Introducing a Pinball-RPG Game

   Nut Slam has just been launched globally in the Apple App Store, it’s a Pinball-RPG game developed by Happylatte’s Beijing studio. I’m very excited as our team contributed a considerable amount of artwork to the game. I have played up to level 30, and I find the gameplay is very good: it’s easy to play, but it’s not a simple game, and it has a lot of content and depth.

    The gameplay mechanic is not like most CCG games (Match 3 and Slot games which you can easily find on the Apple Store), instead it uses a pinball mechanic much like Smash Land and Monster Strike.

Fun Game Play:

Nut Slam has the elements of an RPG and card collection game (CCG) combined. Your team fights foes in an arena by catapulting the heroes toward the foe you want to hit — much like Angry Birds.

    If your hero hits another team member, he/she will unleash a powerful, long range special attack.

    Like many RPGs, the two sides fight each other in turns — but the turns in Nut Slam go by pretty fast so you don't have long waits. Enemies often attack using long range magical damage.

    And there’s boss fight at the end of each level.

    Each level rewards you with some special nuts. By cracking the nuts you get new heroes, just like opening a present (or toy capsule). If you’re impatient to find and upgrade your heroes, you can buy additional nuts in the store to try for rare creatures.

   And the hero upgrade mechanism is interesting. You need to fuse other heroes to upgrade, the more heroes you fuse, the more levels you can go up (and the more your stats, like strength, speed, health increase). Here you can see five low level heroes are put into a green cauldron to upgrade from Vlad the Impaler to Dracula.

   Nut Slam is very similar to the popular Japanese game Monster Strike, but it has many improvements to the gameplay and the metagame, though the metagame is where most of the innovation is.

   Although Monster Strike is a mobile game, it doesn’t quite get away from a handheld game. To do things like upgrade your hero or get into battle, you need to go through a daunting hierarchy of text menus and lists. If you’re not a Japanese player you might get frustrated by all this.    

   In Nut Slam, the interface is much more friendly. There’s no such menus, the most important modules are visualized as graphics. For example the “hero’s home” is visualized as the deck of a sailing ship, you can manage/upgrade your heroes here, you do things by drag and drop, everything is intuitive, you don’t even need to know English.

   And the game flow of Nut Slam is guided by a progression map, a popular game feature today.

The prospect

   A year ago, I posted some articles about game map creation on Gamasutra. Then Michael Welch the Creative Director of Happylatte found me. He said that he was doing a Pinball-RPG game, which needed a progression map. I might be the right guy to help him.

    I asked why he don’t do some Match 3 or Slot games, for they are very popular. As Pinball-RPG games aren't very popular in the west (and Supercell just shut down Smash Land late last year), it seems an interesting decision.  Michael said his team likes action game more than puzzle games and felt that puzzle game CCGS had been overdone. One of the games he thought did things really well was Monster Strike — but it still had the confusing CCG metagame like most Japanese games had. “I think we’re addressing the issue of how to make a CCG game appealing to a casual audience in the west. We hope Nut Slam will smash open the western casual market for this type of game.” Michael said.

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