Pet Monsters was an awesome Action RPG game inspired by the Japanese game Monster Strike but designed for western audience. During the period it ran it gained a community and dedicated fans. I was the Lead Game Designer as well as the Producer for some of time the game ran.
Pet Monsters was an awesome Action RPG game inspired by the Japanese game Monster Strike but designed for western audience.
The game was a joint pitch of the Rovio Stars team and SideKick studio, and following the prototype the game was approved for development by Rovio management. My team (SideKick studio) was working as 2nd party developer for Rovio on the project. All the creatures were initiated by a brilliantly talented guy from Valencia, USA.
The game famously had Day 1 retention above 60% from day 1 of publishing (this is the only KPI I can disclose as Rovio already disclosed it) and a huge promise to become a strong hit, and we were all SUPER excited making it.
I was the Lead Game Designer and for some of the time also the Producer of the game (which later became the role of Tal Raviv, back then the CTO of Sidekick). I wrote the game design and the game balancing & economy. We worked closely with the team at Rovio Stars, and were on the Helsinki – Tel Aviv line quite a bit.
As many games, this project went through a lot. It was first designed as a full westernized version inspired by the Japanese Monster Strike, as we believed western players would have a harder time with concepts like fusion (merging monsters to gain levels for characters vs. gaining experience points for that). However, during early versions Supercell released Smash Land, which was their version of a western Monster Strike. Smash Land was cool, but it also made us realize that removing fusion and a few other concepts doesn’t work so well. We went back to the fully Japanese concepts of Fusion and Evolution for character progression, and it worked way better with Rovio playtesters.
Other things we had to endure was a major layoff at Rovio. It was mostly not in the Games Dept, but it did bring the company to a halt for a few months (because of the way layoffs work in Finland). We had to downsize considerably, and only after things settled down were we greenlighted to resume full team.
The game became even more interesting after we added the weekly raids, where players could finally form clans and compete / collaborate with other players.
The game was developed and published when Rovio was in a period trying to develop new brands beyond Angry Birds. We were not the only studio working on a game with the Pet Monsters brand. However, the project was still trying to reach long-term goals when the Angry Birds movie was released, and following its success Rovio decided to refocus back on Angry Birds. While canceling games is not something rare in our industry, we all loved working on and playing the game very much, so it was very hard for all of us when it was closed.
