Many independent game developers struggle to find a foothold amid blockbuster annual releases like Activition's Call of Duty franchise, which is held up by hundreds of people across multiple studios. Yet, a few names break through the noise and create cultural phenomenons. Yacht Club Games' Shovel Knight and Team Cherry's Hollow Knight are just two examples of Kickstarter-driven games that spawned franchises (though Hollow Knight: Silksong is still in development). Beautiful Glitch might travel somewhat under the radar in this discussion, but its latest release Monster Prom 3: Monster Roadtrip shows it intends to keep expanding the indie dating sim franchise.
Game Rant spoke to Beautiful Glitch creative director Julian Quijano about how the studio designs its games, future plans for the series after Monster Roadtrip's success, and meme culture in the Internet age. Interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Q: Beautiful Glitch is a relatively small team, how did it start out? Was Monster Prom always your first project, or did you toy with other ideas?
A: Monster Prom was indeed our first ever project. I had some money saved, and I always wanted to start something anew. I had worked briefly in an indie studio managing the PR (my background is in advertising), so I figured I could use that knowledge. That's how I figured out that "something new" could be a video game.
There were some ideas I toyed with before Monster Prom, but some of them weren't even games. For some time I was sure my big endeavor was going to be an app focused on perfumes, just to think of one example.
Q: Your studio press kit says the aim was originally to capture a "neat and modern narrative" that other indies didn't. Has that philosophy evolved over time?
A: Yes and no. Of course our aims have evolved; but trying to capture a "neat and modern narrative" is probably still one of our goals. Our games take a lot of inspiration not just from other games, but mainly from TV shows. Many games have their narrative and dialogues subject to the game design or mechanics, and as a result said narrative bleeds a bit. After launching three Monster Prom games, we still are proud to see our games are experienced as if they were interactive TV shows.
There's a different way in which the narrative takes places, where the dialogue (and tied to that, the stories and characters) are our main thing. Monster Roadtrip is an interesting case, because we've refined a more interesting design around its survival aspects, and yet in many situations we've had to say something in the vein of, "Okay, let's keep looking for a design solution, but let's not forget the narrative." It's always circling back to the fact the main drive for our fanbase is to experience hilarious dialogue with charming characters.
Q: What were your expectations from Monster Prom? Seems it became something of a cult classic, was that a surprise?
A: Absolutely. Monster Prom was some sort of "garage project," as mentioned before. I wanted to make something anew by myself. We assembled a very small team of incredibly talented individuals, and then we went all in. We felt it was something special, but never expected such a success (from an indie perspective). For reference, our success metric was to get to 20,000 sales in two years, and we got there in two days.
We are forever grateful to all the people who chose to support this weird little game (now weird little franchise). We have such a loyal and wonderful fanbase.
Q: Your studio also developed MAZEMAN, but otherwise you seem squarely focused on the Monster Prom franchise with Monster Camp and now Monster Roadtrip. Is that the plan for the foreseeable future?
A: MAZEMAN was more of an internal exercise of doing something different while we were working on Monster Prom. We must keep focusing on the Monster Prom franchise, there's two-to-three other games under the series' umbrella that are being discussed. But we surely want to pump out something completely new. We also have ideas (not in development as we are speaking) that we'd love to explore in the future, focusing on brand-new IPs.
Q: How has the Monster Prom series evolved based on feedback or lessons learned from each game?
A: The writing style has been refined a lot, based on our own evolution and seeing the game experienced firsthand. We also optimized the way the game works, in terms of content. To this day, most players experience only about five-to-10 percent of the whole game. We made it huge so that the variability could be high, and each match could feel completely new. We managed that, but we went overboard in the sense we produced too much content. We keep refining how to keep that sense of wonder while reducing the amount of content so that the games are more manageable from a production viewpoint.
We also made Monster Camp dialogues a bit too long, so we perfected our internal ways of measuring narrative longitude and became stricter in this regard while producing Monster Roadtrip. Lots of people have praised it already, as they mention that while they liked Monster Camp very much, it could get quite long.
We've also made many changes to mechanics, as Monster Roadtrip is not a dating sim but a survival narrative game. Future games might keep changing the main design approach; but internally we keep taking note of which little design choices we can keep in future titles, no matter the genre. This exploration in mechanics allows us to experiment and take notes on how to improve the overall experience. We already have a list of Monster Roadtrip innovations that we want to implement in future games, to see if they can work well even if they're not survival-focused.
Q: Are there any particular inspirations that led Beautiful Glitch in this direction for Monster Roadtrip?
