August 26, 2008

GameZone Examines the Monster Lab with Studio Head Joe Bonar
By Louis Bedigian

“We set out to make exactly the product we shipped, the vision stayed strong and the quality team at Backbone Vancouver really pushed hard to make it happen!”

“Monster Lab is a light RPG for the Wii and DS,” Joe Bonar (Studio Head, Backbone Vancouver) begins, speaking to GameZone about his upcoming game with Eidos. “It is set in the crazy world of the Uncanny Valley (yeah – we love that!) where the equally (possibly slightly more) crazy Baron Mharti has decided to take over the world – starting with the Valley itself. The player has just been invited to join The Mad Science Alliance because the fourth member left under bizarre circumstances. The fourth member was, uh... Baron Mharti. What he did was something that the other three Mad Scientists would never do – he learned all three scientific disciplines.

“Of course, up until now, the other three (Professor Fuseless – master of Mechanical Mad Science, Senor Brasso de la Sombra – master of Alchemical Mad Science and the beautiful Helena Sonderbar – mistress of Biological Mad Science) simply couldn't agree on anything or work together nicely. Of course, a common enemy has changed all that, but too late, because now they've got their work cut out. What the three of them are going to do (as the story progresses) is teach you all three of their disciplines to help you build the ultimate monster in order to bring down the awful Mharti, who really is only a little bit more mad than they are.

“So the gameplay cycle starts out with you gathering ingredients from the environments in Uncanny Valley (you can do this by doing frantic little environmental challenges, or by helping quest characters and being given them, or fighting in combat), you then take the ingredients to the labs in the scientists castle and perform awesome experiments on them to create body parts, then put the body parts together to make the monsters, which you can then use to wander around the environments undertaking quests, getting into fights and gathering ingredients in order to make bigger better parts.

“As you progress, you meet the other Mad Scientists, then help them out so they will teach you their skills. There are over 150 body parts (divided, grossly, into heads, torsos, arms and legs), there are 3 Mad Sciences and 4 experiments per Mad Science (one per body part type). Once you have body parts, you can mix and match them as you choose, giving you quite literally millions of combinations.”

The E3 demo showed monsters battling one-on-one. Will you always battle one enemy at a time, and if so, what made you take this less traditional route for an RPG?

Joe Bonar: Yes, the fights are always one-on-one. The fighting is very simple at the outset, but can be made quite complex as you move through the game. The way the fighting works is that the player chooses which part they want to use each turn, and each part can do a different action, on a different part on the enemy. This makes multiple enemies quite tricky to deal with, and not something we wanted to get into in this revision.

However, we've been thinking carefully about the next Monster Lab, and have come up with some cool ways to make combat work – not just one to many, but many to many. There is also a Rochambeau so that each science has an advantageous (or disadvantageous) effect on the other, so you can equip your monster appropriately depending on the area you're visiting. The object of the fight is to disable the torso of the enemy – their power plant – which will give you the "W." You could also knock of all the parts and leave just the torso standing on dead legs – quite funny, but not as quick as trying to knock out just the one part!

Monster Lab is going to offer millions of part combinations… How exactly? I mean, "thousands" would sound feasible, but "millions"!? Even if that's possible, do you think any gamer would have the time to take advantage of that?

JB: I think it's millions. But you're right – you probably won't have time to see them all, but what it does is allow the player to create something that is pretty unique to them, and people just love customization, especially if they've done a really hard experiment with really wild ingredients to create something rare and special. Then they can attach it and show it off. Don't forget there's friend-code-based online play on the Wii, and you can really shock people with combinations they might not have seen. Plus, there are archetypes – so it is possible, for example, to get the head, arms, legs and torso of a werewolf and then you can really have some fun.

From a development perspective, what did it take to pull this off?

JB: There was some very clever technical jiggery-pokery (I believe that is the correct programming term) which allowed the engine to use any part on any part. This was followed by some very clever modelling and animation at the studio to make it all real. The art director sketched pretty much all 150+ parts and the guys put their backs (uh, torsos?) into to in order to get them fleshed-out and working. We also had a test bed where we fought monster on monster over and over again with random part combinations to eyeball any incongruities. In order to minimize those, we gave the animators restricted volumes to animate within, and they had a ball pushing that envelope!

Monsters will have a lot of mechanical parts, as well as those being referred to as "biological." What are some of them?

JB: There's also alchemical! Mechanical parts are generally robotic, or machinery. One of my favorites is a breeze block on a metal arm. The biological parts are generally a bit more icky, roots, tentacles, mandibles, etc. Finally, the alchemical arms tend to be more aetherical or mythical; werewolves, creatures from various shades of lagoon, etc.

Players will use the Wii remote to make various attack and customization selections – tell us about those and any other features that utilize the Wii's unique features.

JB: The method of selecting parts is the same everywhere (use the analog stick on the Nunchuk), and we have a "point and click" interface for much everything else. The real Wii action comes in the experiments, where the player guides welding guns, protects beating hearts from plant attacks, smashes dumb robots, drives a cutting tool along a metal path, staples wounds together, digs holes, shakes stuff out of trees, <breathless now>... among many other things. That's all totally cool, and built from the ground up for Wii.

Could you detail some of the construction mini-games and environmental challenges, specifically those we may not have seen at E3?

JB: We showed quite a few at E3, but one I don't think we showed much was the mechanical game where you have to guide a robotic cutting machine down a stretch of metal whilst hitting the quality bars and avoiding nasty rivets. The player holds the Wiimote sideways and tilt it from side to side to control the machine – like a racing game. One of the environmental challenges which I don't think we showed was the tree shaking game, where the player uses the Wiimote to shake a tree, and the nunchuk to control a basket to catch all the good stuff which falls as a result. If the basket is hit by bad stuff (dead branches) then it is out of action for a quick second which affects your chances. The faster you shake, the more stuff comes down. It's a good fun, and frantic, game to get some ingredients out of.

What can we expect from the multiplayer features?

JB: Pure monster-to-monster combat. Go to the Interlab Link (in the castle, once you've created your first monster), exchange friend codes, decide who you want to fight, and bingo - you're in! If you win, you'll get ingredients which you can take back to the lab for more experimentation. You have a stable of 10, I think, monsters, and you can fight any of them at any time. The longer you play the game, the better monster you can make, and you can win more fights.

Can you talk about the DS version of the game?

JB: It is amazing, it really is. It is one of the most complete and lengthy DS games I've seen in a long time. The story is the same as the Wii version, the only major differences are in the way we've remade some of the mini-games to make the best of the DS hardware. For example, the welding game on DS differs from the Wii in that you have to blow into the mic to cool an overheated gun down instead of shaking the Nunchuk. Other games (like Cardio Chaos) are totally different experiences with the stylus, and that's just fine with me!

I've heard conflicting reports that a PS2 version is on the way... Is this true or false?

JB: You would certainly have to pose that question to the Eidos guys, as I'm afraid I can't speculate about the existence of the game on PS2.

Anything else you'd like to share about Monster Lab?

JB: We had a heck of a lot of fun making it, and enjoyed the process of creating something tailor-made for the Wii and DS. We set out to make exactly the product we shipped, the vision stayed strong and the quality team at Backbone Vancouver really pushed hard to make it happen! I'm very proud of how it turned out.

Thank you for your time.

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