January 6, 2010 - Remember Explodemon? No, not 'Splosion Man, the Xbox Live Arcade game released last summer. We're talking about Explodemon, the 'Mega Man meets Half-Life' action game that was announced early last year for PlayStation Network, PSP, WiiWare, and PC. Like 'Splosion Man, Explodemon can self detonate. However, Explodemon is more of a love letter to the 16-bit action games of yore, going so far as to insert typos into the text to simulate the poor translation so many Japanese games received. We haven't heard much about the game since its announcement, but a few recent blog posts written by Jonathan Biddle, design director at developer Curve Studios, provide some details on what we can expect.
First off, the initial plans to bring Explodemon to all of the above platforms have been set aside in order to focus on the PlayStation 3 version. Work on other versions won't start until the PS3 game is done and Curve hasn't yet determined which other platforms it will eventually make it to.
The inspiration for Explodemon came directly from games like Yoshi's Island, Astro Boy on Game Boy Advance, and the revered classic Gunstar Heroes.
"These kinds of games, and especially for me Yoshi's Island, possess a certain quality to them," Biddle says. "Something about the pixel art, the depth of gameplay deriving from simple rules, the accessibility, the collecting, the level designs, the perfect controls
I didn't know what it was, but it tickled my nostalgia node in a special way, and I felt a burning desire to create my own game that explored these mechanics. I didn't want to create something ambitious, or poignant, or something that pushed the edge of game theory, but rather an uncomplicated platform game, albeit one of the quality of a Nintendo or Treasure title. I was interested in finding out just what it is that makes those titles as good as they are. And so I started at the beginning."
Biddle began coding Explodemon way back in 2005. Once he had the basics of a platformer up and running (and jumping) he borrowed ideas from three separate sources in order to create Explodemon's explosive mechanics:
1. Biddle had made a plug-and-play Superman game called Meteor Strike. Similar to Missile Command you could destroy certain enemies and cause the explosion to take out additional bad guys at the same time. "A key strategy was to repeatedly chain these explosions together in order to clear the screen. It worked out pretty well in a basic fashion, but I thought it might be nice to see how that would work with a platform game."
2. He had also previously created a simple match-three game where the player had to eliminate blocks by destroying like colors around them. Explosions would "level up" and become more powerful as you progressed.
3. Finally, Biddle and a former colleague now working at Pokemon studio Game Freak had an idea for a game starring a robot that couldn't stop itself from exploding. He decided to make Explodemon jump by detonating himself which also happens to be the way 'Splosion Man reaches higher ground.
