Client: COLGATE / Agency: MecGlobal
Objective: Do an interactive application based on the product which is a tooth brush that needs to be changed every 3 months. Make it fun, make it viral.
With this in mind I went to a meeting with the guy from the agency, donwstairs from were I work, my boss wasn't there, so I took the opportunity to ask him what he wanted to do with his product. To be honest I didn't knew what to do with the product, I knew I wanted to do a game... but how I could make it fun and challenging at the same time? Well, after couple minutes of discussing the matter, the idea just popped in my head and I started drawing on the board. The idea came alive, to do a whack-a-mole type of game (those you bang with a hammer on the dying arcade places) but using a mouth as a back drop and each teeth would get dirty and with your toothbrush (linked to the mouse) you had to click and brush the dirt away.
Here is a sketch I did based on what I had on the white board in the meeting:
On top of that, even thou the mouth would be illustrated, the face had to be an image uploaded by the user and calibrated with a mask that fits the position of the mouth. Kind of challenging, never done that from an user upload point of view, but still on the works. The game time will be represented as 3 months, in the game real time, each day will be a second, since the game is running at 30 frames per second that means each "month" = around 30 seconds, so the total of 3 "months" is 1 minute and a half. After the time is up, you pick a toothbursh and go the the next level. Four levels total, 3 months each = one year, so the total gameplya time is 6 minutes, which is perfect for the target audience, a short rush fun game. See, this type of web games are targeted for an audience form the newspapaer website who are jsut passing by looking and interacting with promotion on a short term. SO hte shorter the better.
Couple more subjects came in as a highscore board, the upload image feature (which could be substituted by avatars...Wii likes), tips, product placement and so on. Everything was fine until the deadline was spoken.... June 2nd 2008. Lets see, the meeting was on MOnday May 26th 2006. So that means I had a week to do all this, when I am actually working with another big project for 3M which is another breakthrough story I will talk about later on. One week for a game like this is not enough... I mean its doable if I was cloned like 5 times each of me doing something different, graphic, audio, programming and so on. But no, jsut me, and it was my concept, my programming etc. To be honest I started working with this yesterday.. thursday 29th, like an hour or 2 before leaving, working mainly on the programming, and this morning also, I worked with the programming because the agency started harrassing us. And to be realistic this is NOT DUE for the june 2nd, at least maybe 5th of june, and with out image upload.. unless like I said I was cloned already. So I jsut concentrated on the base programming sent it to the client so he would be happy for the moment so I could then work on the graphics... here is a screenshot of it:
Right now I am still testing the gameplay, but I will leave it simple as it is. Thats it for now, hopefully I will do more updates to the game the last couple hours left today. I do love designing games, it just sucks when I have to do other work at the same time that require the same level of concentration and creativity... it just makes me not do high quality projects since everything is due around the same date. But oh well, but thanks to the encouragement of my co-workers it keeps me motivated, specially when I received a call from my friends downstairs were someone asked if Angelina JOlie was showcased pregnant in Kung Fu Panda..... its like... ok thats stupid... maybe she was pregnant on the voice over.... but c'mon a pregnant cartoon? hahaha oh well why not? oh well.. time to keep on working! Funny shit.
