Designing Shadow Monsters

Today’s topic is about the few but iconic adversaries you’ll encounter in the game, besider the Puppeteer himself.

When we first came up with the concept for Shadow Puppeteer, and the play with light and live shadows we decided that we wanted antagonists that were shadow monsters. We wanted these to be warped creatures based off of real animals that you had to trick rather than fight.

The shadow cat in normal form and in monster form

The earliest idea was for a stray cat, and that the players would actually see the real cat and its shadow before the shadow cat transformed into a monster.

Later we decided to give the shadow monsters more space and focus by letting them function as bosses.

We wanted all the monsters to be based off of real animals, and explored different possibilities for the areas we wanted in the game. But we also wanted the change of the world to be apparent through the shadow monsters becoming less and less like their animal origins.

The first monster i a cat. We don’t want to spoil too much, so what the others will be is a surprise.