A: Well, we just thought a "road trip" was yet another staple in story set-ups that could lead to hilarious adventures for the characters. Many games about long journeys feature survival, so that made us think about how to translate our formula into a survival format. We went through several iterations to refine what became the actual game.
Q: Was it difficult figuring out how to incorporate dating sim aspects into the new game modes?
A: It was a challenge we chose to take, since we knew our fanbase would love a twist on the mechanics; but they surely would appreciate the possibility of still smooching some hot monsters. We figured out quickly that we could mix the idea of dating with the concept of taking a hitchhiker (and getting to know them better), then worked from there.
Q: Tell me a little about the studio's creative process. The Monster Prom games have a lot of raunchy comedy pulling from the tradition of Rick and Morty, Archer, etc. How do you capture that in different scenarios for each game?
A: First we have a set of rules that come from the game design. In Monster Roadtrip we settled for a design in which you encounter "Locations," each having three "Actions" you could choose from. Each Action basically triggers an "Event," which have appeared throughout the whole franchise as its main narrative unit; a short, hilarious story where a choice between "options" is made.
So we have something easy to understand as a fan (Events like in the other games), but with a twist (now you travel through unknown lands, finding Locations that lead to Actions triggering an Event). To make it less theoretical, an example would be a Location that's the BIKER BAR. In there you can choose between "GETTING SOME DRINKS," "STARTING A BRAWL," or "PLAYING SOME POOL." Each Action will trigger only one Event.
This made the narrative process quite clear. We must:
- Brainstorm a series of 60+ Locations.
- Then brainstorm three Actions per each Location.
From there, it follows the same process to create Events as in previous games:
- We brainstorm a general one-line concept for the Event tied to each Action.
- We write a prompt for the Event - basically the skeleton - in which the intro, the options, and the outcomes are described with some detail. Sometimes it's just guidelines, sometimes it's quite specific (with dialogue written for the writer to reproduce).
Then it goes to the writers, and a whole new process start (writing, discussing, feedback, editing, etc.). This is the internal creation process that happens at the start when we bake the general ideas behind the game.
These processes happen internally at the office, mostly between myself as creative director and the narrative designer. The basis is to transition from a recognizable field of tropes and conventions into the absurd, or into a strong, unexpected twist. When I was studying I was taught that culture has evolved into an era of the "remix," and that's so true. We went from production to reproduction, as the Internet has made intertextuality the base of all texts. Of course, this has happened forever. Don Quixote is a staple of early modern literature because it explored intertextuality in unique ways, and it was written at the beginning of the 17th Century. But today, we consume memes with 12 layers of meaning that only make sense because you know at least three or four references from which that one meme builds from. Everything connects with everything, and there's power in that.
So, two key skills emerge:
- The skill of capturing tropes that click with the audience ("Ah, yes, I recognize that!"). Funnily enough, this skill I bring directly from advertising, where they teach you most creative advertising is born from understanding an insight that's true to the consumer - even if they never put words to it.
- The skill of twisting the trope just enough so that it produces something new and interesting.
We build a lot from there: creating a bridge between trope and twist/absurd. If you don't focus on the twist, the trope will feel like it's saying nothing new, and it's a bit boring. If you don't focus on the trope, it will feel like absurdity for the sake of absurdity, pure nonsense and ultimately cheap. A good bridge brings you to absurd places from known places. You get to a point in which you're laughing, asking "how the f*ck did I end up here?" Then when you think about the journey from point A to point B, as unlikely as it is, it makes sense in its own way.
I think that's one of the key things that make a comedic bit (in the style we practice) to work.
Also - not trivial at all - if you want to write and create, the foremost skill is being willing to consume a metric ton of fiction. The classic, "If you want to write, you need to read first." This year (so far) I've watched the first season of 70 new TV shows - not counting seasons of shows I already started in the past.
Q: How do you decide which characters are in which game, and which are dateable or not? Do player reactions from previous titles have a big influence?
A: It's a mix of revisiting fan-favorites and exploring characters with little-to-no development. Monster Roadtrip is nice in that its dating mechanics are not the primary focus, and thus they're a bit more shallow. The upside is that, in exchange, we can make more romanceable characters. We launched with 12 covering the basics (characters we know must be part of said roster), but then we feel more comfortable taking some risks.
Without turning it into the main driving force, we have an understanding of which characters are more broadly liked. But of course, we sometimes take that as a challenge to making players fall a bit in love with less popular characters too.
Q: Monster Prom 3 seems to have a bit of a time skip, with characters appearing older, leaving high school, etc. Is the idea to keep exploring these characters throughout their lives?
