Viva Pinata interview - XBW and Rare
posted 21/09/06
Every kid loves cute and adorable little animals, and everyone besides terrorists loves lollies, so it should come as no shock that someone came up with idea of putting lollies inside cute and colourful paper mache animals, and then, as is human nature, beating it with a stick until it ruptures and haemorrhages Hershey’s and gushes gummi.
What may come as a bit of a surprise is that Rare, home of Killer Instinct, Perfect Dark and Conker, thought they could make a sandbox-style game about living piñatas living, loving and losing in a player-created garden. But someone must like the idea, because Viva Piñata is coming not only to Xbox 360 but children’s TV as well! Xbox World sat down to dine on Horstachio innards with Rare’s Lead Designer, Gregg Mayles.
XBW : Viva Piñata is one of those games that seem to defy attempts at classification, but if you had to explain exactly what Viva Piñata is all about, what would you say?
GM : It always amuses us when people try to pigeonhole games into genres! VP can be simply explained as a game where you create an environment to attract Piñatas into it. But there is much more to it than that, and this is where your genre-defying observation is relevant – you’ll be involved in creation, customisation, nurturing, trading, peacekeeping, competition – even destruction and deviance if you so wish.
The team at Rare have set themselves up with some pretty high expectations from fans and the media alike. What made you guys decide to go with something like Viva Piñata instead of, oh, say, Killer Instinct 3?
Personally, I feel there’s no greater reward and challenge than creating an original game from nothing. It might disappoint fans of existing franchises, but unless there’s a good reason to do a sequel then we have to try new things or risk stagnating. Of course, that’s not to say we won’t consider extending a series if a new and innovative idea does surface…
It’s been said that Viva Piñata is just a giant sandbox game that never ends, but many gamers – grown up or otherwise – crave a little structure. Can players expect any sort of goal-based gameplay or mission type structure?
There is a central story to follow which involves uncovering the history of your garden, and you can also take part in competitions, strive for the most valuable garden and individual Piñatas (and rank them on the worldwide Leaderboards), fulfil official challenges set by Piñata Central, try to claim new player titles, attract every possible species and variant of Piñata (not easily done)… very broadly speaking Viva Piñata is more about setting your own goals, but there’s no shortage of them to choose from.
Something we haven’t heard a lot about is the importance of environmental variables. How will the day/night cycle affect the game, and what impact – if any – will the weather have on the Piñatas?
As in the real world, we have species that are active in the day and those that come out at night. This throws up challenges for the player if one of the daytime Piñatas needs something from a nocturnal one – how do you get them together? When it rains (and no, you’ll be glad to know the rain isn’t based on the amount we get in the UK) observant players will notice that they don’t need to water their plants!
Viva Piñata is a game aimed at kids, but it deals with some pretty powerful aspects of the real world. How do you guys plan to handle the big things like mating/reproduction, and the savage circle of life and death? Are you setting up a help-line for parents when their kids ask them what those two raccoons are doing?
The nice and innocent term we use in this game is ‘romance’. Once the players have found out what the Piñatas need in order to start this process, a mini-game is triggered to ensure they’re a good match. Then the Piñatas dance! Each species has a different dance to a different music style, but the end result is always the same – an egg delivered to your garden with your new baby Piñata inside.
Regarding death, no Piñata ever actually dies. However, there are many ways in which they can be broken open (it’s their destiny, after all).
On the subject of the Piñatas themselves, talk to us a little about the more dangerous side of the candy food-chain…are there many predatory animals in the game, and what exactly are the Sours all about?
All the species are arranged into a food chain, which mimics real life as closely as possible – where, say, a fox would be very interested in meeting the inhabitants of a chicken coop. This is all part of the Piñata cycle of life, and players may well be faced with the prospect of sacrificing Piñatas to the natural pecking order if they want to progress to more advanced species.
As for the Sours, they are rogue Piñata species, coloured red and black, which come into thriving gardens to create problems. Each has a unique issue – they eat things, they break things and they even start fights. If the player can work out how to tame the Sours, they revert to their normal forms, where their bad behaviour is reversed and they become very useful.
How important is the ecosystem to Viva Piñata? Will players be expected to manage complex balances between animals, or is it fairly forgiving?
We have tried to strike a balance between a realistic ecosystem and something that is easy to understand and fun to play. We’re aiming to offer the necessary depth for players who want to manage everything, but at the same time allowing younger and less skilled players to get equal enjoyment.
