Hello readers! This is Ana (the producer) from FluffyLogic, in Bristol, UK. We’re the developer of the Savage Moon series of games for PlayStation 3 and PSP. We’re here to blog about our new title every two weeks, with a developer diary charting progress of the game from now until you’re sick of hearing from us :)

You may, or may not, know that we demo-ed our new exclusive PlayStation 3 game for the PlayStation Network, ‘Eat Them!’ at E3 in June. In Eat Them! the player gets to create their own giant monster which they then use to smash, crash and munch their way though the city. The monster is people-powered, so eating folk is a prerequisite of keeping your monster in full-on destruction mode. The game features eye-catching ‘comic-style’ graphics, fully customisable monster creation and lots and lots of smashing things. The player has the option of single-player and split-screen multiplayer, head-to-head and co-operative missions. Eat Them! promises action, mayhem, destruction, humour and, did i mention?…eating people! The game is scheduled for release this winter. Here’s what it looks like:

So where do the ideas behind Eat Them! come from? I am a big fan of monster movies – the old-school films where a guy in a giant rubber suit goes mad in a model city while the cameras roll…I wanted to be able to do just that… I also love comics; from the 50s horror and sci-fi classics to 70s Hammer Horror Fanzines. And finally, I love games that have a strong destructive vibe – the truth is – smashing stuff is fun! I also really, really wanted to be able to eat people….in a friendly, “I’m just a monster, I can’t help it” kind of a way. So we put all that into a digital blender and the result (so far) is Eat Them!

So I hope you’ll join us over the next few months as we share with you the process of game development from here to release.

Thanks & see you in two weeks…

If you are new to Savage Moon for PS3/PSN, then start here; if not, then welcome! We wanted to say a big thanks to those of you who have taken the trouble to email us with feedback, ideas and suggestions. Where possible we have incorporated some of your ideas into the new update of the game, now available. Amongst other things, the update includes:

• Re-balancing of the stats, including an upgraded Amp Tower with stats more similar to the first release of the game. Other tweaks to the stats make level 4 a bit more forgiving.
• A new ‘Training Mode’ that allows all the levels to be played as before, but the overall gameplay is a bit easier (but you can’t save these scores to the high-score table).
• We have added custom soundtrack support, so you can blast Insectocytes to the tunes of your choice.

We would also like to tell you a bit more about the new expansion for Savage Moon – Waldgeist. If you are wondering, the name is German and translates as ‘woodland spirit‘ and in pagan times Waldgeists (is that the plural?) were believed to be the custodians of the forest. As the new levels in the expansion are set in more biological forested Imoons, we felt the name suited the vibe of the new gameplay perfectly.

So you can get a peek at the expansion, here’s the trailer that’s currently running on the PlayStation.Blog.Europe:

So what is in the new game? We are happy to say, ‘loads’. We got a bit carried away during development and so the final version of Waldgeist has:

• 6 new levels that bring a riot of new colors and environments into the game.
• 2 new evolutions of the Insectocytes: the aptly named Death Blossom – a frightening new adaptation that when it reaches a concentration of towers, explodes launching a payload of deadly guided missiles in a single barrage of devastation to all within it’s range. There is also the ‘Invisibugs’ adaptation; a new photochromatic skin pigment in some Insectocytes that render them invisible to normal attack towers.
• 2 new tower types: fortunately the human techies have also been busy. They have developed a counter to the ‘Invisibugs’ in the form of a sensor tower that allows all other towers within its range to target them. They have also developed the Arclight tower which is our personal favorite, a lightning-firing attack tower that zaps Insectocytes en masse!
• 12 new versions of the existing levels: In the expansion you can re-play Agamemnon to Lotan all-over with different waves and bugs that the normal versions.
• Vengeance Mode: All combined, there is now more vengeance than Dirty Harry in Waldgeist. There are vengeance modes for the 6 new levels AND for the 12 new Waldgeist variations of Agamemnon to Lotan AND for the training mode version of all of the above.
• 7 New Trophies: Yes indeed! A whole host of new challenges for Commanders to show their superior grasp of tactics, examples of which are; the Insectocyte Juggler Award (keep an Insectocyte alive for 5 minutes) and the Luddite Trophy (complete any 5 levels using only Machine Gun Towers and without any damage to the base)
• New Music: Thanks to Parasite, our sound producer and musician, we also have new music in the new levels AND bonus hidden remix tracks that unlock including exclusive tracks by Subliminal System, Monk3ylogic and of course, Parasite.

