A Farewell to Backyard Monsters

[tamakun]

Okay, last week I finally decided to uninstall what I've found to be one of the most addictive games on Facebook. And no, I'm not talking about a Zynga game, as I've managed to avoid Zynga games so far and I've told myself to not ever play one.

However, it is a Casual Collective game, Backyard Monsters.

This started a long time ago, when I was playing games on the Casual Collective website. They are one of the original creators of the Tower Defense games (or so they claim). Eventually, after installing their first FB game (which was Desktop Defender, what a surprise!) I decided to check out their main game page, and I saw Backyard Monsters there, and I was like, "Okay, what's this?"

It starts out innocently enough. You begin with a simple Town Hall, which is made out of a tin can and some unidentifiable objects, and some resources (Twigs and Pebbles). You have a little blob of a worker who can run around the place and you build a few Resource Gatherers with the Resources you have, to build up your reserves. After about 5 minutes, you have enough to build the other two Resource Gatherers, a Putty Squisher and Goo Factory. Putty is used for some of the more complex buildings and Goo is used to build monsters. Building and upgarding buildings takes time, and the higher its level, the more time it takes to upgrade to the next stage.


Three of the stages of the Putty Squisher and Goo Factory.

After building a Monster Locker, you can start unlocking monsters with Putty. What I found fascinating was the physical design of the Locker, since it consists of a strange set of exposed gears and a key. As the locker unlocks, the key and the gears spin in an off-set pattern, which I just loved watching.

I soon unlocked my first monster, a small purplish critter called a Pokey, which you then create using your Goo in a Hatchery. It's pretty basic, cute, and pretty much useless unless you send them in a swarm. See, what these unlocked monsters were meant to do was to attack other bases. You could build a Map Room which gave you access to people "near you" in the environment (not physically). You then "fling" monsters into their backyards to steal resources. And of course, they could do the same.


Wild Monster Tribes
Next up was to build some defenses. Since there were Wild Monster attacks as well as other people who could attack me, I had to build some Defensive Towers. If this is starting to sound like a Tower Defense game, well, that's what it starts forming. You can place your Towers and Resource Gatherers wherever you feel like, and try to protect your Town Hall and Storage Silos from attacks. While protecting, you can continue to unlock more monsters, including the Ichi and the Crabatron, monsters which would target the Defensive Towers, and other monsters which target the Resource Gatherers, and then there's attack-anything monsters like DAVE which are these lumbering beasts which could both take a lot of damage and deal a lot, as well.


Ichi, Crabatron, Fink, Eye-Ra, and D.A.V.E.

The attacking was actually a lot of fun. Being that I had lots of experience playing Tower Defense games, I liked this part as you controlled the monsters rather than the towers. You could choose which monsters to fling in and where (as long as they weren't on existing structures) and they would intelligently head towards their closest target, avoiding blocks (or bashing through them, if it would take too long for them to walk around). At the same time, they weren't too smart about how to attack, as they would follow the same patterns every time you attacked the same base. (This kinda got changed later as they started to slightly disperse around a target when they attacked, also nullifying some damage from towers that attacked in a splash-range.) You also had the ability to fling Twigs and Pebbles into opposing bases as an attack (but risk destroying their Resources as a result), and fling Putty onto the monsters to give them temporary armor and speed.

Eventually, I discovered that they had a Forum where the creator (Dave) would update people on what he was planning, and listen to people's suggestions. I was fascinated at seeing what was next, so I started posting on the forum, and reading a lot about what was going on. They posted hints and pictures on what they were working on, and learned some tips on how to defend my base better (build Towers in range of each other!), and saw some repetitive posts (they had work on a Monster Bunker listed for quite a few months, which let you store monsters to defend your base).

Last Halloween, at the beginning of October, a giant pumpkin appeared on the sidelines of everyone's backyard. As the days progressed, it was noticed that a structure was going up around it, slashes appearing across the skin, and notices that something was going to happen on Halloween. On October 31st, clicking on the Pumpkin unleashed this massive DAVE that glowered over the entire field, and a nuclear blast left your base a smouldering crater. Then, in Eternal Darkness-style, they flashed back and put up a cute "we tricked you!" page. They also had something similar in the early stages of the game - the Trojan Horse, which was an offering from the Wild Monsters for a truce. In standard Trojan Horse style, it was a trick, which unleashed a large amount of monsters to take out the base.


GRAAH! The updated monsters from above.
At some point in the process, the logo seemed to get more "Metal", and the monsters changed from this cutesy little thing into some seriously creepy-looking designs. This polarized a good deal of the people playing (myself included) as the creepy designs were definitely not what I was used to using. However, I was so engrossed in the game that I didn't really bother too much, but noticed the Bolt had gone from a couple of simple shapes (square head atop a triangle) into a Paraskevi-looking Creeper. The Ichi which looked like a wedge of cheese suddenly had textures on him and now looked rather unappetizing. The Fang went from a sphere with claws to a shrimp with legs. Nonetheless, I soldiered on, playing and upgrading, adding Laser and Tesla Towers, upgrading my Monsters strengths with a Monster Academy, and even a Radio Tower that would Twitter me whenever my base was under attack.



More of the monsters, before and after... Brain, Bolt, Bandito, Fang, Project X, and Wormzer

I had invited a few friends to play it, but I noticed that with one exception of a co-worker who is still playing, most of them dropped-off after level 5, while I was sitting at level 42. ravenworks played it for a short while, and likened it to "Bullying, the game" - which is kinda true, especially when the new Map Room opened.


Several stages of the Town Hall.

I was invited into a Preview program where I could playtest a new feature of BYM, which opened up the Map from simply attacking people in my list to being part of a massive hexagonal grid, where I could take over areas and set up Outposts. Here, this allowed me to build more housing for the monsters, and allowed an even bigger amount of monsters to gang-up on one single tile. Soon I had a collection of outposts circling my base, all upgrading all the time, and I continued to play, gathering more resources and attacking more bases.

The downside to this new Map was that you no longer had 50+ people on your list whom you could attack. You had a certain range from your main base, and by building outposts you could expand it slightly, but not by much. The result is that you ended up with four or five people in your range whom you could attack, or you could attack and take-over their Outposts (which was much easier, since they were smaller and less-defended). One day, I had been looting one particular player's outposts (but not taking them over) to gather their resources. I returned a few hours later to discover that the person I had so often attacked went on a furious rampage and swallowed up several of my Outposts, and was targeting more of them.

It was at this point that I thought to myself, "What am I playing this for, anyways? I don't have any friends playing it with me, and all I'd end up doing is taking back my Outposts." I then looked at the Leaderboards, where I was listed as a "runner-up" at the bottom of the Top-100 list, with no chance of even scraping the bottom of the list. And then they updated the game (as they do, every Friday) and introduced a whole new collection of items to upgrade, including the Town Hall, which pulled me back into the upgrading cycle.

I still played it, practically subconciously, for a couple more weeks before I said to myself that this was getting tedious and wasn't fun anymore.

So, farewell, BYM. Here's my Base and its singular Outpost as it stood, moments before I uninstalled the application from my account:

My Main Yard

The single Outpost I had before I shut it down.