Interviews// Harvey Elliot, Head of EA Bright Light

SPOnG: Could you just talk us through how the combat actually works? That's where the rhythm-based stuff comes in?

Harvey Elliot: Yes. We decided pretty early on that the zubos would be indestructible. They can lose their stamina and go weak and have to regenerate, eat some fruit and build their health back up. But we decided that it was more important that you felt safe with your zubos, and you would win or lose based on how they do in an individual battle or encounter.

We wanted to showcase their abilities, and the characters themselves are very kind of... malleable. There's a tactility to them. So, the skeleton that we designed to put in the Zubos is very stretchy and squishy, so as you see the moves play out, that all happens within a standard character rig. There's something very clever in the way we've built it, which I could go into a great deal of detail on, but it doesn't really matter. What matters is they become very distorted in shape and stretch and squash and squish.

(PR person laughs).

Harvey Elliot: Those are all real words! We need a little laughter track...

We wanted to show them in these battles and getting really pummelled, but still smiling at the end of it. We figured the best way to create this interaction was instead of you trying to control what they were doing, which would limit their flexibility and their movement, that we allowed you to interact and just build up the strength with them.

So, we obviously came up with a rhythm-based system. We had the standard line across the bottom, and said 'if you can time these beats, or the graphics falling down the screen'... then we realised that you just spend your time watching that, rather than watching the brilliant moves we had the zubos doing.

So, one of the guys on the team designed this outline prompt system where we took the pose that the Zubo was going to get into and we showed a line closing in around that zubo, and when the two lines collided you time your interact. So, you're actually watching the move to see when to make your interact with it. Suddenly all the problems were solved, you were actually watching the moves, you're entertained by the moves, there was still skill involved – actually quite a lot of skill, not just in the rhythm-action part, in the selection of the move, which move to use when, which zubo to use against which zubo.

But, for the youngest players, you can just get in, you can start playing it and you're immediately having fun and watching something really cool happening.

That was the other thing for us – the audience. We decided these characters appealed to the young audience, and so we picked a seven year old as our entry point, would be able to get the controls, get what the characters can do, but still need to have something that allowed them to play the game and be successful in it without being an absolute expert at games.


SPOnG: That leads into my next question. It's obviously a game that's aimed at kids, but do you see it as something that can cross over to older audiences? It looks quite rich...

Harvey Elliot: Definitely. I think our core audience is 7-12, boys and girls, and we did always want it to be kind of gender neutral and appeal to young players. But, that said, we always wanted to make sure it appealed to older audiences as well, because the characters are really rich, some of them have reference to characters from the 80s and 90s, as well as something from present day. The game mechanic is really good fun.

We wanted a really playable DS game that anyone would be really confident playing with, so there wasn't a... we didn't want it to have a kiddy feel, necessarily. We also thought that was good for the kids, to not have a game that felt kiddy by its definition. It was just a cool character game, you could collect a load of characters, you could have great fun battling. There's some strategy for you if you wanted to start thinking about it – about which zubos to use when. Timing your moves has a pay-off.

So, it led us to introduce an adaptive difficulty setting, which really does allow it to scale up its age group appeal quite a lot. Basically, the better you are at it, the harder the game will get, within reason. If you're good, you'll do really well, but it will always feel like a challenge. You'll never feel like you're just pacing this thing through. Whereas, if a seven-year-old's struggling, it can dial the difficulty down a little bit and do some adjustments under the hood a little bit that make the game feel relevant to them.

So, we've automatically built in a very broad appeal to the characters. We've built in a broad appeal in the way it plays, and we're hoping that the things like the strategy and the depth that we have in there will keep older gamers really hooked on it and wanting to explore and level up the zubos and so on.


End of part one. Check back later for part two, which roves over the Harry Potter franchise, digging into the ups and downs of working on a cultural phenomenon.