The wait is over and we can finally bring you the winners for the Create your own Eat Them! Monster.

First of all, we’d like to say thank you to all of you for the awesome and impressive designs that we have received during the last weeks. FluffyLogic had a tough job picking just from winners from all the entries.

I hope you enjoy them as much as we did:

Eendmo

De-wan-ee

playerDNG

oskarCeg.jpg

As well as receiving a voucher code which allows them to download three games from a selection at PlayStation Store, all four winners’ designs will turn into a fantastic theme that will be available for everyone to download from PlayStation Store for free on 27 April.

Once again, congratulations to the winners and remember that you still can build your own monster in the Eat Them! Laboratories and take it on a rampage.

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I love monsters. I grew up watching movies like It Came From Beneath the Sea and The Thing and playing games like War of the Monsters and Resident Evil. I wanted to honor that spirit with this first edition of the PlayStation Monsterpedia, a collection of detailed artwork and in-depth specifications gleaned directly from the game developers that inspired it all.

For this edition, I selected monsters that have left a strong impact on me personally, whether it was Dead Nation‘s shudder-inducing Cutter or Sackboy’s new arch-nemesis the Negativitron. Expect to see future editions of the PlayStation Monsterpedia detailing more memorable monsters from PlayStation lore, both old and new. What beasts would you like to see in the next installment? Be sure to leave your suggestions in the comments.

Codename: “WIDOWMAKER”
Height: Varies; size difference assumed to be based on varying maturity
Weight: Varies
Natural habitat: Unknown; Chimeran in origin
Defensive mechanisms: Toxic, caustic saliva; barbed fore talons; thick, chitinous armor
Weaknesses: Heavy artillery
Appears in: Resistance: Fall of Man, Resistance 3

BEHAVIOR:
The Widowmaker is the largest known feral Chimera, a wild spider-like predator that spits caustic saliva at any foes it cannot stab with its razor-sharp tarsi. Its appearance on the battlefield requires immediately engagement by all nearby units, with high casualty rates reported for both human and Chimeran forces. Widowmakers are generally solitary creatures, though scattered reports have indicated the possible existence of clans of Widowmakers stampeding through the wilderness.

Unlike the young Widowmakers Nathan Hale fought in England, fully grown Widowmakers are nearly impossible to defeat with conventional weaponry, though high explosives can prove effective. Initial data suggests that combatants that focus on the creature’s face first, then its weak points as it reacts, suffer lower casualty rates.

Codename: “DEVOURER”
Height: Approximately 25 feet tall
Weight: 15,000 lbs (estimated)
Natural habitat: Marshlands surrounding New Marais
Defensive mechanisms: Powerful musculature; long, barbed tongue; thick armor plating
Weakness: Electricity; gaps between armor plates near the mouth and ribs
Appears in: inFAMOUS 2

BEHAVIOR:
The Devourer is part of The Corrupted, a race of mutant beings that have burrowed from the swamplands surrounding the city of New Marais. More precisely, The Corrupted comprise a hierarchy of organisms, including humanoids equipped with long bladed arm talons as well as smaller armored drones called Ravagers. The Devourer represents the pinnacle of The Corrupted’s unnatural evolution. Its long, barbed tongue is prehensile, which the Devourer uses to immobilize and ingest organic matter.

Eyewitness accounts from New Marais are scarce, but the Devourer is reportedly aggressive and territorial, making it exceedingly dangerous. With its vast size, enormous strength and armored exoskeleton, the Devourer presents a persistent threat to the citizens of New Marais — particularly as The Corrupted make increasingly bold incursions into inhabited urban centers. Attempts to subdue The Corrupted by local law enforcement have proven unsuccessful, sparking a small-scale arms race as mutant and human alike position for control of New Marais. A local anti-mutant vigilante group called the Militia has reported some success in keeping The Corrupted at bay, and have peddled these achievements into a local protection racket.

Speculation that The Corrupted and the Devourer were mutated as a result of local Ray Sphere experimentation warrants further investigation.

Codename: “CUTTER”
Height: Over 11 feet tall
Weight: Over 700 pounds
Natural habitat: Bioengineered, designed for urban environments
Defensive mechanisms: Thick, hardened carapace; machete-like talons
Weaknesses: Very few, though tactically inept and tends to charge mindlessly at prey
Appears in: Dead Nation

BEHAVIOR:
This undead construct patrols large areas and can survive for months, even years, on very little physical sustenance. The Cutter’s behavioral patterns are simple and primal, a testament to its lab-grown origins. Alarmingly nimble despite its towering physique, the Cutter often surprises its unlucky targets. Upon seeing human prey, the Cutter immediately charges and attempts to cleave the victim in two using its massive, bladed talons. The cutting power of the Cutter’s machete-like hands can’t be overstated; they can easily cut through cars, fences, and Kevlar armor with one swipe.

The Cutter shows little discrimination in choosing targets, and won’t hesitate to carve through pockets of infected if they stand between it and living prey. Resourceful survivors have been known to exploit this fact as a way of negotiating the countless infected that now prowl the streets of major urban centers worldwide.

Codename: “VERANIDATOR”
Height: Approximately 50 feet
Weight: 5.98 tons
Natural habitat: Any large scale urban environment
Defensive mechanisms: Multi-shot rocket launcher; hydraulic claw; immobilizing acoustic eruption
Weaknesses: Easily distracted
Appears in: Eat Them!

BEHAVIOR:
One of over five million variations of monster built from components in the lab of noted monster scientist and madman Dr. Wilder, the Veranidator is equipped for maximum destruction in urban environments. Its rocket launcher can be used to take out ground-based and aerial attackers, and the patented ROAR acoustic system will immobilize unprotected human foes. Its hydraulic claw is just as useful for smashing through structures as it is grabbing improvised weaponry from the ground.

Like all of Dr. Wilder’s creations, the Veranidator is powered by disposable fuel units commonly used in vehicles, cafes, street corners, and anywhere else civilians congregate.

Codename: “NEGATIVITRON”
Height: 2.6 miles, or approximately 42,000 Sackboys
Weight: The Sun
Natural Habitat: The cold, empty reaches of the Cosmos; the cupboard under the stairs
Defensive Mechanisms: Sucking; Creating Meanies and infecting the Cosmos; Telling jokes at funerals
Weaknesses: Metal toy soldiers, bits of string, Sackboy
Appears in: LittleBigPlanet 2

BEHAVIOR:
Deep in the exquisite cold of the interstellar Cosmos, the skilled Negativitron hunter must know when to hunt and when to flee. Wherever there is silence, wherever there is serenity, calm or peace, that is when the tracker must be his most wary.

With infinite patience, the Negativitron waits in the darkest corners of the Cosmos with one terrible eye always open. The hunter will receive but one warning that his quarry has turned: THE UNMISTAKABLE DEATH WOOSH OF AN 1800W BAGLESS INTERSTELLAR VACUUM CLEANER! Snarling, thrashing, sucking, The Negativitron attacks with nothing but vengeance and fury on its mind. In the vast blackness of space, a Vacuum within a vacuum. Feeding on fear, on doubt, on all those times you were told you were worthless and grew to believe it. The Negativitron will read you, search you. The more you fear it, the stronger it becomes.

And what of the hunter? For most, eternal silence and blackness. Perhaps one in a hundred will escape with his life intact, and one in a thousand with his sanity. The Negativitron is a ruthless foe, filled with cunning and empty of remorse. It will lure you, trick you, seduce you and destroy you. Yours will be but another forgotten story, a speck of dust in the nebula of forgotten heroes.

The Negativitron shall live on! Brooding, resting, waiting.

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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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