Interviews// Harvey Elliot, Head of EA Bright Light

SPOnG: (Grins). It's as good a reason as any... Could you tell me a bit about where Zubo came from? Was it always an internal thing? Was it passed to you from elsewhere in EA?

Harvey Elliot: Well, I haven't been attached to Zubo directly for its entire development time. The idea first came around about three years ago, but it was really only just over two years ago that we started doing something with it.

It came from an executive producer called Rob O'Farrell, who works for me now – a concept artist called Jacques Gauthier and another designer who's no longer with us, Andy Curtis. They just had this idea to develop a new character IP. They'd been in a group called the Fusion Group, which is the internal name for our handheld (guys). They really understood the handheld platforms, they understood what made good games, and they did, for example, Goblet of Fire for the PSP, they did Burnout: Legends for the PSP, and they wanted to do something a little bit different.

They just started thinking about these characters, and Jacques is an amazing artist, you just sit and talk to him and he just sketches away, and suddenly these zubos (or Podos at the time, but zubos as we'll reflect on them now) were born.

It came out of a conversation – we wanted a character collecting game, what could we come up with? The characters took about a year to evolve from those original sketches into the characters in the game now.

But, the thing that was always true about them was they were never based on a person, they were always based on cultural events, or things that happen in culture, or a connection of a number of character types, that created these sort of, these very iconic creatures. We've designed, I think, around 200 of them now and yet there's only 50 in the first game. The interesting thing was we designed the characters and we chose 50 to make a game from, rather than make a game with 200 characters.

For me, the thing that interested me about it was the game came out of the characters, rather than the game was decided on and the characters were found to fit the game. And so, these guys would just meet up each lunchtime and sit and talk about the games that they could do with these characters, and the characters would evolve a bit. And these guys really, really work together. That's really what started it.

It came to this concept artist, this designer and EP, just saying, 'we'd like to make a character-based game, can we make some characters?' And then, 'what's influencing us at the moment', and pulling these references together and, like I say, creating these zubos.


SPOnG: It's interesting that you focus on the character collecting when you talk about the origins. Some reports on the game have focused on that, some more on the rhythm element. Were there any particular games that influenced you as you were putting Zubo together?

Harvey Elliot: There are clearly some very strong character-collecting games. Once those characters came up, it was clearly going to be a game about collecting other characters, because we wanted you to want to have these other characters with you as you moved about, and to choose which ones you used based on the skills that they would have. Each zubo got a back-story and a character behind it. But, clearly, Pokemon's very competitive in that space, the Spectrobes stuff is a little bit more recent, the Digimon, Yu-Gi-Oh, there's a lot of that kind of 'character collecting and do something with' gaming experience.

The thing we wanted to do was make it feel Western right from the start. Not to say 'how do we take on the Japanese with this sort of design', but how do we make something that feels relevant for us and for our cultures, rather than looking at someone else's culture and deriving or taking for ourselves.

It definitely is in that competitive space. But I think that we use that in a slightly different way. We didn't then start breaking the games apart and thinking 'OK, what do we now need to do? Well, they've got 60 characters, we need 70', or stat-based stuff. We just looked at what our experience needed to be to make a really cool character-collecting, battling experience. That led to all sorts of things. We created what we called the Sky Garden, which is this world you could explore, which then became Zubalo, which is the landscape that you're in.

There's a graphical style that developed through the characters. There's a visual treatment that's in every land and every world and every effect has a similar circular style that kind of embeds the world together. And then the idea that these creatures or characters needed to have something to do and that developed the battle where it wasn't necessarily all about fighting, but it was definitely about battling, and there's some showmanship stuff with the dance off. There's also the physical moves and stuff with props, and it just got more and more fun and entertaining.