B O N D P H O N E.
Words and pictures by Chris Lamb.

I threw this in the sidebar but forgot to actually talk about it, for I am dumb. I have a game online.

When I came on with Pop, they were in the early stages of a game for Cartoon Network's Hi Hi Puffy Ami Yumi Show. It's a decent cartoon, nothing special: the animated adventures of the two girls of Puffy Ami Yumi and their zany tour manager Kaz. They travel the world in their van, bring the rock music, the happy fun rock music, to the people. Hijinks ensue. One of my first jobs was grabbing reference material for the artists and animators to build the game with, which is fancy professional talk for watching all the episodes of the show we had with my hands over the appropriate hot keys to pause and screen capture when something came up. Food, furniture, guitars, the girls and their cats, that sort of thing. Four hours worth of show breaks down to eight thirty minute episodes with three shorts a piece. That's a lot of crazy-go-nuts Japanese pop-punk.

So we made the game and turned it in, and CN said it wasn't fun. Which it wasn't, really - it was too much work for too little reward, and way, way too repetitive. But right as they were, it sent us into a kinda sorta four alarm panic, leaving me with an hour or so to come up with two games based on the elements we had. Those elements being dancing food, a handful of obstacles, backgrounds, and rock music.

This is the one they went with, and despite a production time a little less than half of what it should have been, I think it turned out pretty well. It's fun. It's playable. It's hard when it needs to be. I can live with that, for a start.

posted by chris  # 10:35 PM