PixelJunk Monsters Coming To Web Browsers
Posted by Chris K on July 21st, 2011 | 6 Comments | Tags: PixelJunk Monsters
Update: Screens!
I was at Casual Connect today here in rainy, overcast Seattle. The main reason for dragging my butt across Lake Washington to venture into the city was a talk given by Jesse Venbrux, a designer at Q-Games. If you recall early last week, I posted a story about Dylan Cuthbert teasing a new game on Google+. Well it was revealed today, and I was correct in it being a PixelJunk Monsters title.
PixelJunk Monsters is being redesigned for the social network platforms, read Facebook and the like. There are lots of changes being made and I will do my best to give you an overview on this free to play browser game.
First off, the game is no longer linear. Now each island is a grid based world. Once you beat a stage you unlock the surrounding grids. These grids then need to be worked, at the cost of a shovel, so that you can turn them into a level. The shovels are given to you over time, much like in many social network games. If you play Tiny Tower on iOS, the shovels are like the bucks. There are also different types of grid tiles, like the tiki shop, ports (used to travel to new islands at the cost of shovels), volcanos and more.
On the gameplay side, things have changed drastically. Monsters now only have a single path to travel and it is drawn on the level for you to see. A new mechanic has also been added, seeds. With these seeds you can plant trees anywhere on the map. I believe they are dropped much like gems and you are given a fair amount at the start of stages. Tikiman will no longer dance automatically on towers, you have to hold the mouse button down. But you can now grab coins with just using your mouse’s cursor. Levels have also been made more bite sized.
There are also social aspects, as you might imagine, that are being worked on. Shown to us today was a crown system. If you have the highest score on a stage amongst your friends, you get a crown on it. This goes in with the more competitive aspect that they are focusing on. At the moment, co-op play has been removed as the developers at Q-Games are trying to figure out how it will work on a space, such as Facebook, where users aren’t always logged in at the same time.
There should be a press release coming out soon, so I will update anything I missed once that comes out. My phone was dying so this is the only photo I managed to grab from the presentation. Ask any questions you have as I am sure I forgot something and I will try to answer them.
P.S. The game is being made in flash, so maybe it will work on PS3 browser.
Update: Duh… there are new monsters and new towers as well. I don’t know how I missed that.