In 2019, a game was released with no fanfare, no PR buzz—just another new indie game in an ever-growing mountain of indie games. It was Supraland, and it was amazing. This was a first-person Metroidvania meets action game, an extraordinary creation with 20 hours of puzzle-solving, exploration, combat, and platforming along with a great sense of humor, all set among the discarded toys in a backyard. Even more incredibly, this enormous feat was the work of one man. It was an astonishing find that thankfully went on to receive the attention it deserved. Since then, creator David Münnich has formed a small development team to focus on its ambitious sequel, Supraworld. And somehow, they made another full-size, fantastically good follow-up, Supraland Six Inches Under, along the way.

“The years before Supraland were very frustrating,” Münnich told the Epic Games Store. “You work so hard on game stuff and think it’s great, but somehow you get zero recognition for it and don’t know how much longer you can keep trying. When I released Supraland, I was like, ‘Yeah, whatever, no one will play it anyway.’”

Thankfully, he was wrong. The project only took him 18 months, and it found its audience. “It was a big relief to figure out lots of people actually enjoy what I’m doing,” said Münnich, “and I can now just fully commit to my favorite hobby, and sleep well.”

Supraland became enormously successful. It sold over half a million copies and went on to be played by millions of others via Game Pass and as a free game on the Epic Games Store. It’s impossible to overstate just what a phenomenal feat the original Supraland was for a solo developer: It felt like a studio production because of its sheer scale, detailed art, and the volume of various elements that combined to make such a satisfyingly intricate adventure. 

“It was super-stressful to make Supraland on my own,” said Münnich. “When you’re responsible for everything, even things you have no idea how to make, you don’t sleep very well. Don’t ask me about menus and animation blueprints!”

Now, Münnich works alongside a team he’s extremely fond of, meaning he can focus on the parts of the job he excels at, “and the things that I can’t really do are taken care of by experts!”

Six Inches Under, or SIU, was the first game the team made together. Münnich was burned out, having made not only Supraland but the Crash DLC (another 15 hours of gameplay) and the football-themed spin-off Supraball all alone. He set his team working on SIU to get familiar with the process, but the project was undirected without his attention. After a six-month break, he stepped back in and helped pull the game into focus before work could properly begin on Supraworld. Even then, given that the first game took him 18 months alone, the four-plus years that have gone into the sequel so far is much more than he expected.

“Supraland was all YOLO-code, as I call it,” explained Münnich. “Lots of blueprint spaghetti if you know what I mean. It was the reason I could make it so quickly, but it’s hard to work with and maintain. For Supraworld, we set up all the systems from scratch in the new Unreal Engine 5, and while they’re pretty good now, it took super long. And yeah, we’re a bit too obsessed with having beautiful code instead of just getting stuff done I guess.”

So is the game close to being finished? Well, yes and no. “We’re now close to finishing act one out of four and will release this into Early Access,” he said. “Act two is also like 40 percent done. Don’t get me wrong, finishing the game will not take forever—the actual game-building process is kinda quick; setting up the systems the past two years took so long. But we’re picking up speed!”

So what can we look forward to in Supraworld that we haven’t seen before? “I believe the puzzle design is leagues above what Supraland did,” said Münnich. “We learned so much, and we’re avoiding all the genre conventions as much as we can.” Also, a lot of corners that had to be cut by necessity for the solo project—bought in assets, clipping meshes, and a lack of thematic environmental elements—are no longer issues. “Now everything just fits together.”

The sequel will play with structure too. Act two will be set in five different regions, playable in any order, and even the deliberately more linear act one has three different ways to be completed. One of them is for players who enjoy trying to break games and figuring out ways to go out of bounds.

“It’s just so fun to figure out a way to go out of bounds,” Münnich said, “because it’s something that you actually accomplished on your own. It’s not as fun to do something the main quest told you to do. People wanna do stuff they can be proud of. When I, as the level designer, tell people to go to a certain place, you can be sure it’s the absolute last place they will go! It’s the most boring thing to just follow the level designer’s lead.” 

This ethos was tried in Supraland too. Players would figure out a way to exploit the level, reach an area that they believed they shouldn’t be able to, and then discover Münnich had placed a reward chest there. 

“I can’t think of another game that does it as aggressively as we do,” he added. “The number of secret areas in Supraworld is just stupid insane, and I added a mechanic where an NPC makes fun of you for how many secrets you missed in the last area.” The game will even feature a “puzzle police force” that shows up when you complete a puzzle the “wrong” way. “It’s better when the game actively recognizes your cleverness,” he said. 

Another new big feature in Supraworld will be the detective cases. There are murder mysteries, which is a wonderfully bemusing thing to introduce to games that are otherwise focused on progressive exploration. Münnich claimed the game will offer complete freedom in how players investigate: 

“There is absolutely no hand-holding or structure at all. You’re free to talk to people and search the area, and the only thing you ultimately do is lock up one person. The game won’t even tell you if your choice was correct. If you think you made a mistake, you can switch the locked-up person at any time.” 

How this ties into the main game is being kept a secret for now, but Münnich reiterated, “I just think detective stuff is no fun if the game is steering you towards the right conclusions and then confirms them. I want players to debate cases online.”

Münnich is also excited about the new Metroidvania elements they’ve created. “When you’re making a Metroidvania, it’s tough to come up with new abilities no one has ever seen. We have a bunch of the standard abilities too,” he said, referencing genre staples like double-jump, growing health bars, and midair dashes, “but I think we managed to create recontextualizations that are absolutely amazing.” Act one will remain reasonably standard, with the big twists and surprises saved for act two and onward. “In acts two and three, it’s getting more and more wild,” he said. “I can’t wait to see people’s faces when they realize certain things. When things you didn’t notice at all or considered decoration suddenly change everything.”

Supraworld’s first section will release into Early Access sometime this year.