At GDC 2016, two Italians somehow found themselves at a party for New Zealand game developers. The first was Marco Bancale, whose 2D strategy sidescroller Kingdom had just been hailed at the IGF Awards. “A guy asked me, ‘Are you Italian?’ And I was like, ‘Yes, I’m Italian, are you?’ ‘Yes.’ So we started talking.” This was Patrick Corrieri, developer of bridge-building game Poly Bridge. “And then the day after we met, we pitched to each other the idea for our next games – and we found out that it was basically the same game,” Bancale says. “So we were like, OK, either we do it together or we compete, and competing doesn’t make much sense.”
The result of that meeting was Plasma, an ambitious engineering playground that promises to let players create any device they can think of – or potentially even full games, in a manner akin to Media Molecule’s Dreams. “I would say Dreams has always been our competitor in a way,” Bancale says. “But they’re heavily focused on artists – you can sculpt, you can do all those crazy things – and we are more on the engineering side of things.”