Me Monstar: Hear me Roar!

Me Monstar is a concept that I started working on at Cohort way back in 2008. We had just finished pre-production on The Shoot and were waiting to see if Sony wanted to proceed into full production. So rather than sitting around and waiting we decided to start playing with some rather cool hardware from Sixense that had turned up at the office (The Shoot started life as a Guncon controlled game). Our initial thoughts were that motion control would be a really cool way to control a character, and Me Monstar was born.

I had been playing with a game concept using robots and the six axis tilt control to move them around, and the idea kind of morphed from that.

Me Monstar was initially designed to be a cross media franchise, a pervasive experience that you could play at home or on the road. This meant we had lots of ideas for how we could make the game work on various platforms and how we could connect people through the game. Each platform would provide different experiences specifically targeted at the platfrom for the best experience that would feed into the central experience that would be connected online through a social network.

We realised that the motion control aspect wouldn't be commercially viable with Playstation Move the way we wanted to do it as you would need 2 controllers which would be cost prohibitive for most players. We didn't have a relationship with Microsoft so weren't aware of Kinect until late on which probably would have been the perfect fit if we had been aware of it.

Minis

We ended up developing Me Monstar for minis because as a studio our ambition for a long time had been to release our own self published titles. It had been sitting on the back burner while The Shoot was in production, so we dusted it off. I cut the game right down, and took a section that we thought we could self fund and that would create a fun experience on the minis platform.

The minis version is basically about bullying and overcoming it. You get bullied by bigger monstars, and as you grow you get some payback on the bigger guys. The gameplay goes back to games that inspired me as I was growing up, Mr Doo, Bomber Man and Pac Man, and I think you can probably see the influences in there. The humour is based around the digestive system as you have to eat to become more powerful, so there's a lot a toilet humour in there.

The game fits into the overall backstory of Me Monstar, and takes place at the start where your Monstar has to travel the Roaring Road as a rites of passage to become a Monstar Guardian, protector of the Monstars world.

Narrative

The game takes place in a dream world, which is admmittedly a well worn conceit. We needed a device to essentially do what ever we wanted with gameplay, and dreams simply fit that and wouldn't need much explanation and something people could easily relate to. Something to consider when creating something original is how you create your 'in', how your audience can relate to and understand what your doing. There is no point being original for originals sake, you need to pick your battles.

The gameplay was turning out to be pretty weird, with weaponsied vomit, explosive farts and moral indignation as a gameplay mechanic. I could have gone for an equally weird backstory, but felt this would have been harder to relate to. Something I wanted to do was to create a world that held a mirror up to modern society, so rather than being about rainbows and unicrons, it was about greedy bankers and fast food.

The world is under threat, yeah another well worn one, but the fear that is consuming the world is coming from peoples dreams, and the fear of the world they live. Fear of the financial situation, war, terrorism, social and politcal influences, getting fat, etc etc. Where as in 'The never ending story' for example, darkness is consuming the land because people stop believing in magic, darkness is consuming this dream land because people are becoming more afraid.

A lot of this is there as sub text, and it doesn't really matter if players notice it. I think it gives a slightly different feel and a humorous take on bosses and power ups. It also helps to ground a surreal world more in reality, and give some slightly more mature themes to what are essentially fart jokes. Not that theres anything wrong with fart jokes, we were aiming at a 7+ audience and we wanted the world to have a child like charm to it so it seemed like an obvious source of humour.

We have the whole 'chosen one' theme there too, but that's more inspired by Drunken Master (1978) and the relationship between student and master than something like Star Wars, The Matrix or Harry Potter, and it just fitted the gameplay nicely as your Monstar is the only one who can see dreams to eat them. Your character is 'special' and is being guided by a mentor in order to reach their potential. This provides a nice way to deliver tutorials and hints as well as flesh out some backstory.

Art Direction

By the time we started the mini version there was quite a lot of visual development that had been done already. The very early style references were similar to Pokoyo a childrens cartoon and we were aiming at a 3+ age rating, but because we were now aiming solely at PS3 and PSP I didn't feel this would be appropriate. We needed to make the visuals a bit more mature adding more detail especially to the environments and giving it a bit more of an edge that would appeal more to the Sony demographic while still keeping that child like charm.

The real challenge was making the game look good on both PSP and PS3, we had looked at other minis titles, and noticed they didnt do well when being upscaled on the PS3 and I thought we could make a real difference here. So we had to make some tough decisions on the amount of frames for animations to enable us to create higher resolution textures to handle the upscaling. Going for a tile based environment also helped on conserving memory, using an overlay to add some variation to the tiles to try and reduce the repetition.