Mutate – Shaping the metaverse together

Mutate is a no-coding game creation tool with voxel assets, in-built multiplayer, and game remixing. Mutate’s founders tell us more about it.

Mutate is a game creation tool inspired by Minecraft that lets you create, play, and remix games with no coding knowledge required. Christian Pérez and Hugo Hägglund, the two founders of Mutate, tell us about the development and future of Mutate in the article below.

We will all soon get to jump into the metaverse, and there we will spend big parts of our time. But what will it look like, and who will create all these awesome worlds and experiences that the metaverse promises to bring?!

Mutate gives users the opportunity to decide for themselves what the metaverse will be, and the ability to shape it. Mutate democratizes the creation of games, and hands over the control of the coming metaverse to the users themselves.

Imagine Ready Player One – but instead of worlds and games controlled by a company, it is the users who together decide how they work and designs them! They bring their ideas to life!

How it all started and what sparked the idea behind Mutate was playing a lot of Minecraft together. It was super simple to get into, and you quickly got hooked on creating while playing. You could divide the work, and focus on what you wanted to do, and explore and create in this universe together.  

Being avid gamers, we thought why does it have to end at building a house? Why couldn’t it be pushed further, making actual games and stories? Why couldn’t you create experiences and games that you could then play and share with your friends?

At this point we also started looking at Roblox. There, creation was only for the few, and it was not something you could easily get into and collaborate on. The creative experience was not a social and fun journey in itself. 

We started to imagine if it was possible to create a platform where you could take the best from each of these products – the social and simple creation from Minecraft, combined with the ability to make real games like in Roblox. Making creation as dead simple as placing blocks, but making it powerful enough to create actual games and experiences. This became Mutate’s mission!

Playing and creating within Mutate

For us at Mutate it is crucial that creation is made as simple as it can get, anyone needs to be able to make their ideas come to life, and it should never be too hard or take too long.

At the same time we are all gamers, and we love mechanics to master, puzzles to solve and stories to explore. Being able to get both sides of this coin is what makes Mutate special.

To achieve this, the story and the universe of Mutate ties all of these experiences, hubs and games together. The games and experiences are shorter, and without too much meta gameplay, focusing on the essence of play and getting to the fun as quickly as possible.

This enables creators to focus on the best parts of game creation, the gameplay and mechanics, both making it easier to create and allowing players to explore games and experiences without having to learn everything from scratch every session they jump into.

In Mutate everything is social as well, you can play and create together with friends. This is what we believe makes creating in Mutate unique, it is not only about the end goal, and it doesn’t have to be perfect.

It is about making games for others, to evoke an emotion or to express yourself. And you can do it together, or go at it solo if you want to surprise someone.

Challenges making a social games creation platform

The mission we set out to solve was not the easiest one, and we knew that from the start. It started with identifying the challenges we would face and proving that these were things that we could overcome, both from a technical perspective, but also that we could make it fun. 

Making Mutate accessible for everyone

Something that has always been important to us is that anyone should be able to play and create in Mutate, and there should be no need to have the latest computer or the best connection.

We also want anyone to be able to invite their friends, and have them join instantly. The metaverse exists everywhere and anywhere, the device you’re using should not really matter. 

This was one of our first and biggest challenges, something that required us to create our own cloud based gaming engine from scratch. That is, an engine that streams the games as you join them, and that allows users to be inside of and playing their games as they are being created.

Powerful yet dead simple

This is a challenge that we have started to get a handle on, but one of the biggest that we’ve faced. It is a super tricky trade-off where we want to unleash people’s creativity, without limitations, while keeping the tools simple enough that anyone could do it. In Mutate this is all about drag-and-drop, layering complexity and creating a no-code visual language.

Social creation

If it wasn’t enough to enable anyone to create a game, we also set out to enable users to do this together, live and to make the creation into a shared and fun experience. This is what we really loved about Minecraft, and now something that we are proud to have in Mutate!

The Future

Taking on this huge mission has been very exciting, even trying at times, but we always want to push things further. Mutate is not one singular game, it is a platform and universe.

Just as with popular social media platforms our mission and the Mutate universe will never be “complete”. Mutate will evolve and grow with our users, enabling people to express their creativity freely along the way.

Right now there are a few things we are looking forward to in the near future:

We are working hard to weave all of this into a unified platform and universe, tying it all together, creating the massively connected universe we’ve envisioned.

We are working on broadening our visual language, making it even easier for new users and introducing new layers for the more seasoned Mutate creators.

We are creating an avatar system that would allow you to express yourself within this universe, both while creating and playing.

To do all of this we are now looking to grow our community and gather as much feedback as possible. This is a project and platform that is made for all creative people out there, and we need to talk to as many of you as possible!

We want to hear what you would create and play, and what challenges you are facing that we could help solve in Mutate. This is what drives us and motivates us to push forward, seeing the things that users are able to create and enabling more creativity with every day passing.

So, what are you waiting for? Come join us on this massively crazy and fun adventure, and create your first game in a day, today!

You can check out Mutate at the official website here. You’ll also find them on Twitter at @MutateApp.

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