Dibs Adventures was a project I did last month, it was quite an interesting project I did in conjunction with Longanimals for addictinggames. The initial brief was that a girl called Lauren had won a competition on Nick.com to design a game character. Here design was not just the character but an entire game, the main character was called dibs, who is a pink and green peanut.

The basic premise was this :-

“Dibs (a pink peanut) and his sidekick Pogo (a blueberry muffin) embark on an epic quest to claim Mount Wafers as their own. However, the evil Dr. Bullswank and his minions stand in their way. Using methods such as Hot Dog Throw Guns and the Wrath of Smelly Socks, Dibs and Pogo battle various enemies, including Cheddar Nuggets and Discoing Blobbers.”

We then went away and came up with a list of what would go in the game, the amount of levels, bosses, weapon types. We settled on 5 levels and 4 bosses/ mini games at the end of most levels, level 1 was just a trainer mission to get the player used to the controls and how to play.

From the art side it was quite fun to do as I had a load of Lauren’s drawings to work from, including all the bad guys. We wanted to keep the art style professional looking but still to look like it was drawn by a teenager, this was the first time I’d really used the drawing tool in flash to produce art in conjunction with the wacom tablet I have. They were pretty quick to draw as it most cases I simply traced Laurens drawing and tidied them up a bit, it was then just a case of chopping up the character into component parts, legs/ body/ arms etc for animation purposes. We kept the anims fairly simple as there were lots of characters, so the bag guys just had a moving anim and a death anim.

The backgrounds were drawn pretty much the same we, I laid out the level with blocks and then mainly scribbled into them to create a sort of sketchy looking effect.

What went right on the project ?

The project was delivered on time. It was pretty good to work on as addictinggames pretty much left us to get on with it and the feedback they gave was very helpful. We also got a lot of content into the game including quite a lot of extra content such as flowers growing when you squash a bad guy, the mini games were also quite a novelty, especially the disco level where you have to out disco the chief Blobber. There is also quite a lot of variety between levels in terms of artwork and theme although they all share the same basic gameplay.

What went wrong ?

We probably added too much content, when i initially designed the levels 8 screens worth for a level really didn’t seem like a big level but once all the badguys and pickups were in they seem massive, its probably 2-3 mins per level, which means there is around 15-20 minutes of game-play to complete the game which is quite a lot for a flash game. With hindsight 3 levels would have been plenty. The other thing which I don’t think we quite got right was the difficulty level, having left it a few weeks and come back to it, it is a bit on the hard side. Especially when the target audience is 10-14 year olds.

Overall

The project was a success, delivered on time and is a nice fun game, it was also something different as me and Longanimals had planned to make a platformer for a while so it was a good opportunity to try it out. If we were to make another we would certainly look at making it shorter and perhaps not quite so cute with the artwork.

Go and Play dibs adventure to Mount Wafers.