Dare to be Digital - 'Full English Fusion' 2011

Art by Daisy Spiers

In 2011 myself and 4 other people from my university joined together to form 'Tea and Techno'. We applied to Dare to be Digital , a competition in Dundee, Scotland, where 15 teams were brought together to work in industry- style conditions for 8 weeks to produce a working prototype of their chosen game design in time for 'Protoplay'. At Protoplay you get to show your game off to the general public where they can then vote for their favourite games.

The application process consisted of a written application explaining our game idea - with images - followed by a trip off to London for a presentation-like interview in front of a panel of industry professionals. It was probably one of the most nerve racking experiences I have had so far. We were confident, but because the application was global, we knew that our team being picked as one of 15 in the world would be really slim.

Alongside the story, our game really grew around the idea of our 'tap-tap-shake' mechanic. The player would tap 2 usable items and then once they were both in your inventory they would need to shake the phone in order to combine both items into something new that they could use. unfortunately during our first stage of play-testing that a lot of people didn't like having to shake the phone and thus we added a 'combine' button to give players the option of not shaking the phone.

Our entry was 'Full English Fusion' for the Windows Phone 7, in our game you play a mad scientist bent on taking over England!. By using the T.E.A machine you are able to combine English objects you encounter to create crazy combinations that help her on her path to domination!

Within 3 weeks of our interview we found out that we had made it into the chosen 15! We were so excited, it was fantastic experience that none of us will forget. We met a great number of interesting industry professionals that offered valuable advice on our game and their positive responses to our game boosted our motivation and inspired us. We also met many brilliantly talented up-coming designers/developers/artists etc and left with a lot of new friends. 

My role within the team was as a supporting 2D artist and designer. We only had a limited time in which to bring together something visually and aesthetically pleasing for players; we made the art bright and appealing so that it had an immediate positive impact. We had to make sure the mechanics worked for smooth gaming experience at Protoplay, and that above all, the game was enjoyable.

I worked on a lot of the pre-production and level design in the game, background assets and implementation of assets into the game, to do this I had to build a good working relationship with the programmers, working closely with them to instruct them on how the game was to play, what each of the assets were to be used for etc.

A few example assets:

For this project I needed to fully utilise my organisational and administrative skills, these helped to streamline our workflow since we had such a huge quantity of assets to produce [interactive and background assets]. I had to break down the demo into Levels which were made up of individual Scenes, this had to happen so that the programmers were better able to allocate phone memory. We had wanted the game to be a full side-scrolling level, but the Windows Phone 7 wouldn't allow for this because of the sheer amount of assets we were using. Once the demo had been broken down this way I made individual folders for each scene making it really easy with all the relevant animations attached so that they the programmers could easily swap them in to replace the static sprites I arranged as placeholders.

After discussing our initial needs with the programmers, Dave Griffiths produced his own Level Editor for the game, this meant that I was able to organise our assets and levels in a visual, more artistic fashion. The level editor even allowed me to plot in hit boxes around assets to block in where the character could go, what it could interact with and objects that would kill the character. It was  really impressive application that he adapted to fit my needs as we needed him to.

People enjoying Full English Fusion at Protoplay:

Final Protoplay trailer:

Credits:
Daisy Spiers - Artist
Dave Griffiths - Programmer
Megan Goodwin - Programmer
Matthew Jackson - Programmer