My Singing Monsters

My Singing Monsters is a video game franchise created by Canadian computer game developer Big Blue Bubble. The first game of the series was released in September 2012 for Apple iOS.^[1] Ports of the game for other touchscreen smartphone operating systems were later released, including versions for Android, Amazon Kindle Fire tablet, Barnes & Noble Nook. The game was also released in the portable console PlayStation Vita The success of the title prompted Big Blue Bubble to create various spin-off apps including My Mammott and My PomPom featuring popular characters from the My Singing Monsters mythos.

In September 2015, the company released the second official game of the series, My Singing Monsters: Dawn of Fire on iOS and Android.^[2]

My Singing Monsters

The current logo of the first game

In My Singing Monsters, players collect and breed many different types of monsters, each of which has a unique musical line that is either sung, or played on an instrument. The gameplay environment consists of ten islands, each of which has its own distinct theme. Monsters, even if any of them are muted, generate coins, which can in turn be used to acquire many decorations, remove obstacles, build structures, and buy food for the monsters to level up and make more money. There are also achievements and goals to direct gameplay, with in-game currency as rewards.^[3] Diamonds are used to speed up processing products, upgrade certain structures, and for buying uncommon and rare monsters, though common monsters can be bought with coins. Many in-game actions earn experience points, which unlock new monsters, structures, upgrades and achievements.

Screenshot of My Singing Monsters

Each monster is unique by its configuration of elements. The most common elements in the game are Earth, Water, Cold, Plant and Air, with availability of each element depending on the island. For example, in Plant Island, there is an absence of the element Air and all monsters associated with it. The common elements can be combined to create less common and more valuable monsters using a Breeding Machine. The Breeding Machine can also create rarer monsters that do not necessarily possess any of the common elements. Rarer elements include Plasma, Shadow, Mech, Crystal and Poison, the Ethereal elements; the element Legendary for the character Shugabush and related monsters; the element Electricity for the monster Wubbox; and the fire element for the Kayna.

Structures in the game mostly involve in helping with the gameplay. Most structures either perform function with breeding processes, diamond or food production, or dealing with tasks relating to monsters, such as moving them to a hotel to conserve "beds" (the capacity of monsters an island can hold at once).

The game's built-in social features allow players to visit each other's islands to share their personalized songs and island configurations. Players can also publish information about their progress on Facebook. Likewise, players can invite other players to join them in gameplay via social media, e-mail or by adding a "friend code".

My Singing Monsters: Dawn of Fire

My Singing Monsters: Dawn of Fire is the prequel based upon the original My Singing Monsters game, except with more complex mechanics to it. Examples include monsters requesting personalised treats instead of feeding the normal Food currency, new monsters to breed, and also the different currencies.^[2]

Like the original game, the player builds a musical community from monsters. The player starts off at a place named "Continent", which supposedly is most of the original game's islands joined together prior to continental drift. Monsters can be bought from the shop or bred from a Breeding Machine. They can be placed anywhere around Continent, but can also be teleported to islands outside Continent, which each have a unique song from Continent.

Coins, the primary currency of the game, can only be earned through completing requests made by the monsters, through completing goals, or selling products at the market. Diamonds are a premium currency that can be obtained from the Wondermine, another type of mine, with small chance, or be gained through processing from the Diamond Extractor structure. Instead of the food currency, monsters request their own personalised treats, which are either raw food materials or baked treats from the raw food materials. Requests from monsters may also include non-edible items, such as toys. Requests that are completed grant the selected monster to rise in level.

The player can have monsters that include the Earth, Water, Cold, Plant, Air or Fire elements. The new element Fire allows breeding of a larger variety of monsters. In Dawn of Fire, there are not any special combinations that form "special" monsters of separate types of elements, as in the original game.

Notable collaborations

In July 2013, Big Blue Bubble announced that they had collaborated with Grammy Award-winning artist Kristian Bush from American country music duo Sugarland to create a new character, the Shugabush.^[4][5] Bush had been inspired to collaborate with My Singing Monsters when his 11-year-old son was playing the game. He praises the attractive music surrounding the game My Singing Monsters, and collaborated with Big Blue Bubble to create the Shugabush. After his collaborations being featured in a news release, he had said "First of all, the music in My Singing Monsters is irresistible — that's what drew me to the game. And since I love to dream big via social media, I'm so glad that Dave Kerr and his team at My Singing Monsters dreamed back. I've always wanted to let my inner monster out ... and I think I'm finally about to impress my son."^[5]

In October 2013 Big Blue Bubble signed a deal with publishing house Egmont UK as its new strategic licensing partner.^[6]

References

External links

• My Singing Monsters official website