RSS

“Make it Sexy”

This entry was posted on Aug 01 2009 by

G1 is out, so it’s time to look at other options.

We sit down to a meeting and the Topic-Of-The-Day is Microsoft. How do we get Microsoft to love our game? How do we get Microsoft to desperately want to feature it on the Zune?

[nggallery id=4]

It was time to take our seedling and start to flesh it out. It was an exceptional toy, but that wouldn’t be enough to sustain a game. Especially not for Microsoft.

As the designer, I sat down and contemplated the numero uno cool facet about mobile games: the ability to connect to other people. If someone else was controlling the black flock, wouldn’t that be much more interesting than just the default dark spawn? From there, we decided that color should be indicative of the person controlling the boids. In fact, if enough people played as red and were really victorious, everyone else’s color would start turning red, too.

At the time, the fact that everyone’s boids would eventually be the same color, and ‘what about when two people are both red?’ completely eluded me. When I finally figured it out, we settled on the insignia option – the ability to pick a symbol that would also represent you, and to which you could contribute global stats. That, and we started calling the boids ships to make it easier to relate to – and added a touch of Borg. Everything is better with Borg.

Design Changes:

  • Visual: No more 2D sprites – Microsoft wants 3D, and they want sexy. Specular models, tilt and yaw – can we just take a corvette and make that the boid? Is that possible? No more pastel colors – Microsoft wants bright and bold, and honestly, that’s the easiest way to tell colors apart now that the game’s going to be multiplayer. We also decided that the trails should fade out, and put the whole game on a black background.
  • Mechanics: Multiplayer – it’s no longer black against white, but red versus blue versus yellow versus green. We’ve also added insignias so that we can have global stat accumulation and teams (without worrying about color).
  • Feel: Err….. sexy? Despite the unshakeable pillar of faith that is my design principles, I for once purposefully tried to skin a game to appeal to 18-24 year old males.

Post a Comment