Bionicle: Masks of Power - Matoric Conlang Dialogue Files
As you may have seen, it's now been publicly announced that LEGO has asked for the Bionicle: Masks of Power fan game by Team Kanohi to be shut down.
You can read the announcement letter from Team Kanohi here, and also view a walkthrough of the game demo on YouTube, with and without dev commentary. The demo would have been released on 8/10 of this year.
As I've posted about before, the game was slated to feature fully voice-acted lines in the Matoran Language conlang ("Matoric"), and I've been contributing Matoric line translations for this purpose for a few years now. This work amounted to nearly 800 individual lines of Matoric dialogue translated.
Needless to say, this was a very disappointing thing to experience behind the scenes, after the amount of work that Team Kanohi had put into the game, and (in my opinion) it's an extremely poor repayment from LEGO for the enthusiasm that the team has created in the Bionicle fandom over the years, although not unexpected or shocking on LEGO's part.
With that said, there is some solace to be found in the fact that many resources from the game, including 3D models, music, art, and other development materials, have been preserved by the team (for the time being) via Google Drive. This includes all of the individually recorded voice-actor lines in Matoric!
Here is a link to the full Google Drive.
Here is a link to the folder containing the Matoric line recordings.
Here is a link to a spreadsheet containing all of the written Matoric lines and their English translations (along with a few fun easter eggs).
Finally, here are the credits for the audio directors and individual voice actors whose excellent work was represented in the game:
Voice Acting Directors
Tasch Ritter
Gort (Garrett B)
Voice Acting
Lewa ……………….. Dane Braddy
Pohatu ……………….. Gianni Matragrano
Gali ……………….. Tasch Ritter
Onua ……………….. Ashley Quills
Kopaka ……………….. Tom Schalk
Tahu ……………….. Wes Wiggins
Makuta ……………….. Justice Washington
Mata Nui ……………….. Justice Washington
Matoran 1 ……………….. Ethan Godwin
Matoran 2 ……………….. Viator
Matoran 3 ……………….. Lou Haroldson
Matoran 4 ……………….. Tasch Ritter
Matoran 5 ……………….. Mark (Markle) Stefely
Matoran 6 ……………….. Anna Maguire
Matoran 7 ……………….. SyntheticCharmVa
Matoran 8 ……………….. Tabitha Bardall
Matoran 9 ……………….. Mark Beischel
Matoran 10 ……………….. Jordan (Jocool1231) Willis
Matoran 11 ……………….. Quinn Stokan
Matoran 12 ……………….. Abigail Adair
Matoran 13 ……………….. Cody (MasterGir) Littlefield
Matoran 14 ……………….. Zane Schacht
Narrator ……………….. Justice Washington
Announcer ……………….. David Michael Williamson
I was honored to be able to contribute to this project in a small way, and I hope that the Bionicle community will continue to support the team as it rebrands and moves on to future projects.
Now that things have all come out, and the project is well and truly over, I thought I'd take a moment to talk a bit about something I worked on in the game, the "Abandoned Koro" area, now that there's video footage of a playthrough I can easily reference.
I suppose as a quick primer, I was with the BMOP team from around March of 2021 to November of 2022, serving as both 3D art lead and Level design lead for a time. There's a post out there about my experiences with the leadership of the team that I mostly stand by still, I do feel bad for how the project ended, and I have come around a bit to remember the positive times more than the negative, but that doesn't erase what happened.
So to begin, when I came on level design was a fairly inactive sub channel of the game development discord, some ideas got tossed around occasionally, but not much seemed to be happening, before I'd joined there was a rough map drawn up by the then current level design lead.
It was very basic stuff, there was a version of this map in engine that had been extruded a bit to make it a kind of playable space, one area had some trees on it and some random platforms.
One area that interested me greatly was this part in the south, the so called "Abandoned Koro"
The rough idea being that it was the Le-Koro seen in the GBA game Bionicle: Quest for the Toa, that had been abandoned in favour of the one seen in the browser game Mata Nui Online Game and the cancelled PC game Bionicle: Legend of Mata Nui, as the one in QFTT had a lot of wooden structures while the one seen in the other two was more like a woven nest.
At the time I was just a 3d modeller, and had never really done any real level design, but the concept just really inspired me, so I went off and in blender sketched out a possible level layout for this area.
I made a bunch of renders and wrote out how I thought the level could work, which can be seen in this document HERE.
For a quick overview, the idea was you'd enter the area, the bridge would break, you'd have to clear a river to activate the water wheel on a large mechanical tree that would allow you passage upwards, and then navigate through the Nui-Rama infested ruins of the village before coming to a cave.
The tree was something I poured a lot of time in to, its worthy of its own post at some point in the future.
