Rare Gamer talks to James Thomas

by Paul on Nov 10th, 2011

We are huge fans of Viva Piñata and we’re not shy in letting people know just how much we love it. It’s been five years since the game was released on November 9th 2006 and to help celebrate the occasion we’ve been lucky enough to spend a bit of time chatting to James Thomas at Rare who worked on the games and he’s been able to share some very interesting tidbits of information with us, so join us as we whip out the champagne flutes and raise a toast to our favourite paper-based life sim.

1. Which of the VP games is your personal favourite?

I’d have to say the second one, for very personal reasons.

Bear with me on this one… Trouble in Paradise was the culmination of an incredible amount of hard work from an awful lot of people. During my time with VP, most of my efforts were centred upon getting the whole shebang working on Live, and given how many different components we had – from the piñatas to the steadily growing trees – this was quite an undertaking. Even just remembering the lengths we went to in order to add three more players into the garden still makes me wake up in a cold sweat some nights. Somehow, though, after a large number of late nights we (and I have to name check Mr Eike Umlauf at this point who played an equal part in completing this monumental feat) managed to pull the whole thing together and there before us we had full four-player co-op.

Leading up to release I don’t think I realised how happy that would make me, but the joy I got from this feature alone I think may never be reached again as long as I game. The weekend of launch, there I was in a garden with my wife, my brother and one of our good friends, chasing Fudgehogs, breeding Bunnycombs, and desperately trying to attract a Doenut. Hours went by chewing the fat and allowing the garden to go by as we nattered and relaxed. At times we became compulsive, depending on the mood of the hour, as we switched tact and all set about separate tasks in our own little corner or combining our talents to blitz through Piñata Central’s request list. I haven’t had such a complete co-op experience since, and knowing I had a hand in it made that warm glow feel even better.

2. Some argue that the first game is prone to long periods of player inactivity while you’re waiting for various things to happen, but overall it’s viewed as a better game than TiP. How do you respond to that?

I think the lulls can be honestly down to where you are in proceedings and how you’ve setup your garden. Yes, especially at the start, it’s a slow build, I’ll admit that, but such is the nature of only having a single Whirlm in your garden; as cute as they are they don’t do much. But I’ve always thought it cascades really quickly. You get the Whirlm then the Sparrowmint shows interest, your first flowers should bring in the Taffly and any veg should cause a Bunnycomb or Mousemallow to creep into your garden, and before you know it Leafos is trying to tell you a dozen things at once and you need to choose what to pay attention to. And then, later on, when everything’s settled and you’ve filled up your garden it’s much calmer. No-one’s trying to eat each other, the Watchlings patrol the boundaries, and even Pester is kept at bay. It can be a game of extremes but I think that’s the nice thing about Viva Piñata as it allows you to have as much order or chaos as you see fit.

A large part of this I think is down to the piñatas themselves. They’re not scripted in any way shape or form and so effectively have a mind of their own, wandering about the garden doing their own thing. With that anything can happen and the upshot is that if you’ve got a bunch of chilled out herbivores in your garden then there’s a good chance that the worst that will happen is a turnip is going to get savaged. Throw in the odd predator, or smack someone too hard with the shovel, and watch all hell break loose as each critter does what they can to stay out of trouble.

3. The game is so deep and engrossing yet the look of the game leads you to believe it’s aimed at the younger market. How hard was it to balance out those opposing areas i.e. not making it too easy or too hard or making sure the sugary sweetness of the art style wasn’t too twee and cutesy.

I don’t think at any point we actually sat down and thought “let’s make a game for the younger market”. The idea originally started out as more of a mobile Sim Garden idea, as this original isometric concept art shows [NOTE: the original article was published on the Rare website but has since been archived, I just kept a personal backup] and it really just evolved from there. Platforms shifted, gameplay was tweaked but a key part to our success was the look of the project. Indeed for all Rare games, from Blast Corps to Nuts & Bolts, Piñata to Mr Pants, there’s always a focus placed on creating the right look for each one to make it a distinctive and rich experience.

Strangely enough, the original look comes a very child-unfriendly sounding source. Our concept artist, Ryan, began looking at the Mexican Day of the Dead festival, and those comparatively normal animals we see in the original concept eventually evolved into the paper covered critters you see today. Each was designed to have a strong shape and distinctive patterns, taking in the bright colours associated with the festival. With the piñatas at the absolute centre of the game, the stars if you will, Ryan did an amazing job at making each one utterly memorable and in turn created a style for the game that is wholly unique.

