Client — Everyone
Project — This was the product of an annual holiday tradition where I would attempt to:
- leverage the skillsets of anyone interested in participating
- try to top the previous year’s holiday “card” entry in scope and ambition
Role — Creative direction, game and asset design, content
One of our young designers was looking to do more illustration work, an engineer was learning Unity, and I like video games — so for this entry we decided to combine our powers and create a cute lil playable experience. Here’s the star of the game:
And here’s how the process worked:
- I came up with an initial game design
- It was soundly rejected as being “too ambitious” by our engineer and I was sent back to the drawing board
- Came up with a drastically simplified approach that was was deemed “doable” within the time frame we gave ourselves to finish it — just under a month
- I tasked our designer (Sarah Nagaratnam) with generating sketches of our main character to build upon
- We generated the game graphics based on an existing tile set — creating walls, floors, and maze assets
- I worked with our content team to come up with common health terms to serve as the main decision points in the game, and wrote some blurbs for the “hidden” characters; which would serve as easter eggs from another product, “We Heart Health Literacy”
- Sourced free looping music tracks
- Jammed the whole thing together (seriously I have no idea how our engineer pulled it off so quickly and will likely never know)
- Sent it out to partners to rave reviews, and garnered a metacritic score of 90 based on thousands of reviews
You can play it here until it’s deleted. Otherwise here’s gameplay footage: