Moshi Monsters: Moshling Zoo

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Project Info

Moshi Monsters: Moshling Zoo has the unique honor of being my first game developed in a professional capacity (i.e. someone actually paid me!)

Moshling Zoo is the first foray into the world of handheld games by the wildly successful kid’s MMO franchise, Moshi Monsters. I worked as part of a small co-dev team to bring the game to life on the DS handheld from its original home as a Flash web game. I worked on nearly every part of the production pipeline, including design documentation, wireframing, UI design, scripting, and general art creation.

As first projects go, this was taught me a lot. I learned about and contributed to localization, sprite sheet creation and configuration for animation states, scene setup in a game engine and using its supported scripting system, even a bit about font and palette creation.

ABOVE: The very first screen I ever designed for a game; a humble but exciting start to a career.

BELOW: A sample of the various screen layouts and interfaces I designed, including the main safari gameplay, moshipedia, an example store, and some of the various nurture minigames used to care for moshlings.

Not only did I design most of the visual elements and layouts present in the game, I also directly implemented them using a provided scene editor. These scenes were then piped through the utilized game engine, reading in layout data, pixel fonts, and gameplay scripting.

ABOVE: An example section of the puzzle/state planning spreadsheet I used as a reference for setting up scripted logic, tracking which localized text needed to be displayed, etc.

BELOW: Sample scene setups an configuration using a custom editor for DS games developed by Black Lantern Studios. This is also where the scripting for the various moshling collection puzzles was defined.

It was exciting to work on this project from start to finish, from the time the ink was dry on the contract to when the cartridges finally hit the shelves. As a franchise, Moshi Monsters was a very big deal at the time and Moshling Zoo‘s its release was at the top of several charts for a bit. Prime even released a 192-page guide detailing every moshling, level, puzzle, mechanic, etc.! A very memorable freshman project!