We’re really pleased with Waldgeist and feel it builds upon the strongest aspects of Savage Moon; we hope you think so too!

Hello readers! This is Ana (the producer) and Tomas (the designer) from FluffyLogic. We’re a digital media development studio based in Bristol, UK. The home of trip-hop, Isambard Kingdom Brunel and John Cabot who set sail and discovered America in 1497 (Though I don’t think the Native Americans had reported it lost…) bubum…

For the last few months we’ve been hard at work on our take on the Tower Defense genre. Although here in the UK we spell it ‘defence’ ;-). If you’ve not played any tower defence games, you’re missing out. They are a great off-shoot of real-time strategy games where the player can only build static defences and the enemy is the one on the move. Our art director, Stuart, introduced us to a few of the games on the net and needless to say, work around the office dropped to zero as we got hooked. At the time we had been given a couple of PS3 development kits by Sony to play around with and we thought, “Wow, we’d love to do our own take on this.” We threw around a few ideas then went up to see Sony and surprisingly enough, it turned out that they had been thinking exactly the same thing. Thus Savage Moon, our first game for the PS3, was born. It is due for release on the PlayStation Network store this week for $9.99…we’re very excited.

First off we wanted to give the game a bit of a story. All the tower defence games we’d played on the net were pretty abstract, but we wanted to give the player a sense of purpose and threat. I am a fan of Harry Harrison’s Death World books and have always been fascinated by the idea of a whole eco-system turned against you…so we thought this would be a good way to go. Tomas and I decided to make this the basic premise of the game — humans have landed on an asteroid to mine valuable minerals from it, however as they burrow into the ground, the sentient rock produces its own auto-immune response, much in the same way that the human body produces white-blood cells in response to an infection. Except here, the response is in the form of massive chitinous armoured bugs! (Or Insectocytes as we call them).

In terms of the style of the game – given that we had decided on massive insects – it almost went without saying…we were hugely inspired by ‘Starship Troopers‘ which has been a firm film favourite for years. I especially like the different types of bugs that appeared and this inspired us in the range of different creatures that appear in our game. In keeping with the xeno-biological theme, the Insectocytes evolve throughout the game, with each wave becoming tougher, and the creatures mutating into new forms to meet the human threat.

In response to this, the player needs to research and deploy new forms of technology to meet the escalation of bug toughness. The strategy of the game is a mix of open and directed levels — in some levels the player can place towers to herd the Insectocytes into their cross-fire. In other levels the landscape defines the battlefield and the player must use their abilities to respond to this. The challenge, like your enemies, evolves. The Insectocytes will always protect the place they spawn by seeking out and destroying your mining base. If your mining base takes too much damage, it’s game over. The Insectocytes are strong but not too smart; you need to match your strategy/puzzle-solving skills against their armour (but you also have some serious fire-power on your side!)

So what types of creature will you face? We’re not going to give them all away but some crawl, some run, some bite and some shoot. Here’s a taster:

Above is a ‘soldier’ Insectocyte. They are pretty fast, tough and have powerful mandibles with which to deliver bone-crushing bites. These form the backbone of the sentient asteroid’s defences. They come in a variety of sizes and colours but they all have just one aim — to remove the infection that is humanity…

So what do you get to use? As the commander of the defences, you have the ability to call in orbital drop-pods, each of which lands a fully functional military tower. Towers come in two types; attack towers (that impact the enemy) and support towers (that help the attack towers). Key to success in the game is the use of the right tower at the right time and in the right places to stop the waves of Insectocytes. Here’s an example:

This is a machine-gun tower. As you upgrade this tower, it goes through five levels of offensive power you can deploy. The idea is that as your enemy evolves, you can upgrade your towers to match. Different towers upgrade in different ways – some get an increase in damage, other an increase in the range they can reach, and sometimes upgrades give you a bit of both. As the commander, you will get a feel for the best way to use upgrading pretty fast.

We hope this whets your appetite for some strategy-action on your PS3. As we said, the game is out tomorrow as a direct download via the PSN store for $9.99.

The music and sound in the game is one area we would particularly like to mention. For this we hired a local electronic music producer we knew and had worked with before. He is well known in the breakcore scene and plays under the name Parasite. He gave the game audio the sense of menace we felt it needed.