I used to work at Pipeworks Software. We did really cool things like the original XBox demos. I didn't work on Desk Toys, but I did most all of the Ping Pong Ball and Mousetrap room. I did the butterfly flight in Butterfly Garden. I also did part of the boot screen that was used for the original generation XBox. I did the fog, camera paths, and blobby goo.
For Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee" I worked on special effects, rigid body physics, &c. At one point I was coding the results of a monster being thrown into a building. Whenever you destroy a building it is supposed to make the people a bit more angry at you. Unfortunately, when a monster was thrown into a building we had no record of who threw the monster into it. As I contemplated how much work would need to be done to track that information I realized that I could just attribute the destruction to the monster that was thrown. After all, if someone throws me onto an ant pile, the ants are going to get mad at me.
I walked over to a designer and ran the idea past him. It would let the player force some human anger onto their opponent. This wasn't a big deal, but could affect the game as the humans would attack the monster that was doing the most damage to their city. Humans could never kill you, but they could take you down to about 10% health through machine gun fire from helicopters. It seemed like the change would work okay, so I went back and implemented it.
That saved me a few minutes of time and some added complexity to the data structures. And I thought it was a nice feature.
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