Discord community, and we are constantly impressed with innovative creations and solutions, as well as the humour of our players. We often see creations that we never considered possible -- elaborate animation using hydraulics, over-engineered bridges that seem impossibly complicated, or making the game look like Minecraft!
You love bridges, clearly. When do you think you’ll tire of them? Hopefully never – the cool thing about Poly Bridge is there are always new things to create and discover.
How important is user-generated content to the success of Poly Bridge and how have you leaned into that further with the latest game? UGC has been an important part of Poly Bridge since the original, with both the Workshop and Gallery. We are taking UGC to a whole new level with Poly Bridge 3 though. We have added built in support for modding, as well a brand new and improved in- game workshop.
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