PC: They Came from Hollywood Interview

Our Take

They Came from a Hollywood is a new B-movie monster themed game where you take control of your very own monster and wreak havoc upon various real world cities. I recently had the chance to speak with Sparky from Octopus Motor to learn more about the title.

Who are you and what's your position at Octopus Motor?

I'm Sparky, game artist, writer, web person, PR person, whatever needs to be done etc. Lars (my husband) is the programmer, lead designer, and he also does the 3D animation and the other half of the 3D modeling.


They Came from Hollywood is a really unique game idea. What games/movies/other products have inspired its development, and how long has the game been in development?

TCFH is mainly inspired by Crush, Crumble, Chomp, a game from the early 80s. Back then there were quite a few giant monster games, like Mail Order Monsters, The Movie Monster Game, and Greg Costikyan's tabletop game The Creature That Ate Sheboygan. There haven't been quite as many lately, but giant monsters are loved by fans world-over, and monster movies are still very popular. It's a subject that's always been full of rich material for a wide variety of games, just like medieval fantasy, intergalactic space travel, or the great battles of World War II.

How long has it been in development? Too freakin' long! About four years now. Of course, we've had to stop every now and then to take on contract work, and we redesigned a lot of the way we do things about midway through. Everything takes so much longer to do when you're just a two-person game company.


TCFH is a real time strategy/action game. The action part is obvious as the player will be destroying things, but what makes this game real time strategy? Will the player have any resources to manage or anything like that?

Real-time strategy isn't quite the right genre description for TCFH. It's more of an action-strategy game (strategic action game?). For some reason, the term "real time strategy" has come to mean something very specific in gaming: resource management, tech trees, and many tiny disposable units, like the Command & Conquer and Warcraft / Starcraft series. We are referring to the terms in their less specific sense: a real time game that has strategy elements. We don't have tech trees, resource management, many units, etc. but we do have strategic decisions for the player to make. You do have to manage & balance your monster's health, hunger, state of mind, etc. as well as decide how best to attack the city and fend off the military.


Players can choose from one of twelve monsters to play as, and each one can be completely customized. Are any of these monsters going to resemble ones film fans already know?

All of our monsters reflect the popular B-movie monsters: giant bugs, giant plants, giant humans, giant animals, UFOs and space creatures. Ours are taken directly from the films of Harold Haxton, so some of them are a little weird, like the Giant Pea.


Give us some information on what the overall goal(s) of the player will be while playing TCFH.

It varies based on what type of monster is being played and what sort of scenario is chosen. One monster may play best with a rampaging destruction style, smashing everything in its path. A smaller, more delicate monster may play best using stealth and sneak attacks. Ultimately, the goal is always to cause as much death and destruction as possible before the monster is killed, but there is more than one way to accomplish that. :)


One of the most interesting things I've heard about this game is that it has support for the PC Dance Pad (most often used for games like Dance Dance Revolution). How exactly is this going to work?

We've made a simplified game mode for dancepad play because of the limitations of the controller. Things like grab, throw, objectives, mini-map, etc. are removed, which makes it more of a smash-and-stomp console game. Commands like "walk" and "turn" are issued by stomping on the dancepad in short sequences (left-right-left-right for walk, etc.). They can be remapped and customized to support any Direct Input controller if you don't have a dance pad.


How is the structure of the game going to be set up? Will the player be free to explore the environment and choose goals at their own leisure, or will things be more linear?

You can play as a simple "play until death" sandbox style, but we have also implemented a dynamic objective hierarchy system which provides for short term goals and rewards. This gives the player some structure to follow and allows the game engine to trigger events based on how the player follows the "script". You don't have to play this way, but it does provide secondary goals and added interest in making the game play out like unique movie plotlines. We're also going to supply an editor for users to create their own story trees. But there is no level system, canned script or cutscenes, or anything like that.


The screenshots you've shown of the game seem fairly zoomed out, giving a greater scale of each city. Will the camera be able to zoom in and out to show more detail and less of the environment, or vice versa?

We do have a zoom-in feature for quick looks at close-up details of the monster (although it's done with pixel doubling, there isn't more detail to the bitmaps). But otherwise, the game is fixed camera. We've tried to balance the field of view and scale so the player can see the big picture of the local environment, but also details of what's going on with individual people and units. Since there are a lot of big buildings, we let the player adjust the building transparency on the fly with the mouse wheel (if you've got one) or a keyboard hotkey (if you don't). So if there's something hiding behind the Empire State Building, you just dial the transparency down and look through it.


TCFH features real life cities; will there be recognizable landmarks in each that the player can destroy as they wish?

Definitely. That's half the reason the game's taking so long to finish - I really want the cities to be recognizable and detailed, so there are hundreds of landmarks to create, big and small. We've tried to keep the streets accurate, although with our map scale we can't include every street. I think part of the fun will be just stomping around looking at the city, with all the little people fleeing and cars driving around -- it's like SimCity, but more detailed. And more smashable.


Is there going to be a central storyline to all the destruction in the game?

Nope -- it's pretty much just you (as the monster) vs. them (the people). There are objectives you can choose to complete, but they're optional.


When can players expect TCFH to be available in full form or even as a demo?

We're shooting for the end of this year, but we're not setting any actual dates (we did in this past, and quickly learned that game development can be too full of unexpected setbacks). The demo will come out around the same time as the game, so you can try it out first -- it'll most likely be one full playable city with one monster.


Get more information on the game at http://www.theycamefromhollywood.com/

Chris Dahlberg
September 20, 2005