Kaiju Wars is an upcoming turn-based tactics game that looks to bring monster-stomping action to the strategy genre. Foolish Mortals previously developed the innovative real-time strategy game Radio General with an immersive voice-command system. Kaiju Wars looks to take that same innovative spirit into the world of monsters.
I had the chance to talk with Michael Long, one of the lead developers, and pick their brain about Kaiju Wars’ development and features.
How would you describe Kaiju Wars to a newcomer?
In Kaiju Wars, you play out a Godzilla movie as the terrible military fighting an invincible monster. Just like those scenes in the movies, you actually fly jets directly into his face and the monster will actually step on your tanks and get hurt like they’re spiky Legos. The gameplay is a cross between Into the Breach and Advance Wars. You can’t ever kill the monster, but you can slow it down. It slowly moves around destroying your city and you have to buy enough time for your scientists to come up with a solution.
What were the main inspirations for Kaiju Wars?
The main inspiration is the old Godzilla movie from 1954 back when it was humans versus the monster, whereas the new movies focus on monsters versus monsters. We’re also taking inspiration from movies like Pacific Rim where it’s humans fighting the monsters again. Of course it can’t be the military that defeats them on their own. It has to be science that finds a way to stop the monsters.
How did you come to the idea of making Kaiju Wars in its current form?
A long time ago there was an old game called Godzilla 2: War of the Monsters and it was a turn-based strategy game for the NES. It had you playing as the humans fighting these Godzilla monsters that appeared and wrecked up your city. It wasn’t a very good game. It was super janky, but the idea was so good and we played so much of it as children.
Basically nobody ever really took up that idea. All the modern Kaiju games are basically fighting games where they’re fighting each other. We wanted to bring back the turn-based tactical Kaiju-ness where you play as the humans to fight the monsters.
About two years ago, my brother made a board game based on that idea where you play as the mayor of a city and the monster comes and wrecks up your city. It was such a good game that after playing it, I said “Jeff, we should make this into a video game, so you don’t have to keep shuffling the little cardboard tokens around on the map”. The game was made explicitly in mind for the monster to be automated so their behavior is very simple – they just move towards the nearest building and then the human has to plan around that. It’s similar to Into the Breach where you know where the monster is going to go and then you have to position your units. You want some of the units to get stepped on and then other units you don’t want to get stepped on. Then you have to build your city and place buildings strategically. You can actually use buildings to lure monsters down certain paths away from your chief scientist who’s working in a laboratory, which you’ll have to evacuate eventually once the monster gets rid of too much of your city.
Kaiju Wars is based off an NES game, then we made a board game, and now it’s going to be a video game.
What element or feature are you most proud of?
One of our big inspirations was Into the Breach. In that game, it shows what the monsters are going to do when they’re attacking your buildings. But in that game, you’re fighting many monsters. In Kaiju, you’re only fighting one or two at a time. Ours is not quite perfect information and that we show the monster’s path – where they could go. But if there’s a tie between like two closest buildings, the monster will choose randomly and we actually give you the exact percent odds the monster will step on each tile. You actually have to think about where you want to position your units. You don’t know for sure where they’re going to go, but we give you the odds. We explain the rules of the game, but there’s still uncertainty and chance that you have to work around. It’s kind of a mix of Into the Breach’s perfect information and then a little bit of you don’t quite know where they’re going.
Why did you decide to focus on a semi-perfect information system?
One of the big things is, since it came from a board game, everything had to be fairly simple. The mechanics ought to be fairly simple for the player to move things around. We want to explain the entire game to the player, which is something that, although Into the Breach is awesome, doesn’t quite actually accomplish. It does show you what the monster is going to do, but it doesn’t tell you how the monsters make their decisions. If you move your mech here, what is the decision for attacking your mech versus attacking that building? I don’t know. There must be some rules for deciding, but the game never tells you that. In our game, we aim to tell you everything, all the rules of the game.
Could you explain how the Kaiju mutation system works?
That’s one of the final missions of each area. The monster will attack your city for a few turns and then afterwards retreat back to its lair and when it emerges again it gets a new ability and the abilities are somewhat randomized. Each monster only has a small subset they can get and they’re very powerful abilities, but also very easy to understand. It’s also random which tile the monster comes back on based on its home terrain. Those ones are definitely more of a battle of attrition as they slowly appear, blow up a few buildings, and then leave and slowly your city gets destroyed showing that defeat is inevitable, but hopefully you can hold on just long enough to squeak out the win.
