Home

This is the first of three developer diaries from Blue Fang, developer of World of Zoo. This week Design Director Bart Simon is talking about the Monkeys in the game...

The personality, zoo exhibits and gameplay for each animal family in World of Zoo flows from a central “Big Idea”. Every animal family we chose to include in the game could have been created in a million different ways. The creative challenge was deciding how we wanted portray each animal in the game. We knew all about real monkeys, but what exactly is a World of Zoo monkey? To answer this question, the artists, designers and programmers involved in bringing the monkey to life locked themselves in a room to figure out the “Big Idea” for the monkey family. After hours of back-and-forth brainstorming, we emerged from the room with a characterization of the animal family that would inform the creation of not only the animals themselves, but also the environments, toys... Even the sound design

For the monkey, we had a number of strong ideas but ultimately chose the concept of “Monkey Party”. The central idea is that playing with the monkeys in World of Zoo is like attending an awesome party. Of course instead of joyous people dancing the night away... We have frenetic monkeys, jumping, climbing, leaping, and acting generally ridiculous.

The interactions you have with the monkeys reinforce the monkey party idea. Everything is a game to them! Try to hose them off and they run around like lunatics – if they were people they’d be laughing. If they find something in the exhibit to bring to you, they might jump up and hang from the top of the screen – you end up with an upside down goofy monkey giving you something cool! There are launchers that shoot toys and food around the space. Your monkeys can use these launchers to lob items around – but you can also use them. Fire off a few food items and watch your monkeys go crazy! Monkeys can climb up trees to rummage for food. If you really want to make their lives interesting surprise them with your air horn and watch them tumble around.

Monkeys are very intelligent creatures, so we definitely tried to incorporate these traits in the game.  You can prompt them to look for certain items and once they’ve found it, they will literally swing or jump right out of the screen and hand it to you.  These types of Magical Moments are quite fun and delightful to watch.

The monkey exhibit we designed in the game gives them lots of places to party – but it also has something that serves as a “stage” – an open area right in front that is ripe for monkey antics. We give you a ton of toys you can use to play with the monkeys; the majority of these toys give them reasons to really boogie. Balls that fly all over the place, puzzle toys that they can shake and throw around... even pillows that they can go berserk with. There is also a sound rock in the space that allows you to choose different music track and the music itself really reinforces the gameplay. You can even build drums in the exhibit which the monkeys can use to lay down some nice party beats.

We can’t wait until the game is released so that people can join in our awesome monkey party!

> Watch the Monkey gameplay footage on THQ TV

Come back next week to find out more about the Panda in World of Zoo.