Eat Them! gives gamers the chance to wreak havoc on cities by creating and bringing to life colossal monsters to topple entire cities and feast on inhabitants. Always dreamed of laying waste to downtown? Here’s your chance. If you’re still not convinced, wrap your destructive side around some of the features of the game.

The Monster Lab. We wanted you to be able to piece together the apocalyptic creature of your worst nightmares, and the Monster Lab gives you access to a huge selection of monster parts including a full arsenal of excessively powerful weapons. This gives you the power to play mad scientist to your heart’s content, designing creatures tailor made. If you were so inclined, the Monster Lab would allow you to create over five million unique monsters – you certainly shouldn’t run out of ideas any time soon.

Challenging Missions. Whether you get your kicks from maximum destruction, or prefer to face endless waves of opposition in a bid to survive as long as possible we’ve got the game style for you. Survival, assassination, racing and pure unadulterated destruction missions are readily available in Eat Them! Ever wondered what it’s like to rob a bank using a 100 foot tall, laser firing mechanical tyrannosaur? We can answer that question – it’s freakin’ awesome.

Co-op Multiplayer. The only thing better than single-handedly destroying an entire city is teaming up with other monsters to take down an entire city. Eat Them! allows four friends to join forces and play every mission in the game in multi-player. Anything you can do in single player, you can do in multiplayer, only with far more devastating effect!

Mayhem. As the missions play out, the city’s defense forces get wise to your destructive plans and send an increasingly lethal barrage of artillery – and even superheroes – to take you out. You certainly need your wits about you to fight them off, complete the mission at hand, and stay fed. I’ll give you one guess what your primary source of nourishment is.

Eat Them! launches exclusively on PSN today! Go download and start the sheer joy of charging up to a pristine building, and letting rip until only the foundations are left!

‘Sup? I’m called James Parker, I’m a designer here at FluffyLogic and I’m working on Eat Them!, which Ana has been telling you about recently, and I’m here to say a few more extra in-depthy words about how making a game like Eat Them! actually happens on a day to day basis. Today – CONTROLS!

A game can have the greatest technology in the world, the most incredible art assets, and USPs that would have marketing people salivating into their espressos, but if the controls feel wrong – if the player isn’t properly connected with the game – then everything else will be wasted.

One of the first things you do when designing any game is download a picture of the DUALSHOCK 3, cribbed from Google images, fire up your favorite drawing package, and put little lines all over it connecting buttons to boxes that describe their functions. At this stage, as an experienced designer, you make an educated guess at what’s going to work for your game. The reality is, until you get the game on the Test Kit, the controller in your hands and you actually try the thing, you may as well have been drawing a moustache on the Mona Lisa.

Because customisation is a big factor in Eat Them!, each monster’s capabilities are going to be slightly different – and with four possible weapon positions on each monster, as well as kicks, grabs, jumps, and stomps – mapping all the controls, and all the while keeping things simple and intuitive, is quite challenging. Those things, however, are easily tested and changed, tweaked to accommodate new functionality and swapped to satify people whose fingers are the wrong way round – that’s the 80%.

The more dificult thing to get right is the 20%, that ever nebulous factor of whether the controls “feel” right. And that’s more than just where you hands sit – it’s how fast the camera rotates, it’s the timing of the build up to a punch, it’s the relationship between the press of the button and the action happening on-screen.

No one wants to play a game where they feel they are out of control, and the very best games make you feel you are being more than just a player sitting on the sofa mashing buttons; they put you in the shoes of a pro skateboarder, or a cage fighter, or a superhero… or in our case an ultra-destructive five storey monster.

We’re getting there – we’re now at the stage where it’s almost impossible not to indulge in a spot of destruction when loading up a level, even if you were just there to check the latest exports. It feels good to simply tool around smashing things and eating people, even without the rest of the game content layer in. That’s a very good sign that things are going in the right direction. But we will continue to refine and polish and tweak to ensure that it feels even better before release. You don’t see Godzilla struggling to unleash his atomic breath, so why should the player?

Anyhow these are the current controls for the game – let us know any thoughts:

Hello readers! This is Ana (the producer) from FluffyLogic, in Bristol, UK. We’re the developer of the Savage Moon series of games for PlayStation 3 and PSP. We’re here to blog about our new title every two weeks, with a developer diary charting progress of the game from now until you’re sick of hearing from us :)

You may, or may not, know that we demo-ed our new exclusive PlayStation 3 game for the PlayStation Network, ‘Eat Them!’ at E3 in June. In Eat Them! the player gets to create their own giant monster which they then use to smash, crash and munch their way though the city. The monster is people-powered, so eating folk is a prerequisite of keeping your monster in full-on destruction mode. The game features eye-catching ‘comic-style’ graphics, fully customisable monster creation and lots and lots of smashing things. The player has the option of single-player and split-screen multiplayer, head-to-head and co-operative missions. Eat Them! promises action, mayhem, destruction, humour and, did i mention?…eating people! The game is scheduled for release this winter. Here’s what it looks like:

So where do the ideas behind Eat Them! come from? I am a big fan of monster movies – the old-school films where a guy in a giant rubber suit goes mad in a model city while the cameras roll…I wanted to be able to do just that… I also love comics; from the 50s horror and sci-fi classics to 70s Hammer Horror Fanzines. And finally, I love games that have a strong destructive vibe – the truth is – smashing stuff is fun! I also really, really wanted to be able to eat people….in a friendly, “I’m just a monster, I can’t help it” kind of a way. So we put all that into a digital blender and the result (so far) is Eat Them!

So I hope you’ll join us over the next few months as we share with you the process of game development from here to release.

Thanks & see you in two weeks…