Now I'll be honest, I was super nervous about releasing this document to the team, I thought I was overstepping my bounds. I was just a relatively new 3d modeller on the team, I didn't have the right to be talking about level design, but to my surprise people were really receptive to it, and I very quickly got added to the level design team¹.
I ended up doing a rough blockout in engine. This was back in the time before Lewa had been chosen to be the main player character, so it was still Tahu.
This was the first time I'd ever touched Unreal, so it took a while. That's why the sky is black, I didn't know how to add a skybox.
I never got in to level scripting, but as a proof of concept, I think it was successful.
You can see that in this version of the level it had already progressed, now there was the idea of using the Pakari to break the dam, so finding it was the first task on the ground.
This version wasn't in the actual demo map, because as I said before the demo wasn't really very fleshed out at the time. One thing my map showed though was that the demo was way too big. The level design lead at the time had decided the size based on how long it took to get around the map as a perfectly flat plane with no terrain, at max run speed, with no obstacles. This is a very flawed methodology to say the least. Having an actual level with things scaled to the character really started to show the holes in this, and eventually, once I became lead, the demo area was massively shrunk.
Here's a version from just a month later. The version is now part of the new, more compact demo area, but its mostly barren at this point.
This version was actually completely rebuilt from the ground up because it had been decided to try out voxels as a basis². They were a pain to deal with and this was overturned eventually. I'd say in total, including the 3d sketch I did, I re-built this map maybe 4 times.
One benefit of voxels was it was trivial to have caves, so this is where the idea of the pakari being found in a cave started to emerge.
As I continued to play and refine the demo it became clear how much the movement systems would need to be tweaked. There seemed to be this idea in the team that everything could be done separately and bolted together later, so character moment was all handled by someone jumping around on some big blocks in a test map whereas level design was off doing their own thing, but it really wasn't working. So while the movement felt good in a vacuum, actually putting it in context really exposed a lot of issues. You could easily jump over any enemy you could come across, as said earlier maps had to be huge in order to make the world seem big while you were running at full speed, and after about 3 jumps you'd be 20 metres in the air.
At this point the idea still was to have the entire island of Mata Nui be one large open area you could freely explore, so the sheer size of the maps resulting from the over powered movement was a major issue. I lobbied very hard to have things pulled back and eventually they were.
its a bit out of order, but here's the demo area from closer to when I left. Its a fraction of the size of the original map
Here's another video from a month later.
As much as it pains me to say it, this is basically it in terms of meaningful development. By this point Lewa had been locked in as the playable character, and the movement had been dialed back to a more reasonable degree, so I was able to really start trying to refine the area. This is where I ran in to a fatal issue.
No one else wanted to play the game.
And what was worse barely anything worked.
The level is still in what I would call a grey box state. I used a couple tree trunk assets I'd made here and there, and put in a big canopy asset from one of the many asset packs we had for a bit of ambience, but it was all still very basic geometry, easily changed or modified.
Unfortunately, there's only so much you can do for playtesting your own area. You built it: you know where everything is, what's supposed to happen, where you're supposed to go. You can try to pretend to play it as a new player, but that only gets you so far. I was hoping people on the team would play it and provide feedback³, but outside of maybe one or two people a handful of times⁴, trying to get any real feedback was was a futile effort.
The thing was that this area was very complex. If the demo was a vertical slice of the game as a whole, this area was itself a microcosm of the demo⁵. It had platforming, puzzle solving, combat, mask powers, the lot. Now unfortunately for me, barely any of those systems actually worked.
As an example, this long ledge was for a long time a stand in for vine swinging, then rail grinding⁶, then was ultimately just replaced by a platform.
So things had kind of hit a wall. I couldn't properly design areas with combat in them until combat existed in a more stable state, I couldn't design platforming sections until platforming worked in a consistent way. I couldn't even adjust the overall flow of the level because everyone else basically refused to give feedback.
But the unfortunate thing is, in August of that year they'd released a teaser trailer.
And that trailer had gotten hundreds of thousands of views.
This is where the whole development of this game really went off the rails. Now there was this push to get things in a presentable state, start set dressing and making final assets so things could be shown off.
But I refused. Everything was too up in the air to commit to set dressing, this is why block out exists, if the jump changes height its no big issue to grab the couple cubes an area is made out of and shift them up or down, if combat is found to need more space its easy to make things bigger, or add or take away walls. If something is confusing things can be shifted. Once set dressing starts now you're dealing with dozens to hundreds of objects being scattered about, even the smallest tweak can lead to a mess.
Not to mention set dressing raised its own series of issues, from plants triggering the IK on the toa's feet, making their knees go up to their chin when walking through a bunch of ferns, to collision volumes being oversized or offset, meaning that big rock face they just added has now created a massive invisible wall in another area. Once the addition of some plants caused all ledges within a wide radius to no longer work⁷.
