I'm pretty psyched about this one. When I was younger, I wanted to be a filmmaker. I grew up as Hollywood was making the transition from analog to digital, and after the novelty of CG wore-off, I found myself missing stop-motion, puppets, rubber suits, and even the rough look of photo-chemical compositing. While I love the power and potential of digital tools, I prefer practical effects whenever possible. I saw "The Evil Dead" when I was 15 and it pretty much ruined me for life. The 80's was an incredible decade for creature FX in general. Godzilla was a staple of family movie nights.
I was also a pretty obnoxious gamer growing up. "War of the Monsters" was a fantastic multiplayer brawler with a 50's sci-fi B-movie aesthetic that just pushed all of the right buttons for me. It came along at a time when Sony was constantly cranking out new IP for the PS2, but we never got a sequel (I think we can blame "God of War" for that one, but I'm definitely not complaining).
Then Guillermo del Toro made "Pacific Rim". I remember reading that one of his directives to the design team was that Robots and Kaiju alike had to maintain human silhoettes, as if they were to build practical suits. My reaction was, "why didn't they just build suits?"
It was around this time that the PS4 had also been announced, and Sony was talking up the power of the hardware. Then it hit me: a "War of the Monsters" clone, inspired by Kaiju movies of the 60's, 70's and 80's. Characters that look and move like people in rubber suits, film grain, and cutscenes that composite "soundstage" monster footage with "live" crowd footage. I wrote it off as impossible, until Unity announced its version 5 update. Between physically-based shading, global illumination, and a significantly more powerful physics engine, it looked like there might be a possibility of getting this working.
Once I booked my trip to the Unite 2015 conference in Boston, I knew I wanted to try and get some kind of realtime demo running alongside "Car Jumper" and Top-Down Shooter. I'm still in shock that it's not only possible, but that I've got it running on my phone.