Project Wacom :

Sepiadventure

Sepiadventure - click to enlarge

Project

This game was meant for Bamboo Dock. Bamboo Dock is a type of widget bar that contains applications which are meant to be controlled with the Bamboo tablet from Wacom.
The game needed to be playable without a Bamboo tablet as well. But the tablet should have to provide a better experience.
Because of the boom of the social media, we also needed a way to connect friends with each other.
A major constraint for us was that the game needed to be smaller than 3 MB !

Team

me - Lead Programmer
Christiaan Ribbens- Project Lead and Lead Game Design
Abel Hagen- Lead Game Artist

Audio by Rutger Muller.
Past member : Takuma Nakata - Interaction Designer

In the first week we needed to make a presentation movie about our team. Here is the result, courtesy to Abel :

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Paper

We needed to write a paper that was connected to this project and to our role within the team. This paper will come in handy for tech people who are working on a Bamboo Mini.

Bamboo Mini Creation - What are the technical opportunities and limitations of developing a Bamboo Dock game ? [pdf]

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Legacy

We actually were expected to create the spiritual successor of the game called Paper Cakes. Paper Cakes was a game made the previous year by fourth year students and is available on Bamboo Dock. This game became immensely popular. So this was a blessing and a curse at the same time as we knew people were going to be watching our every move and the expectations were going to be very high.

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Concepts

We had concepts that were all over the place : RPG, RTS, action adventure, etc. We tried to avoid the obvious choice to have a game with drawing mechanics.

From one of the concepts, we had a focus on the actions you could perform with the tablet. These actions were related to arts and crafts. And this is how we came up with a game where you would build a tower out of arts and crafts monsters whom you were battling to defend your tower. The sharing with friends would be achieved by giving people the possibility to play on each other's towers.

And although we had the most hope for this concept, an other concept was eventually chosen. This concept became Sepiadventure.

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Departure

Originally, we were a team of four people. But after a while our team member Takuma figured out this was not what he wanted. Takuma was an exchange student from Japan. He originally came to our school to learn interaction design and not to play the part of the interaction designer in a project. So he left our project and we were down to three guys.

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Friends

The core of Sepiadventure was that you would use your friends in a platform game where you would use your friends to progress in a level. The friend using was not meant as a multiplayer game. This would be a single player game. We would make it possible for the player to cut out photographs so she could play with whoever he/she wanted. There would be an option in the game to make snapshots you would be able to share with your friends.

Me, myself and I - click to enlarge

Sepiadventure postcard souvenir - click to enlarge

Share! - click to enlarge

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Art style and size solution

The artstyle would be the old slapstick movies from the '20s and '30s. We thought we could create some slapstick moments in the game that would be interesting to take a snapshot of.

And because this style feels old today and has a bunch of noticeable flaws, we realized we could use this as a benefit. Sure, the dust particles you see in these old movies needed to be made. But we realized that we could compress everything until it almost screwed up the images. This would give an old feeling and would save us A LOT of space. We also have a feedback system that actually increases the noise on the screen. The more you fail to get safely through the level, the more noise there will be. For sounds, we decided to not use sound effects. We just used one piano music track which we also compressed to an acceptable size. It is not compressed as badly as the image files, but it's just bad enough to let people experience it as an old track.

Failing a bit - click to enlarge

Failing big time - click to enlarge

To further keeping the file size small, we worked with a tile based system for the levels. The levels would be simple XML files that were small in size.

By doing all these things we ended up with a prototype for the game that is only 2 MB in size ! Although we only had one level, new levels would not increase the size severely, because they were simple XML files.

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Drunk

Originally we took using your friends very literally. You would stack them, kick them over and a couple of such things to get through a level. But we just couldn't find a way to make this feel natural.

So we changed the way you controlled the characters. You would not be able to control your own character, only your friends. And the characters would move forward themselves. As a player, you needed to use the friends to avoid obstacles along the way. You could pick them up and place them.

And so the story emerged. The character wearing your face would be drunk after not being able to get an autograph from his/her favourite actress. While drinking your sorrows away, the actress would pass by the pub and you would go in pursuit to get the autograph. But drunk. So it is up to your friends to make sure you survive the dangers of the city.

This story is also incorporated into the 2 MB as a short animation ;)

The drunk rises - click to enlarge

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Ode to the masters

You can cut out your own face in this game to play it. But we also needed to have default faces for people who would not wish to cut out faces or who are simply not capable at a certain moment to cut out pictures.
And it is here that we incorporated the actors of yore. If you look at the screenshots with black and white faces, you can recognize Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton.
At the end of a level, you get an overview of all the screenshots you have taken during the level and get the option to e-mail them to your friends of you would wish to.

The masters - click to enlarge

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