It was a miserable state of affairs. My mental state rapidly deteriorated as I fought against this, I became very short tempered and irritable, and eventually near the end of 2022 I was kicked from the team. It was such a relief honestly.
I think the tragic thing is, set dressing is actually quite a fast process. The starting area went from looking like this to something quite like the final in about a month?
But you can't show off the first screenshot on twitter⁸.
I guess I'll spare a quick moment to talk about the final version seen in the video.
Its at 46 minutes in if the link doesn't work
Its...fine? The assets they've made are all good, though I think they lost the QFTM inspiration along the way. The thing that stands out to me is just how...little its moved on from 2022. Just look how much progress was made in like 3 months, compare that to now, 3 years later. Temporary platforms I placed are still in the exact same spot. I do find the addition of a matoran with a key for the cave to be a not great addition, if only for the fact that you need to find a tiny green man in amongst the overwhelming greenery to proceed.
One part I found quite amusing was the final enemy encounter. It was supposed to be this large hut, probably Matau's, that had been completely overtaken by a hive, and Nui-Rama would spawn constantly from it until the encounter was over.
There were a lot of concepts drawn up, but I guess it just...never happened. I also don't know why there's waves of fikou there either, that was after my time I think.
So that's really all I have to say about that version, it looks okay. Its still clearly unfinished. It kinda works more than it did when I left, but its shockingly not that much different, outside of some new assets.
I'll be honest, I did intend this to be more of a happy, reflective post, but when watching part of the developer commentary a quote stood out to me.
"Traditionally you would kind of have really basic blockout for an environment and play test that to see how the level design is working. Because of the the situation we had we were kind of forced to just go ahead with set dressing and prettying it up and everything so if it were in a perfect world I would have loved to have gotten to do some more play testing early on but we did what we could with it. And I mean you basically had to just blindly trust the process because many systems weren't working at the time things were designed."
-AN UNKNOWN BMOP DEVELOPER (2025)
And I just fundamentally disagree. This was a fan project, there were no deadlines but those that were self inflicted. This process they blindly trusted just lead to a thing that on the surface looks okay, but is still riddled with bugs that were well known for years.
I've seen some people on the team say the game was 90% completed, feature locked, just 3 more months of polish and it would have all been working, but from what I've seen of the game I really doubt it. They say themselves in the commentary that there's bugs they've been fighting for nearly a decade still rearing their head.
So yeah, its not exactly a happy tale. I'm quite proud of the work I did, I learned a lot, and met a lot of people I'm still friends with to this day. Its a shame the project had to end this way, and I'm sad everyone's work has gone to waste, but I'm also not going to pretend this was some amazing project that was struck down right before achieving greatness.
But most of all: Fuck you lego.
If you're interested in seeing a few more of the things I worked on in my time with BMOP, go HERE. I may post more publicly about some of them in the future, who knows.
I have a post about the regional Kini temple I designed and built for the game HERE. Also some renders I did for some of my game design reports HERE.
¹-I say team, it was maybe two other people who were barely around.
²-I'll be honest here: Some people wanted to have the entire map destructible so that they could have Bohrok dynamically destroy it. For the post game DLC after we'd finished this Zelda sized free fan game⁹.
³-💯👍👀 isn't helpful feedback at the end of the day. Its supportive I'll give you that. But sometimes you need more.
⁴-One person on the team even outright refused to play the game until final release, to "save their first reactions for their stream"...
⁵-idk if its clear at this point but the "demo" is, was, and now always will be the entirety of the existing game. Oh there were ideas for other things, but nothing concrete ever materialised⁹.
⁶-You know, like Sonic⁹
⁷-The ledge's over sensitive detection for something blocking it is one of the most frustrating things about the game's development for me.
⁸-You absolutely can show off real development stuff, there are lots of people who find that fascinating.
⁹-This game was nothing if not ambitious.
You see that kind of mop is called a "Bee Mop", because of its sponge's resemblance to honey comb.
New music early in the morning... #bmop #bostonmodernorchestraproject #newmusic #contemporarymusic #orchestra #violin #harbison #schuman #aucoin #sanford (at Melrose Memorial Hall)
With the release of the BMOP files, I saw a couple of screenshots where Lumi the Le-Matoran Astronomer is tracking "Volo Nah". Two questions, if you were involved in that scene:
1. Would I be correct in assuming that Lumi is looking up at either Bara or Bota Magna (and if so, which one)?
2. Would the translation of "Sphere of Elements" be correct?
Thanks in advance.
I was involved in developing that name, yes. Bara Magna was intended to be visible in the skybox of the game, and the scenario with Lumi would've given some nods to the planet's identity. I recall there was also some discussion of possibly having the Matoran of other villages recount legends about the origin of the "Barren Moon" in the full game.
