The Day of the Warm Beer

A B-Movie in Flash form to promote Carling's "Nothing worse than a warm beer" campaign, commissioned by Skive.

Goals

Targeted to a very specific demographic of players (Young men who like beer. A target audience which we feel a definite link to), the essence of the brief was to supplement the advertising campaign with a fun, replayable arcade game.

Process

When we joined the project the design doc had been agreed by the client ( After being produced by Skive ) and we were lucky in that only a very few initial meetings were needed to firm up the ideas. The concept is like being locked in a toy shop, there's just so many things we could throw at it, that designing the game structure was a pleasure from start to finish.

Godzilla, minus his body ( And Flames )

It became apparent even after the first meeting that we were all on the same wavelength and Skive's nature of working is that they trust their developers to run with an idea, which from our perspective was just bliss.

Solution

The whole game screamed "Large" at us. Everything needed to be wildly over the top. That started with the size of the city, which is over 16x16 screens in size. We wanted to convey that the player was just a little wheel in the bigger machine of a whole city, which was falling around his ears, which meant that we needed lots of little details to make the city feel more real, and then just ramp up the size of it.

An unused image. There was a great sequence planned for this...

To design the actual city we used a public domain map editor, mappy, and wrote our own map exporter script using lua. Although designing the layout of the map did take a lot of time, the workflow was as refined as possible (The map data is loaded externally, so any alterations can be tested away from the development environment, meaning the designer could just jump in there and tweak things whilst we concentrated on adding more and more features)

Mappy, an excellent free tile map editor

With the core engine built using a lot of existing technology, more time could be spent on the actual game play. Because we wanted a hint of "GTA" to the game, we took on some of their ideas (They've not done too badly with the format ), in that we wanted it to feel free roaming, but Flash didn't at that time really have to scope to allow it. To make it feel like a huge open area but actually restricting the player to the areas we wanted them to be in, we simple blocked off roads with fire.

After all this was in place, it was more a case of what ideas we'd have to drop rather than scrabbling around for inspiration. The game is split into levels in so much as you must meet up with a mate or your girlfriend and each mission brings in the next wave of B-Movie baddies, from zombies to giant spiders and aliens with lazers to Godzilla (Or at least a copyright friendly homage to him).

One area where time got the better of us was the military. We really wanted them to be more inactive and give a sense of fighting the monsters. In the end it was a bit of a cheat, but it still works (This was one of those projects where the cry of "Just one more week..." really was valid).

In terms of the art, most of it was supplied by Gaz at Skive, and he did a really excellent job, with Rakesh providing the design (A special mention is warranted for Teju too, whose back-end scripts worked seamlessly first time, which is painfully rare. A true pleasure to work with). We produced the explosions (We were in the mind set of big explosions as this game was developed at the same time as Polarity), and the debris which fall away were made using Xara 3D as a quick and dirty way of rendering them out.

Made using a "box" font, and then rendered out using Xara 3D

Also worthy of a mention is the sound. Although the title music was bought in, all the in-game sounds were produced by us, and they add a very dynamic sound scape to the whole game. Something we're very proud of (It's great when everyone hears them for the first time during the development and they all say "It really brings it life". Couldn't ask for better feedback) .

Result

The client feedback was that they were pleased with the results, and praised the quick turnaround. In terms of traffic it has more than met their expectations. From our point of view, it's sums up everything about how we like to make games.

Play it here