Sponsored Feature: Ubisoft on developing Monster Burner specifically for iPad

Bulkypix and Ubisoft Montreal's new game Monster Burner was conceived long ago in the dark recesses of the Canadian studio.

The game has been in development since the iPad was released, and Ubisoft has always maintained that it needed to create a game unlike anything else on the App Store.

We spoke to Nicolas Eypert – creative director and one of the two developers attached to the project since the beginning – about the challenges of developing a game for more than 18 months.

Pen and paper

From the very beginning, the developer was determined that the game design would be tailored to the device.

"Before the iPad was available," Eypert says, "we cut a piece of paper the size of the iPad and sat down looking at it and handling it for hours."

Monster Burner was the product of considering the best way to use the whole screen of the iPad. Instead of pressing virtual buttons, you use gestures to create various fire spells.

The gameplay, Eypert explains, is built around "creating and throwing fireballs wherever on the screen and launching them on hordes of monsters to maximize kills. The more kills the more fire energy you get back. We built the game we wanted to play on that machine."

Badass adorable

Eypert says that designing game's monsters was, "easy when you know which kind of gameplay they should bring to the game – once you know what they do, it's a matter of finding the visuals that will make that as obvious and fun as possible."

He adds that once his team had worked out what they required in the game from the mobs, the design team had one central mantra which it applied to the art. "They must be badass and cute," Eypert says.

A new flame

Another major guideline the team studiously kept to was that the game had to be a unique experience.

One of the reasons the game has been in development for so long, Eypert says, is that he and his team "spent a lot of time trying to figure out fresh and unique gameplay that only the iPad could provide."

He goes on to say that after "months of prototyping" the team finally found its direction in the concept of firing and guiding fireballs with your fingers.

As the game progresses you unlock various new fiery features and incantations, including walls of fire that you can use to block off various paths. Deploying well-judged combinations of these spells will help you repel the various kinds of monster bearing down on you, from Water Elementals to 'Magic Bags'.

Spreading like wildfire

There are already a few planned ideas to implement in later updates, but Eypert claims player experience will shape the direction of the game in the future.

"Right in the game, there's a form so that players can directly send us their feedback," he explains.

So while the updates are liable to include new monsters and levels, the community will be able to determine what kinds of content they'd like to see in them. Do you feel like a given enemy should be improved or nerfed? You don’t even need to leave the game to let the dev team know.

Eypert has told us that he'd like to take Monster Burner to other popular tablets, but the iPad is "such a fantastic gaming machine" that for now the team just wanted to concentrate making the game work perfectly on one platform.

Monster Burner on iPad is available now, and costs £1.99 / $2.99 [buy].