Dylan Cuthbert, president and executive producer of Q-Games Ltd., posted on the PlayStation Blog this afternoon and announced PixelJunk Monsters -- a real-time strategy game from the creators of PixelJunk Racers.
"So one thing I really wanted to do with Monsters is take the simple RTS concept of building and researching and having base defenses (a concept that has been used in Warcraft tower-defense mods and more recently in its Flash incarnations) and wrap it all in a completely different style and mode of gameplay that the Japanese public (and hopefully the West too, of course!) would really get into," Cuthbert wrote.
PixelJunk Monsters won't be controlled by the traditional RTS roving cursor; instead, Cuthbert said the team opted to for "a cute character." Players will roam the levels as a "little defender-of-the-forests type chap" and collect money while building defensive towers. The monsters you run into during the battles will occasionally drop gems that you can use to create and upgrade towers.
You can even dance in front of the towers. The longer you dance, the more powerful the towers become.
The game will feature 20 different stages that Cuthbert called "unique and addictive to play." There will be online rankings -- broken up for cooperative and single-player -- and hand-drawn 2D art instead of 3D modeled graphics.
PixelJunk Monsters will be available on the PlayStation Network in January.