The translation of Volo Nah comes from volo "sphere" and nah, which has the following entry in the dictionary:
So you are not wrong to translate it as "sphere of elements", but there's some double-meaning going on here as well, and the actual intended meaning was the second sense, yielding a meaning like "Pierced/Punctured Sphere".
This is just a short little slideshow I did as a graphic representation of a quest that was being discussed at the time. According to the files this was in March of 2021, so literally just after I joined.
It would have been based around the Abandoned Koro area, as discussed in my previous post HERE. Basically there would have been this little brakas monkey guy who would lightly harass you throughout the demo.
You'd see him right at the start. At this point the demo would have started with Tahu meditating in a clearing.
His plot was that he was in search of a mask, so later on in the demo you'd think you were about to get a ruru only for him to take it and run in to a dark cave.
Then deep in the cave you would see him being menaced by some rahi. After defeating the rahi he'd give you the mask and run away.
And then tragedy, just as you were going towards the end of the demo, where the sanctuary was, you would meet him again, only now he's unfortunately found an infected mask.
You would have to fight him in a little midboss fight, just a simple thing, running around, jumping at you, throwing rocks, etc. It would have been in the marsh in front of the big Miru gate.
Then you defeat him and its very sad.
BUT! This would tie in to a seemingly unconnected quest earlier in the Koro, if you've read my document HERE it details a side quest mirroring the main quest in QFTT, having to collect 4 gears to open the top of the tree.
Within the tree would be a shiny copper mask.
So if you had the mask with you when you got to the monkey encounter you got a happy end!
Final Verdict:
Rejected for being too much like twilight princess.
Oh well...
I was quite happy with how the infected mahiki came out. I think the mask really fits well with the brakas.
Sorry about using the old build though. I was ignorant please be kind. The mahiki works so well with the new design too.
Unfortunately, the ultimate tragedy, the komau doesn't fit.
So monkey will rest in peace, maskless, forevermore.
BMOP/sound 1085
Gail Thompson Kubik (1914-1984) was born in Oklahoma, educated at the Eastman School of Music, Chicago’s American Conservatory (where he studied with Leo Sowerby), and Harvard (where he studied with Walter Piston). He is also among the long list of composers who studied with Nadia Boulanger.
Gail Kubik
Kubik joined NBC radio in 1940 and was music director for the Office of War…
Norman Dello Joio (1913 - 2008) was a relatively famous American composer in his heyday (the 50's - the 60's) who today can probably seen as part of the second-tier of mid-century American composers who never left tonality and strove to create exceptional music within fairly straightforward principles. Some of his most striking music is religiously-inspired, though the music isn't explicitly devotional. Nor does he obviously quote or allude to religious music directly in his works (though I've only heard a few of his major pieces).
The two pieces on this disc set give a good sense of his range. The main course of this disc is the one-act opera "The Trial at Rouen" concerning the last day and denouement of Joan of Arc's trial at Rouen. The music is dramatic, though the second scene where Joan wrestles with Pierre Cauchon (the main inquisitor prosecuting her) is by far the most striking. The first scene, primarily a pre-court dialogue between Joan and the less accusatory Father Julian necessarily sets the stage, but Julian's more conciliatory approach of fighting for Joan's soul in the privacy of her jail cell, inspires far less orchestral outbursts and variety than the blazing confrontation of the second scene.
The libretto was written by eollo Joio himself. He often skillfully makes subtle mentions of various aspects and background of the trial, while still creating an opera with primarily three characters (Joan, Father Julien and Pierre Cauchon).
However, Dello Joio never reaches out too far into musical language beyond what was relatively mainstream at the time. When portraying Joan's ecstasy and her inner voices, we have a fairly conventional off-stage chorus. One can only think that composers like Messiaen were writing far more religiously ecstatic music at roughtly the same time to understand the limitations of Dello Joio's approach. By now, Dello Joio clearly had deep experience writing both for orchestra and for chorus, and his work clearly shows a comfortable command of both, but he was not a boundary-pusher.
The first work on the disc -- The Triumph of Saint Joan Symphony -- is similarly well-written, though at times it's three movements have more dramatic variability. It was adapted from a separate, earlier attempt to write a St. Joan opera, and save for the subject matter, is a completely separate stand-alone work. It's dramatic nature later lead to be adapted to a Martha Graham ballet, though not on the subject of Joan of Arc.
As always the Boston Modern Orchestra Project has produced a fantastic performance and presentation. Their discs have become an immensely valuable document of American music, of both the 20th- and the 21st-century. As long as you're comfortable with the language and style, you'll be immensely satisfied with this set -- I can't imagine better performances or presentation.
