The Video Game Caper and Contest

Factory Week allows for our entire team to stretch out creatively and take on new challenges. Factory Week is also about getting things done so when one of our developers, Jordan Wilson, pitched the idea of making a video game tied into SmallBox culture were we extremely excited even though a lot of questions surrounded the execution of the project itself.

Read on to find out the story behind our video game.

The Jackal Contest

UPDATE – We have our winners. You will be notified shortly on how to redeem your prizes. This contest is now closed. Thanks for participating!

Starting today. Play the game – Musée de Bobby Pin: The Return of The Jackal – where you take on the role of international thief extraordinaire, The Jackal, and successfully outwit and out maneuver the security of the Musée de Bobby Pin to abscond the most prized bobby pin in the entire museum. After successfully jumping, sneaking, and stealing your way to victory the game will display a special phrase. The first 5 individuals to email us the phrase proving the success of their caper before Monday, January 30 at 5pm EST will win an Indy grab bag. Our selection of prizes Just Pop In popcorn, local music, tshirts and other goodies.

What can we do? What will be fun to play?

The most important aspect of the video game project actually happened weeks before Factory Week: Jordan’s project pitch to Jeb and the team. At first the idea of developing a video game seemed a little out of place. We took the idea a bit further and came up with a concept for the game that tied it directly into SmallBox culture by focusing on the Musée de Bobby Pin and its nemesis, the thief known as The Jackal. The light went on and the excitement level immediately rose as the project was green lit.

With a general concept and goals defined, there was still work to be done leading up to Factory Week to ensure the project was possible. Jordan used his spare time to research platforms and game engines that match his skill set. The final selection ended up being an ActionScript 3 code library that specializes in 2D platforming (running and jumping) games called Flixel. With our tools chosen, our concept defined, we were ready for the first day.

The first morning of Factory Week Jordan and myself as project manager met to define our daily goals. Our initial issue was that we had to flesh out our video game concept so that it had the potential to scale based on our progress throughout the week. What was the simplest version that would still be a complete game, but also leave room for expansion if we wanted to add onto the game? That answer led us to concepting several levels of museum security that The Jackal would have to conquer in order to unlock his prized bobby pin as the end goal. While our final version ended up having 3 puzzle rooms total, we left room initially for creating an additional 5 rooms.

Welcome to the Musée

Midway through the first day we felt we had a solid concept so Jordan began work on a prototype game with placeholder artwork to put our ideas to work. Our goal by the end of the first day was to commit to our game concept or know if we needed to simplify it further. We could not move forward with specific design elements until we knew exactly what elements we needed to create until the game concept was locked down.

Coloring with Legos

While Jordan began his prototype, I brought in our lead designer and culture advocate for the project, Leigh Marino, to get her up to speed on where we were headed with the game. We decided to work on the overall style by looking for inspiration for the museum design and The Jackal character himself. Based on the strengths of the game engine, we decided to pursue a sprite based or 8-bit art style reminiscent of early Nintendo video games. The most interesting aspect of this was that even though the graphics themselves look relatively simplistic, Leigh cautioned that designing these elements could be very time consuming. It became very obvious that designing a video game in a week is possible, and developing a video game in a week is possible, but the real challenge would be combining the two in the same timeline.

Our initial interactive prototype proved successful enough on Day 2 that we could nail down our design wish list. As with any prototype some features worked better than others (the lasers) while features that seemed relatively simple (going through doors) proved to take more time and others had to be scrapped entirely (an inventory and gadget system). Overall though, we were happy with where the game was headed and had confidence that we would be able to make a complete experience by the end of the week.

Now that the design elements were defined a bit more clearly, we brought in additional SmallBoxers that had time to spare to assist with the pixel art, namely Justin Shimp and Emily Watkins. The team hammered away at this project as well as the other Factory Week projects and several personal hours were spent at home to keep the video game on track. It is safe to say that no other Factory Week project had so many different people working on project features they had never done before. While Jordan and myself were the “most experienced” in video game development neither of us had completed a Flixel game to this point so communicating what we needed from the design team was a challenge because most of the time, we weren’t sure what we needed until we were able to work with it. Thankfully, we have a very patient design team at SmallBox.

The prize bobby of the entire collection.

A major breakthrough occurred in the afternoon on day 4 when Jordan completed a fully featured prototype. At this point we had a complete game, the only factor being the graphics we were using were placeholder graphics so it wasn’t exactly presentable to the public. However, Jordan was now free to work more directly with the design team and customize the graphics as needed. By the end of the day, the first version of the game with our design assets was sent out to the team and we considered it a success when Jeb found the game challenging without being frustrating.

The final day actually found the video game with more art assets than we knew what to do with. In applying the artwork we had to make some tough choices that did not allow for some of our hard work and detailed design elements to be displayed in the final game. Instead we opted for using fewer design elements that had a more consistent look and feel. By mid-afternoon the video game was finished. That just left play testing and fixing relatively small issues throughout the rest of the day. After one final step of incorporating the game into the Musée’s homepage on the SmallBox website, the project was complete.

Completion is no small accomplishment

I could not have been more proud of our team on this project. Not only did we complete a project outside of our normal skill set, but just talking about the game brought about a sense of pride from the entire company. Passion projects are notorious for never having an end, and our team did a masterful job of producing a truly finished product. The video game project went from not even being an option for Factory Week to becoming one of the most tangible and entertaining representations of our company’s culture.