Its sad.. sad sad. I feel sorry for agencies and its clients sometimes and even myself for wasting so much effort, creativity and neurons on something that it was cancelled after completion. Why? Who knows why. Maybe the agency fuck up something.
I don't agree how this game production was set. There was no contract anywhere... I didn't knew about it until it was cancelled, so its like... why I wasted so much time on something that wasn't even 50% sure it will be approved by the client... COLGATE. How the agency expect me to do a GAME.. its a game is not a fucking website or ad, its a game.. it involves planning, programming, audio editing, illustrations.. problem solving testing... etc. Its fucked up, and they wanted me to finish it in what? Less than a week? 2? I I said on the earlier post about this game, we had a meeting on May 23, and they wanted the game ready for June 2nd. And on May 30th I already had the game programming working, I did enhanced it later on but the core of the game was working. After that date instead of using simple squares I added a mouth illustrated by the practice student of mine Gabriel, here is how it looked the test game by that time:
It looks Ugly I know, but it was for testing purposes, I already had a quality bar of the toothbrush -which you suppose to switch every 3 months, (nice way to get money assholes)-, I also had the health bar, which starts decreasing if many teeths are dirty at the same time and on the right I had the 3 month calendar, which of course was the game's time, each level was a different 3 month. And yes the points on the top. The game worked... but I wanted to make it better by reprogramming the toothbrush to actually brush the teeth instead of just clicking on it. I came up with this techinique -programming and graphic wise- that actually ended up being pretty impressive making the game more fun. Gonna re-use it on a Guitar Hero type of game I am working with Misfits songs -which I dubbed an extra guitar played by myself- to use the mouse to strum the strings.
After the agency tested it, they still were like.. WHERE ARE THE PRODUCTS WHERE IS THE ART!? Of course they know shit, we gonna add that later on, we are still working with the game... is not like.. we do all the art then we jsut click a button that says... ADD TOOTHPASTE GAME WITH A 3 MONTH CALENDAR AS TIME. I know there concern is branding... they give a shit about the core mechanic of the medium, if its either a website, ad interactivity or game... they jsut wnat the PRODUCT BIG AND NICE. BUT, they need to know that this multimedia / web field is waaaayyy different thatn the traditional mediums... the main difference is lets say.. one medium is linear and the other is non-linear... in the linear one you just look at it and have no control, on the non-linear you consumer controls it and well there is the non-linear 2.0 were the consumer not only controls it but customize it as they want. So this means I was working on a non-linear medium.. it was a game... people interact with the product having fun of it.. dedicating more time being exposed to the product visuals than flipping an ad page on a new paper that was exposed for what? 2 seconds?
Agencies here in Puerto Rico KNOW SHIT. This makes me make my own or be a director or something and take controls of things on agencies since I know the limits of this type of field... I fucking studied multimedia and web so I know whats the deal of it.. not some asshole that studied communication or something and then they say all we know this or that... FUCK YOU.
Anyways after re-working the game and many illustrations by GABRIEL which were all declined.. - I thought the mouth he did was pretty good - because the client was TOO traditional... fuck them, if you want to reach a younger audience you better be not traditional asshole. Anyways the agency sent an illsutration and said make the avatars look like these. Yes, the game ALSO had an avatar selection screen, which you could modify, so after GABRIEL actually traced waht the client sent - I told him so- I started doing the other features of the avatars, I did a martian, a clowen, a pirate along with other traditional faces and it was awesome... but when the client saw it, they were like NOT SURE THERE ARE GREEN PEOPLE WITH CLOWN NOSES AROUND...you and then they said THE GAME WAS TOO FUN. Dude... its like.. its a game it supposed to be fun. This reminds me an episode of EL CHAVO DEL OCHO where chilindrina wanted to watch tv and asked her dad don raon and he said YES YOU CAN WATCH IT, BUT DONT TURN IT ON. Its stupid.
After making some adjustments here and there and taking many avatar features out and only leaving CAUCASSIAN, LIGHT BROWN AND BEIGE as the skin colors - black wasnt allowed- the game ended up looking like this:
You can even play it here http://especiales.primerahora.com/promociones/colgatejuego/!
The game works, its all there, did what they wanted... then they decided to cancel it on the day it was suppoed to be delivered beacuse it didn't met their expectations. Its like, if they sent an emai lsaying do these adjustments AND i DID... how come then they said NO? And saying it didnt met their expectiations when they were FOLLOWING all the game process? Its like having a girlfriend all this time agreeing on buying a house making all the wedding arrangements then at the altar saying I dont wanna marry you. WHY ALL THE HASSLE AND PRESSURE? Fuck the agency and fuck the client. Even the agency got screenshots of my game and did some graphics adjutsments to make it look like an infro graph of colgate and still they declined it. All I got of the agency who harrassed me during all the process was... MAYBE THEY ARE NOT READY FOR THIS MEDIUM, THANKS. ...Thanks? Does that "thanks" pay me for all the pressure I went through? No... the worst of all is... there was no contract... so all that effort was worthless because we did a game customized to the client specific requirements... whcih cant be used for another client. Its my fault of my department then. No contract no sample or demo. Fuck it. I was just giving away MY IDEAS and concept.
So there, the game was cancelled, I was pretty excite about this game... maybe I'll rework it or something... I dont know... for now I jsut want to can the mother fucker.
Because of things I am thankful Im et the team of POR DIVERSION who make games here in Puerto Rico, we are trying to form a game developers group locally and we had this meeting at Chilis:
We gonna make things right.
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