A few of our favorite monsters…

6/7 6:48pm, oBRAoMMANDER posted:
Why the mad rush to get to the Alpha build?

Getting to Alpha is always a critical and busy time in development, because all features must be in at first pass by Alpha. Even though we have been working for many months now to get all our features in for Alpha, our game will be by no means done. We will actually be doing a huge amount of finishing work to the game post-Alpha, to bring all these great features together to make a cohesive game experience. For example, we will have all of our monster moves implemented and animated at Alpha, but all of the tuning of move speeds, timings, damage amounts, plus balancing all our monsters against all our other monsters, will happen post-Alpha. We also have another entire polish pass planned on our environments post-Alpha. So, even though we are extremely happy with where we are on the look of the game, we’ll be pushing that envelope even further in the next couple of months.

Our scheduled Alpha date has actually been known for almost a full year. That said, it’s impossible to predict exactly how long the game will remain in Alpha and Beta before Pipeworks and Atari decide that it’s ready to submit to Nintendo. Getting to Alpha on time is the first step in making sure that our polish and tuning phase after Alpha, and then submission, can go as smoothly as possible.

UI Programmer: I like Godzilla because I always favor the signature character in any game. Except if there’s a girl fighter; in that case, I play as them.

My assigned monster is Ghidorah and he’s cool because his attacks are very powerful, his lightning beam can target up to three monsters at once, and everyone knows three heads are better than one.

Animator: My admiration for Gigan was born when I fought him on the 8-bit NES Godzilla game. Godzilla was at full health, when all of the sudden, Gigan busted out his buzz-saw and cheesed me to death in the corner of the screen. It was a complete and merciless destruction - you gotta admire that.

Animator: My favorite has to be the unannounced Mecha/GDF monster I’ve been working on recently. Yes, I’m biased because I built and textured it. I am quite happy with how the final turned out with the texture and geometry. It’s also my favorite because it’s a challenge to mimic a robot and make it look convincing. We spent a good amount of time coming up with this monster’s “character” movement style which makes it even more endearing for me.

Producer (me): I’ve definitely got a special place in my heart for the mechanical monsters that we’ve got in the game. The animators have done an incredible job in nailing their individual feels – either really heavy, solid, mechanical constructs or guys in clunky retro robot suits. I was really happy when I was assigned one of these.

My second favorite group of monsters are the ones with really interesting running animations – I really love Anguirus’ bouncing, powerful Thunderball run, and we have one monster whose run animations are based on our animator’s dog, Moe. You can see the similarity, and it is really the perfect run for this monster.

6/7 7:30pm, the-switcher posted:
Has there been any expansion on the actual combat side of things? One of my main gripes of all the Godzilla games is how many of the monsters played pretty similar to one another. Does each monsters have more or varying moves that set them apart? Also, are Rage moves back? Or have they received an overhaul?

It’s not so much an “expansion” as a full “re-imagining.” We didn’t start with the old game and build up from there – we threw out almost everything and started fresh. The monsters and fighting system are 100% new for this game. It’s been developed by the same team that made the previous versions, so, naturally, there will be similarities. And the basic control commands will still be the same for all of the monsters – that’s part of the accessibility of the series. But we think you’ll find that the monsters all have very unique playstyles. As for Rage – that system has been replaced with an all-new, as-yet-unannounced system that we think people will be pretty excited about!

6/8 5:49am, blackbox77 posted:
Can you explain to us what's going on in the health/energy bars? Seems to be a lot of new information tucked around each monster logo.

Here’s the brief overview – we’ve reduced the length of the G:StE energy bar from 12 units to 4, but it behaves in a similar fashion. The blue bar is your current hitpoints, which regenerate. The blue boxes indicate your overall health level. To KO a monster, you need to reduce their health level to zero. The red dots keep track of the number of rounds each player has won, and the red semi-circle indicates the amount of ambient Crystal Energy your monster has been exposed to.

6/8 5:45pm, Zilla2007 posted:
I've got a comments about the different monster types. I'f Kiryu is on the Global Defense Force, then whats the point of the "mecha" group.

“Mecha” was an early name for what has become the “Global Defense Force” – so the two groups are essentially the same thing. The GDF is the “human” faction in the game, concerned primarily with defending human cities from peril. Believe me, they’ll have lots to defend against. J

6/11 6:10am, Zilla2007 posted:
I forgot to ask. On Atari's site for the game, it shows 3 of the monsters doing cool poses, but Godzilla is different. He is grappling with Kiryu, then he breaks the grapple, grabs Kiryu and throws him over his head. Will there be this type of grappling in the game?

Yes. Those are all in-game animations.

6/13 12:51am, shigamado posted:
I saw saw the Box art for the U.K. That's not the final box art right? It looks like a laundry detergent box. It's horrible.

We saw that as well – Atari has confirmed through TohoKingdom.com that that is NOT the actual box art. J

6/15 8:29pm, megamonk4 posted:
What happened to all the different colored crystals? In the previous screenshots, it shows the (awesome) crystal assortments in the area. Weren't they going to be used for power-ups to change how the monsters were going to be balanced? Are the crystals just for the particular areas you shown before, or are they dropped completely?

They’re still there. We’re still polishing the exact look of each environment, but crystals are very much part of the theme.