How dynamic is the mutation system?
No, I’m afraid it’s pretty simple. It basically just picks from a pool of five abilities. And whenever we do random stuff it’s just always the same odds. We find that AI in games suck. In games like Advance Wars and Fire Emblem, the AI is braindead stupid and we want to make a game that didn’t have an AI essentially, because everything’s automated exactly how they behave and then you have to plan around that. Into the Breach also does that well, but we add an uncertainty into the mix. You have to plan for a contingency of, “oh, is he going to go left or is he going to go right?” – that sort of thing.
Which human character would be the most successful in taking command?
Major Danger would be very aggressive with all of his units, but he would completely neglect his science. Whereas probably Dr. Wagner would just isolate herself in her lab. Commander X is more of a tricky guy. It’s hard to say. Probably Wagner would focus on the win condition cause she’s actually smart, so probably her.
How did you come up with the human units you wanted to use?
One of our inspirations was Advance Wars and they have the standard of tanks and fighters and bombers and all that. There’s the expectation in strategy games of those base units, so we did add those. But we want each one to be very specific and very different and we didn’t want to complicate things with random attack percent chances or crits or HP. We made it very simple. We simplified a lot because it comes down to a board game that had to move along. We don’t want HP and stuff. If the monster attacks your tanks, your tanks are dead, that’s it, but they will counter attack. We took the idea of the Advance Wars archetypes but then simplified them down to the very bare bones of, “well, does it shoot air? Does it shoot ground? Does it have counter attack capability?” That’s basically those three stats and how far it moves. Advance Wars archetypes but simplified down to its barest of bones.
Are there plans to add a conventional PvP multiplayer system?
We actually have added in a very simple versus mode where one person can play as the monster and then the other player plays as the human. You can use that Steam remote play if you want to play virtually with a friend somewhere else, which is super handy, but it’s definitely not a full game mode. You’re still limited to where the monster could move, but whenever there’s a choice for the monster that player makes that choice. It isn’t nearly as in-depth as the regular game, but it is there as kind of a bonus. Though the board game doesn’t play at all like that.
Have you considered a procedural map generator along with the map editor?
The infinite content of procedural is very tempting and that’s something we may look into the future. The way the game is set up is that the placement of the buildings is actually so important that even moving one building one tile to the left can completely change whether or not the monster rampages around the edge of the map or goes straight into the middle of where the scientist is.
Coming up with a procedural algorithm that makes something interesting was deemed to be a lot of work. We just opted to make a bunch of handcrafted levels and you can play each level on normal or hard mode. Hard mode is mostly the same level, but we actually handcraft change a few features. It’s not just adding some health to the monster, we actually do tweak the layout and how many units you get and cards so that each one is handmade tweaked. It does come back to an homage of the original Godzilla 2: War of the Monsters NES game. That game came out with about 12 scenarios and we were like “we’ll do better. We’ll make like 50.”
What makes a good strategy game addictive?
I think most people would come down to the choices that can be made. You have a scarce amount of resources or actions and you have to make interesting choices on how to use them. If you make poor mistakes, you’ll do poorly. It needs to be accessible enough that most people can play the game, but there needs to be a very high skill ceiling for the very good players to really benefit from the mechanics of the game. We feel we’ve achieved that pretty well.
Most people should win most missions on normal on the first try, but the hard mode is actually very challenging. The way the leaderboard works – the game just keeps going until you lose and then every breakthrough you get adds a score. It’s basically how long can you last to get high scores. The really good players, like my brother who made the game, they can get an incredible amount of breakthroughs and other people just can’t see how it’s done. There’s a very high skill ceiling for that, but it’s still pretty accessible for showing where the monster is and you can still do pretty good just by gut instinct. Strategy games need to have a fairly high skill ceiling to be interesting to me because if the skill ceiling isn’t very high then most of the decisions you make kind of average out to being okay, whereas there needs to be good and bad decisions for it to be an interesting game.
In a Pacific Rim-style war, would you take the side of the Kaiju or the Jaegers?
If the Power Rangers were manning them, it’d definitely be the Power Rangers, but if it’s just regular humans in the Pacific Rim robots, I’ll take the alien monster overlords. They looked pretty interesting and things aren’t going too great in the world right now. Who knows? Maybe they’d do a better job.
A Kaiju Wars demo is available now on Steam.
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