Our Helper system is a good example of this – Helpers are humanoid characters that can be employed to carry out tasks in the garden if the player wants to be sure nothing is forgotten or just wants to set aside time to concentrate on other challenges.
From ecosystem right into economy; how do players acquire chocolate coins with which to buy things for their garden? Is it available in-game or acquired with Microsoft Points?
In-game, not MS points! Coins can be dug up in the garden, won and earned in various ways, but the main method of making money is by selling off your garden produce or other assets at the in-game village.
It’s a question that has got to be asked: a piñata is really designed to be beaten repeatedly until its innards spill out, bringing joy to small children...so what happens when a Piñata ‘dies’ or ceases to be in the game? Do the other animals eat the sweet candy innards? Are players encouraged to beat their Piñatas for their candy?
When a Piñata is broken open, it spills its valuable candy, reverts to its wild status and leaves your garden. Yes, Piñatas will eat each others’ sweets, especially the precious Life Sweet! Players can even beat Piñatas themselves and sell the sweets for profit, but as the Piñatas are worth more than their candy contents this isn’t a great way to raise funds. Sour Piñatas can be smashed to drive them from your garden, but this isn’t without its problems either.
Do the Piñatas have individual attributes within a species? Are two Moozipan cows identical, or does evolution and genetics rear its Darwinian head? In other words, will cultivating breeding stock be an element of the gameplay?
Your two Moozipan cows would start off identical, but what the player does with them from there determines how identical they remain. They can be accessorised to look different, and the way they are treated will have an effect on their health. Some species can also evolve into completely new ones if the requirements are discovered and fulfilled.
Still on Piñatas themselves: can you reveal a little about how customisation of the Piñatas will work? We’ve read about backpacks, mohawks and silly moustaches, but what other kind of things will be available? Are they purely aesthetic, or do they have more than cosmetic value?
You can name them, design a label (that all your Piñatas sport) and add accessories. Some accessories have only aesthetic value, but many have special functions – some are needed as requirements in order to romance, some can protect your Piñatas from harm and some just look silly. The player will have to experiment to find out which is which!
How does co-operative multiplayer work? Is there more to it than simply visiting a friend’s garden and trading Piñatas?
Eventually you will be able to visit other gardens and invite visitors of your own, and it’s the host’s decision whether or not the visitor is allowed to bring tools and get his or her hands dirty. We’ve also included what we call Family Mode, where more than one player can plug a controller into a single Xbox 360 system to help cultivate the same garden.
This is a tough question but it’s one you’ll probably get asked a lot…how exactly is Xbox Live Marketplace going to work with Viva Piñata? Are you encountering any headaches with marketing premium content to a demographic not in possession of their own credit-cards?
This is something you’d probably have to ask Microsoft – we’re just concentrating on what we do best and cramming as much as possible into the game ready for launch! But we very much doubt it’s an issue that’s been overlooked.
On a similar note, not every Xbox 360 owner is an Xbox Live user…will people be missing out without access to the Marketplace and online features? Do you have plans to release premium content in a retail SKU format in the future, ala the Halo 2 Map Pack?
We are aware that not everyone has Live, and as one of Viva Piñata’s aims is to reach out to a new audience, we have tried to make the game a complete self-contained package to ensure that offline players won’t feel like they’re missing out on anything.
Of course, for those players that do have Xbox Live, the trading aspect and other online features are there to be enjoyed. But the Live features are really an added bonus rather than something crucial to the main game experience.
Briefly on the 4Kids TV show: how can we expect to see the cartoon and the game interact? Does it introduce specific characters that may visit gamer’s gardens, or new items to purchase etc?
The game and show use the same Piñata Island setting and species, as we supplied 4Kids with piles of design info and art assets after MGS approached them with the TV series idea.
Beyond that the game and show are their own entities, although developments in the show may well provide hints to things in the game (as a very basic example, if you see a Bunnycomb eating Carrots in the show then you’ll know a Bunnycomb in the game will want them too).
We’d like to thank Gregg and the team at Rare for taking the time to answer our questions, including the tough ones! We’re pretty excited about Viva Piñata here at Xbox World Australia, and we’re looking forward to getting our hands on the game when it is released in November.
Interview by Dominic Rozenberg