A: Well, I created these characters when I was 26 or so. Because of that, I made them 20-25 years old (the high school bit was more about using the "prom" trope, which from our non-American eyes seemed universal and understandable), shaped from myself and people I knew at that age. As I grow up, I get a better understanding of further stages in life, and therefore felt more comfortable exploring that.
Bringing them into new stages of their life is not a prime directive, but it is something we're willing to explore eventually. At some point a mobile game was discussed in which we did some of a time skip, but the project didn't progress. Who knows? I still appreciate the stories we started shaping there, and I'd love to eventually bring them into reality.
Q: There also seems to be more lore about the world overall in Monster Roadtrip, exploring elements like differences between the human and monster realm. Was there a concerted effort to increase worldbuilding here?
A: Well, we sometimes discuss these things with no discernible goal in sight. We ask ourselves these questions, and for some time we found no answers; but in recent years we've started to draw a more detailed picture, leading to more proper worldbuilding. From an internal standpoint it seemed interesting, so we thought it'd be cool to transcribe part of that into the dialogue of Monster Roadtrip.
The game even has some subtle kernels of bigger implications around worldbuilding, but I haven't seen anyone picking up on those yet. We enjoyed the exercise, and we're down to keep presenting this worldbuilding in future games.
It is a bit conflicting for us, since this is a comedy game and we run into an ongoing problem where many things are written for the sake of a joke. It's what we label "official but not canon." This makes the canon/lore/worldbuilding sort of brittle in the end. We have fun working on it, but at the same time it feels like an arduous, often useless endeavor. When we finally define an aspect of this game's reality, we are sure there are 10 past instances that become outdated and inaccurate (joke lines we said in passing about how that world aspect worked, without taking it seriously... But now we take it seriously). We don't have the bandwidth to search all those instances and edit them.
It all comes from the fact that Monster Prom was a sort of silly "garage project" that never intended to become the size it is today. Therefore, we never planned for a multi-game franchise that could benefit more from sturdier worldbuilding beyond "haha funny."
Q: How far do you want to go with giving fans details versus leaving mysteries for them to debate?
A: We dose the worldbuilding bit by bit. It's fun to leave some mystery, and since we have some more games lined up for this franchise, we know there will be a time and place for more. Dunno if everything will be properly explained by the end. We sometimes consider making a sort of "Lore Book" that reveals everything as planned by us. Maybe we'll never have the muscle and time to do so; but it is something that has been discussed many times. It'd be great to clearly tell fans what's proper worldbuilding and what was just a silly joke with no real lore implications.
Q: In a related note, I imagine the dev team has seen a ton of fan-made content; art, fanfiction, etc. What has that been like, and what more are you interested in seeing?
A: It's wonderful to see fan-made content, one of the key things that fuels us to keep creating games within the franchise. This is true for new content too, since sometimes there are new team members who didn't work in the conception of an original character. Getting fan art from a new character can truly make a day for someone on the team. Other than fan art (always wonderful to see), I enjoy seeing memes. Animatics are incredible, but understandably more rare.
But generally speaking, any piece of fan-made content is interesting to see. I am constantly marveled by it. Imagine creating something with such an impact that talented individuals decide to invest time and effort into creating another thing that celebrates and re-imagines it. It's truly beautiful and humbling.
Q: Now that Monster Roadtrip is available, how has the reception been?
A: The reception has been incredible. We sit at a 99 percent overwhelmingly positive review score, and I can't explain how happy we are that people see how this game shows the evolution of the studio. We felt that way when seeing the game, but as we took so many detours from the original formula that we were a bit nervous whether the fanbase would agree it was for the better, or if it spoiled the broth.
Today we see people find this experience to be much more well-defined and better-constructed, and that means the world to us. It re-affirms the lessons we learned while building this game, while also telling us we have a good sense of direction for what this franchise can be. Fingers crossed that keeps being the case in the future!
Q:The series has been largely driven by Kickstarter, why did you decide to go this route? Is Monster Retreat still in the cards based on goals reached during the "Holiday Season" crowdfunding campaign, or what else is there to work on?
A: There are still some more games promised during the Kickstarter, and yes, we discuss them every now and then. Now we need to focus on Monster Roadtrip's post-release with some features and content in future updates. But our goal for early 2023 is to internally discuss, brainstorm, and explore a series of ideas, both for future Monster Prom games and new IPs.
Q: Is there anything else you want to add?
A: Thanks for considering us for this interview, and thanks to our fans. We pour lots of effort and love in these weird little games we make, and it is wonderful to see how they resonate with people.
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Monster Prom 3: Monster Roadtrip is available now on PC.