KAIJU CARNAGE (Myo Armband)

I was the Lead Designer of Kaiju Carnage, a city-destruction game developed by Other Ocean for the Myo Armband. The player controls a giant monster, hell-bent on destroying a city, while relentless military forces attempt to stop them.

Here’s a YouTuber’s Let’s Play Walkthrough of the title

Defining Gameplay

This was a challenging project, due to working with new technology and within a limited timeframe.

The Myo Armband has an accelerometer and is capable of identifying hand gestures as inputs. My first step was figuring out which gestures were most comfortable to perform and then assigning them player actions and potency.

- More comfortable gestures were required more frequently.

- Less comfortable gestures were required less frequently.

Additionally, we wanted actions that made the player feel like a giant destructive monster.

We narrowed down these actions to the following:

- Swipe: Basic low-damage claw attack. This occurs by itself when the player simply moves their hand around.

- Fireball: Mid-Damage attack. The player points their hand at the screen, makes a fist, and then opens their fist to unleash an explosive blast in a targeted area.

- Nuclear Beam: Upon filling up an energy meter, the player raises their hand towards the sky to build up power, and then points their hand back at the screen to unleash an annihilating beam attack!

A few other notable gameplay decisions:

- Time: We introduced a timer into the game, not for the sake of difficulty, but as a way to motivate the player to take action. It is nearly impossible for the player to actually run out of time.

- Loading Times: We intentionally increased loading times and downtime between levels to give the player more time to relax their arm. We also ensured each level was only a minute or two at max for this reason.

- Dynamic Destruction: I requested buildings made from many pieces so that they can be ripped apart in dynamic interesting ways. As we had a limited number of assets to work with, it was essential that our core action (destroying buildings) felt satisfying and different each time. Additionally, we added rag-doll physics to enemies and objects, to ensure that each time the player moved their arm and swiped, something fun would happen.

Level Flow

Kaiju Carnage is divided into a series of levels.

Due to our limited number of assets, we went took some creative measures to ensure that each level felt new and interesting. A few examples include:

- We introduced mechanics slowly. Only the first of the three player actions I listed above are introduced immediately. The other two become unlocked over the course of the next few levels. Additionally, we roll out pick-up/power-up types and new enemies at a deliberate pace.

- We played with perspective: For some levels, we pulled the camera in so that the player was closer to the city, and then others, we pulled it further away so that they could see more of it. Though this could narratively raise some questions about the monster’s size, within context, it didn’t violate the player’s suspension of disbelief, and dramatically changed the way the game felt from level to level.

- We gamified comedy: We introduced low-challenge levels to simultaneously give the player a break from the escalating difficulty and pad out our level count. For example, there is a level which is just a single house and a Shreveport level that when you get there, the city is already destroyed. We have four Springfield levels in the game, which allowed us to use the same city four times (with slight modifications) while playing it up for comedy. To cut down on assets in general, we used lesser known-cities so that we wouldn’t need to create landmarks.

Writing

I added a news reporter to the game who would shout out campy lines during each level to give them more personality. I wrote all the dialogue for our news reporter, including such lines as:

- “The monster has destroyed Newark, making air travel a little better for everyone!”

- “The monster approaches Podunk, Idaho, making it the first visitor to the city in 50 years!”

- “The monster strikes Yuma! If you’re driving from Arizona to California, now where will you stop to use the bathroom?”

Fun Fact: We couldn’t afford licensing/development of well known monuments/buildings, so we chose to make the game take place in lesser-known cities and towns like Yuma, Arizona. It’s the lowest-stakes Kaiju game ever (this adds to that comedic value of the title).