Godzilla: Unleashed Designer Diary #1 - The Story

Currently scheduled for release toward the end of this year, Godzilla: Unleashed is a combat-oriented action game in which you'll get to pit monsters like Godzilla, Megalon, Gigan, and Kiryu against each other in large, destructible, urban environments. The game is the third in the series to be developed by Pipeworks Software, but it's the first to appear on the Wii. In the coming weeks, various members of the development team will be offering some commentary on the project, and first up is lead designer Simon Strange.

The Story of Godzilla: Unleashed

Welcome to the first of several columns previewing the upcoming Godzilla: Unleashed game. It's the third of Pipeworks' epic brawlers featuring classic Toho monsters, the first being 2001's Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee, followed in 2004 by Godzilla: Save the Earth. I was the lead gameplay designer on all three games, in collaboration with veteran designer Mark Crowe. Mark cut his teeth working on some classic adventure games, including his own long-running Space Quest series.

Looks like New York is in trouble again.

Although this game is the third of its kind from our studio, we decided early on that it would be anything but "more of the same." Since we had so much experience with the basic gameplay formula, we felt that it was time to really stretch our creative muscle and improve upon the game in every way possible. That meant beautiful cities, more engaging military, revamped destruction, highly detailed monsters, and totally new controls for the game. It also meant a real, polished story for the game. That's what I'm going to focus on for this first dev diary: how we went about creating the story.

Fighting games do not need stories. People don't buy the latest iteration of their favorite fighter because they want to see a new story--people buy fighting games for the visceral thrill of virtual combat. If your story is more compelling than your combat, I would call that a problem! So, on the first Godzilla game, we didn't bother to create any sort of fiction to support our combats. "Alien Mind Control!" was plenty, we figured.

But Godzilla is based on a movie franchise, and movies do have stories. So giving players a story to contextualize the game makes some sense. Our next task was to figure out what we wanted the subject of that story to be. The story is not about the monsters.

Godzilla movies are not actually about the monsters--they are about the humans underfoot. In most of Toho's films, the humans scurry about talking about the monsters, reacting to the monsters, and trying to decide exactly what the monsters will do and why. The monsters act; the humans contextualize and interpret those actions. This provided us with a great structure for writing our story. Our human characters will talk about how some monsters are attacking the earth while others are defending it, but we leave it up to the players to decide which role they want to act out in any particular encounter.

We have a significant number of comic-book aficionados here at Pipeworks, myself included. The concept of producing our own story sequences as graphic novels had been floating around a bit, and with the new emphasis on a real story, it was clear to us that the time had come to make them a reality. In Godzilla: Save the Earth, we budgeted for high-quality CGI scenes to be produced externally. We were able to get about three minutes of video from that. The quality was high, but it is simply impossible to tell the story we wanted to tell with just three minutes to work with. By creating 2D art in-house, we were able to stretch to 30 minutes of video, while at the same time giving us the flexibility to adjust the story as needed. We're very happy with that decision, and I think the players will be, too.

The monsters in Unleashed will be divide up into factions.

Mark came up with the concept of monster factions back in 2003. His original faction names were Earth Defenders, Alien Invaders, Military Monsters, and Malefic Mutations. We've changed the names a bit for Godzilla: Unleashed (we knew that we'd never get the word "malefic" into a mainstream video game), but the basic categories are still the same. So what is the point of the different factions? Besides being tied to our unlock mechanism, the factions give us an opportunity to tell our story four different ways. For example, an early encounter for faction A might pit two of that faction's monsters against a single monster from faction B. When you play as faction B, you'll face the same encounter, but from the other side.

You'll need to play through several of the factions to get all of the perspectives. The Earth Defenders start their story by breaking out of Monster Island. The Global Defense Force story begins somewhat earlier, when they detect a strange object entering Earth's space. What is that object? Well, maybe the Alien story will make that clear. Each faction has some unique encounters and story elements, but the fundamental elements do not change.

The other great part of giving players four specific groups of monsters is that we can have the various factions ally with one another at different times. It is entirely possible to begin an encounter as a one-on-one battle and have it end up as a two-on-two slugfest, as outlined in the sidebar example encounter between Godzilla, Gigan, and Kiryu. The really exciting thing about the faction alliances is that they are 100 percent determined by the player's actions in-game. Battling Global Defense Force monsters and destroying the cities won't score you any points with the GDF faction, but it might make the Mutants respect you more. Shooting down flying saucers won't earn you any Alien allies, but it might make the Earth Defenders more sympathetic. Since our encounters don't have any specific goals, you're allowed to act as you see fit.

I've talked enough about the reasons behind our story, so now let's get specific and look at how three aspects of the story have actually been integrated. We'll start with how players select encounters, then talk about the structure of days, and end with the impact of monster upgrades.