Those same bright colours often do get us mistaken as being solely a “younger persons” game, but I think we did well in offering something up for everybody. Often the very independent nature of the piñatas, waddling about on their own and interacting with anything they find I’ve seen engross the youngest of minds for quite some time, whilst parents will spin yarns about just what Whirlm 05 is up to on his day out to the shops. Slightly older players are content to create a garden that looks right, whilst the depth that we tried to incorporate into the vast web that links all the piñatas and plants together is hopefully enough to secure the interest of those older and more determined players. Of course you can plan for those things but actually seeing them go like that in the wild is something completely different and seeing in the community and on the forums the different things that a whole wide variety of players have taken from the game always pleases me.

4. There’s so many piñata to choose from, but which ones are your favourites and why?

So many, indeed. Firstly, it has to be the Goobaa. Anyone who knows my online handle should know why, but add a top hat, monocle and ‘tache to that bad boy and everyone should bow to his greatness.

I also have a special place for the Whirlm as I think there’s so much character in what is effectively a very brightly coloured sock. Though it’s the Macaraccoon that probably is my true favourite just because of his manic nature. The speed at which he walks makes it sound like there’s a mini-drumroll going on in the garden, and when you’ve gotten a dozen of them and are wired up to a surround sound system it’s fantastic. When they decide to start doing a lap of the garden, it’s like there’s a small marching band circling your living room.

I’ve also a soft spot for the Doenut and Walrusk. Whoever was the voice talent for those two is an incredibly talented chap.

5. Some feel that TiP is just Viva Piñata 1.5 rather than a true sequel; was the intention for TiP to refine the first game into more of what the original vision was intended to be or did you have more planned for it but ran out of time? If so, what bits did you not get round to including?

We do consider Trouble in Paradise a refinement, but it was not in the manner of “what the original should have been”. With the original VP out the door, there was still a lot more that we wanted to do with Piñata Island as there is so much character in there it’s hard to let go. We wanted to explore the different areas, create more toys for the piñatas, add in Live, instigate beauty pageants, create a challenge mode to focus players, add in hunts and traps, the extremely innovative Piñata Vision Cards, single-box co-op, create a more child friendly / free-roaming mode, and of course breathe life into the piñatas that never made it into the original. There was an awful lot of content in the sequel that I don’t think really justifies the 1.5 tag in my mind. I can see why people may say that, but it does make my eyebrows furrow seeing what we added.

For me, our refinements came from listening to the community. I’ve spent a lot of time on VP forums, especially PinataIsland.info, and a lot of the tweaks we made to the UI, controls and general accessibility were down to the feedback that we got straight from the Horstachio’s mouth. There are times when you’re so close to a project that you either can’t see the less-than-elegant solution that you’ve dreamt up or find yourself working around a problem so that it’s no longer an issue. That was what it was like with certain aspects of VP’s controls and so hearing fresh perspectives from the fans meant we had some great impetus to go back in and change things up.

6. There are a number of references back to the original Banjo-Kazooie games and even Project Dream, with Captain Blackeye’s questionable ship “The Mudplugger”. Are there any bits that didn’t make it into statues or references to your older titles? If you can’t think of any, are there references that you put in that nobody seems to have found out quite yet?

The one thing I can say is that you lot have plundered every single inch of both games. One of my favourite moments associated with VP is actually how well the community have bonded in this act. Take the Dragonache in the first game for instance; there was no Player’s Guide initially and so by sheer determination the Internet set about finding out just how to hatch a Dragonache egg and then mature it. Not an easy task considering the hoops that you had to jump through for that mystical piñata. It reaffirmed my faith that the Internet can be used as a tool for good.

Within months I think every single secret and Easter Egg we put in had been called out. Well almost. No-one has discovered yet the exact chance of producing a wildcard baby in the original yet.

7. It was very neat to see the release of the Viva Piñata vision cards, especially the developer ones in a fancy holographic green pack. How exactly did that idea come about to have players using the camera to scan cards?

That is completely the work of one enterprising mind, our lead programmer, Will. It was one of his pet projects after seeing some very early augmented reality demo from MIT. I can’t remember too much about the early days except constantly walking past his office wondering just why he was waving these bits of paper at the telly. The initial demos displayed an animated Fizzlybear upon the card, which could then be flicked into the garden, and it wasn’t long before all sorts of piñatas were popping up in the game. As the project went on, every single thing that could be tweaked or edited down eventually found itself as a Vision Card.

