What’s not to like? Eat Them! gives gamers the chance to create and bring to life colossal monsters in order to flatten entire cities and feast on their inhabitants. Always dreamed of laying waste to downtown? Here’s your chance.

If you’re still not convinced, wrap your destructive side around some of the game’s features::

• The Monster Lab. We want you to be able to piece together the apocalyptic creature of your worst nightmares, and the Monster Lab gives you access to a huge selection of monster parts including a full arsenal of excessively powerful weapons. This gives you the power to play mad scientist to your heart’s content, designing creatures tailor made to handle the variety of mission on offer in the game. If you were so inclined the Monster Lab would allow you to create over five million unique monsters – you certainly shouldn’t run out of ideas any time soon.

• Challenging Missions. Whether you get your kicks from maximum destruction, or prefer to face endless waves of opposition in a bid to survive as long as possible, we’ve got the game style for you. Survival, assassination, racing and pure unadulterated destruction are readily available in Eat Them! tying together the story that is as big as the monster you’re controlling. Ever wondered what it’s like to rob a bank using a 100 foot tall, laser firing mechanical tyrannosaur? We can answer that question – it’s freakin’ awesome!
• Co-op Multiplayer. The only thing better than single-handedly destroying an entire city is teaming up with other monsters for more carnage. Eat Them! allows four friends to join forces and play every mission in the game in multiplayer. Anything you can do in single player, you can do in multi-player, only with far more devastating effect.

• Mayhem. As the missions play out, the city’s defence forces get wise to your destructive plans and send an increasingly lethal barrage of artillery and even superheros to take you out. You certainly need your wits about you to fight them off; complete the mission at hand, and stay fed (I’ll give you one guess what your primary source of nourishment is).
• Destruction. The sheer joy of charging up to a pristine building, and letting rip until only the foundations are left!

Eat Them! launches exclusively on the PlayStation Network on 22 December 2010.

Happy Chris-munch!

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Hello, James again. Lead Designer on Eat Them! And I want to talk to you about Power Bars. I know, interesting stuff! It’s all rock and roll here at top flight game developers FluffyLogic.

One of the aims of the game is to maintain the pace throughout. We want the game to be pick-up-and-play – so session times will be short but the nature of the game will encourage repeat play. We are aiming for an old-school arcade feel and we want people to sneak in one more game before school, or when coming back from the pub, or between courses at a swanky dinner party! A game that is played in five minute chunks needs to be pacey and efficient – there’s no time for standing around when you should be beating the daylights out of a skyscraper or chomping through a bus load of tourists.

The other thing that’s important is eating people; if monsters aren’t eating, the game doesn’t live up to its name and whoever came up with the title it is going to go away disappointed.

So this brings us to power bars. In the E3 version of the game there are separate health and power bars – it’s a fairly typical set-up: the health bar is depleted whenever the monster is attacked, and the power bar drops whenever the monsters uses any of its weapons. Eating people increased both. So far so good…

We are very lucky to have a relationship with Sony which allows us to make changes to the design if we believe them to be beneficial to the game. It also means that when we receive feedback from Sony, we trust their opinions, and are happy to act on them. On this occasion we got some feedback which basically said “Why not combine the health and power bars?”. And you know what? We did.

Our man from Sony was right, the system we had in place had an unintended consequence: because a monster’s power decreased independently of health, players would end up running away from a fight, even if their health was high, because their weapons were out of power. They would then hide in a corner eating passers by until they could attack again. This isn’t, and never will be, the behaviour of a proper monster…

Now the two are combined, there is more emphasis on eating people to keep the monster alive, and it is rarely beneficial for the player simply to stand around. The power loss caused by using weapons is replaced with a small but consistent power use throughout gameplay, so the player is not dissauded from wading in all guns blazing.

We’re pleased with the new system, but it’s still early days – and it will undergo further refinements, I am sure, before you good people get to see it. But I hope I’ve given a little insight into the thought that goes into something as seemingly inconsequential as a power bar.

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‘Sup? I’m called James Parker, I’m a designer here at FluffyLogic and I’m working on Eat Them!, which Ana has been telling you stuff about recently, and I’m here to say a few more extra in-depthy words about how making a game like Eat Them! actually happens on a day to day basis. Today – CONTROLS!

A game can have the greatest technology in the world, the most incredible art assets, and USPs that would have marketing people salivating into their espressos, but if the controls feel wrong – if the player isn’t properly connected with the game – then everything else will be wasted.

One of the first things you do when designing any game is download a picture of the DualShock3, cribbed from Google images, fire up your favorite drawing package, and put little lines all over it connecting buttons to boxes that describe their functions. At this stage, as an experienced designer, you make an educated guess at what’s going to work for your game. The reality is, until you get the game on the Test Kit, the controller in your hands and you actually try the thing, you may as well have been drawing a moustache on the Mona Lisa.

Because customisation is a big factor in the game, each monster’s capabilities are going to be slightly different – and with four possible weapon positions on each monster, as well as kicks, grabs, jumps, and stomps – mapping all the controls, and all the while keeping things simple and intuitive, is quite challenging. Those things, however, are easily tested and changed, tweaked to accommodate new functionality and swapped to satify people whose fingers are the wrong way round – that’s the 80%.

(more…)

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