Hi all,
My name is Jim Griffiths and I'm the writer and designer for "Monsters (Probably) Stole My Princess!". I've been intimately involved with the game right from the very start, and with the game finally released on PSP and PS3 this week, and what with all the support and encouragement we've received since the trailer was released, we thought now would be a great opportunity to start sharing a little more background information on the game!
The Duke and the Title
Two things helped define the feel of the game right from the start more than anything else - the character of the Duke, and the title of the game itself.
We knew that our game was going to be released as a PSP minis right from the start, so it needed to be something that people would get right away and could then just jump right in. Even though we don't believe in letting anything other than good ideas and what's fun dictate what kind of games we make, we knew that this was going to be an important factor in making sure we were creating something that people actually wanted to play!
The character of the Duke pretty much matched this "Let's go!" mentality perfectly. Right from the moment his character popped into existence, he was all about action and movement and doing stuff just for the joy of doing it - pretty much regardless of reason or consequence. He's just looking for an excuse to go have a bit of a mess around, and he felt like a great match for what we wanted to achieve with "Monsters!"
We did quite a few sketches for the Duke at the start. Some clearly worked better than others and the Duke is a quite cleanly defined character now - so these "alternatives" look very strange in some cases and make us feel pretty uncomfortable looking at them now!
EARLY CONCEPT SKETCHES OF "THE DUKE"
Once we had worked out the basics of the game mechanic and the character, the title of the game just snapped into place and felt right - it pretty much said exactly what the game was about!
The only other title that was considered for a bit was "Monsters! I Will Hunt You Down!" - which maybe wasn't terrible, but definitely lacked the same light-hearted feel to it (and also missed a chance to poke a little bit of fun at stereotypical videogame plots, including our own).
There was a fair amount more that went into the initial process, but once we had the core idea of the game nailed down, the next really important part was to create a cast of monsters to shoulder the blame!
Squishface Octo-Thing
Squishface Octo-Thing is the first creature that you encounter in the game. He was also the first creature that we drew, and he was really, really important in terms of setting the look and feel for all the monsters in the game.
For the monsters, there were two things that were really important to us in their design. First of all, at "first glance" they really did need to look monstrous, so that you wouldn?t have much difficulty in believing that they were capable of a kidnapping - or worse.
But secondly, we wanted to make it so that if you looked a little closer, it seems much more likely that instead of behaving discourteously towards princesses, the monsters in the game seem to be more concerned with just quietly getting on with their lives. We wanted to make sure they had enough personality that you'd maybe stop and have a bit of think if everything was quite as the Duke seemed to see it.
With Squishface Octo-thing, we went through a few different designs to make sure that hit this balance. Early sketches had him in shorts, but that was felt to be a bit too "human", so we went to full-on monster.
"SQUISHFACE OCTO-THING" EARLY SKETCH. He's wrong because he's angry, which isn't what our monsters are about, and the shorts also make him too "human"
Evil King Skull-for-a-Butt
We tried to make sure that at the start of every cutscene, the monster for that level appears to be engaged in doing something truly dreadful - something that could probably involve your princess without too big a leap of the imagination.
If you chase the monster to the top of the level, we've tried to include a little joke up there every time, that sheds a little more light on the life of the monster and what it was REALLY doing when it was interrupted by the Duke.
King Skull-for-a-Butt is definitely one of the creepier monsters, especially when you see him at the beginning of the level, but he also has one of the more touching "jokes" at the top of the level. He also originally had a little moustache and bowler hat, but again this made him a little bit too human-like.
"EVIL KING SKULL-FOR-A-BUTT" POSSIBILITY.
Again, the shirt and hat are too human-like. The monsters have their own lives and agends, which are part of their personality, but their day-to-day activities are not human.
Also in this image, one of the "Dukes" has pupils. This looks horribly wrong now.
It Came from the Bog!
This was the last creature that was drawn and we did have the biggest struggle with making his (her?) opening joke/reveal work, and we tried a few different designs. We were trying to create something creepy on the top of the head that could still be revealed as being something not quite so terrifying when you saw the bottom half of the monster. We tried different shapes and markings, but in the end sticking a big 'ol eyeball on it was the way forward.
"IT CAME FROM THE BOG!" EARLY DRAFTS.
This guy changed more than any of the other monsters. But he ended up one of our very favourites...along with all the other monsters as well.
"IT CAME FROM THE BOG!" EARLY CUTSCENE "REVEAL" IDEA.
The intent was to have scary markings that were revealed to be comical once he was out of the water. But eventually we had a better idea.
In the end, I think this is one of the favourite cutscenes in the office. Jon, our animator, has a keen sense of timing and there are many cases where this meant the difference between a joke working or falling completely flat (we hope!)
The scene from the top of the waterfall, in contrast, was one of the earliest ideas that was had.
This was also the most difficult level to code into the game - especially when you get to the top of the water fall, because of the way this monster moved.
Ghost (Busted)
The Ghost was also quite tricky to get right - as with all the monsters, it was our artist, Adam who found a way to really make the idea shine and create something that was both really quite unsettling, but was also almost... cute.
The Rock-It Lord
I'm not going to talk about this guy for now - we don't want to spoil the end for those who haven't played the game! But we were really pleased when we got this guy?s reveal right. There are also some really neat details and story behind this guy, most of which you can get an idea of by unlocking all the in-game literature - but there's also some really neat detail in the creature itself and the background of the level.
Getting a guy this big up and running was a real challenge for our coder, Gabor. It was a pretty amazing job to get everything to fit into the 100MB limit we had for the game.
Finishing up
There's a huge amount we could talk about, but with the game just launching now we don't want to give too much away that might take away from the story!
We really hope you've enjoyed this post, and if you're are interested and do want to ask more about the game just let us know!