The aspect that took us all was that it meant that people could trade piñatas in new ways, scan down special items, or even find them hidden in places across our website. There were even early, ambitious plans were to try and attach them to any VP products we might produce, e.g. actual piñatas, DVDs, cuddly toys, so that you could scan them and something special would appear in game, but that never came to pass.

As with everything, however, the community have gone to town on this and over on PinataIsland.info, they’ve even cracked the code to the point where they’ve created their own card generator. Now that’s impressive.

8. Looking back at the games with the benefit of hindsight, what bits are you most proud of and which bits do you wish you’d done differently or implemented in another way?

When it comes to something that you’ve worked on, you’re always going to spot the flaws even if no-one else can. On the first game I’m most proud of the trading, and the way we broke new ground with the ability to trade piñatas with other on your friends list. On the flip-side, an irk for me is the saving mechanism. I think we ended up auto-saving every two minutes and now I look at that and cringe going “why did I insist we do that so often!” Having been burnt from losing some test gardens, I think I overcompensated there.

In Trouble in Paradise it’s all about Live. I love the fact that you can play an entire game in co-op on someone else’s machine and get all the relevant awards and XP, I’m really happy about how we achieved that. I’m not so happy about the lack of safeguards we put in for the Sours. There’s an interesting side-effect where a garden can suddenly be swamped by the red swines if certain events unfold and even if it’s not that common I still wish for five minutes more in the codebase to resolve it all.

9. Was it hard to get that gorgeous ruffly paper effect on the piñatas implemented? Does it tax the Xbox to any serious degree (the sound my console makes mid-game would suggest so – sounds like a jet flying overhead).

As a man who starts sweating and hyperventilating if he’s put too near graphical code, I can’t give you the absolute ins and outs on this but I can declare that it was very clever. Our graphical engineer Mike, who’s now Stateside, took the concept of fur and sort of tweaked it. Heavily. If Conker’s fur can go out, why not flatten it and make it go down? I’m simplifying profusely there, mainly out of ignorance, but it’s fair to say that we were pushing the Xbox quite hard with this playing a large part.

Not sure if extra polygons equates to a jet engine sound, however. I’d get that checked out.

10. When you sat down to think up all of the piñata, who was the lucky so-and-so who got to name them all, and how did you go through the process of deciding what piñata interacted with others, who eats who for resident requirements, who’s spoiling for a fight, etc. It must have been a logistical nightmare to keep track of it all.

I’ve still probably got the email floating about somewhere, so excited was I by the prospect of naming piñatas. It was open season and the whole team were encouraged to conjure up species, the end result being a huge spreadsheet so full of sweet-based puns that staring at it for too long it could cause diabetes. Sadly I don’t think any of my names were quite up to scratch but the vast majority of our creatures’ names came from our very own barn. A few had to get tweaked for skating too close to brand names, but on the whole, those current names are unchanged from back in the day.

11. Do you have any specific memories of working on the game?

My biggest memory of Trouble in Paradise is from the first day that Eike and I both took our devkits home to do home testing over Live. I hopped online first and found a message from him saying that he was going to be a little late, setup a garden, invite him, and he’ll be along shortly. I did as instructed and hopped into a new, completely bare garden. A few minutes of pottering about later and I disappeared off to answer the phone. Twenty minutes later I return and find my living room glowing orange as Eike has turned up and has filled my garden with pumpkins. Every square inch was filled with brightly coloured vegetables. I grab a headset and ask him what on earth he’s doing? Turns out I hadn’t completely unlocked his toolset and so the only thing the poor man could do was plant seeds and had been doing so for the last 18 minutes straight, having appeared only a couple of mins after I’d left. Not only was it a ridiculous sight to return to but it was the first indication it was the first proper test we’d completed in Live. Whoever had synced those pumpkins had synced them good.

As for the original, my residing thought is of my poor wife, whose garden was beset by the invisibility glitch. So much so that when her first Whirlm rocked up and became resident, when Leafos proudly shouted “look at that!” there was nothing to see. We had a very exciting cutscene looking at a blank patch of soil. Oh dear.

12. Is there anything else you’d care to add to conclude?

Yeah, why not. It’s 1:10,000.

A long and loud round of applause please for James Thomas who took time out from his very busy schedule to talk to us. We’re very grateful! Now we can get breeding those remain 9,950 pretztails we need for the wildcard.

Categories: Interviews