Tiki Towers

Tiki Towers was conceived by designer Frank Boosman from the Republic of Fun before the Wii's release in 2006. Excited by the promise of the Wii, he felt that the Wii's controller, the Wii Remote, would work well with games that required a lot of physical interactions. While listening to a talk by video game designer and entrepreneur Will Wright, Wright said something to the effect of "Monkeys are funny", which gave Boosman the idea of representing building pieces as bamboo and coconuts in his new game and since a friend of his liked Tiki culture, it was used as the game's theme.[4]

Drawing the bamboo sticks to scale in order to fit on a small cellphone screen was a difficult task and there wasn't a clear perspective and the sticks had to be functional to implement realistic bending and breaking. In the prototyping stage, the developers did limitation testing to get the physics just right. As development progressed, the game engine became more advanced and multiple layers were added to the graphics to capture the Tiki atmosphere. To simplify the game's structure, all information on the gameplay was placed on menus rather than popup boxes and all islands in the game were placed in a single screen. To boost graphic quality, the developers opted to use symbols instead of text to indicate level progression. Early in the game's development there were going to be different kinds of monkeys - the first to build the bamboo structures and the second to climb on them. There were also going to be small, medium and big monkeys which would have light, medium and heavy weight that would correspond with easy, medium and hard difficulty levels. Both ideas got scrapped and the medium climber monkey made it into the game. The monkeys needed to be scaled just right so that they didn't obscured the every part of the bamboo sticks.[8]