Next week, the team who helped bring 2-Bit-Bub, the ParaNorman iPad game, to life will present a panel at SXSWi on how brands and games companies can work together to make the best product possible.
We sat down with Michelle Childs and Mike Giepert to talk about what it’s like to work with a professional game developer, how they worked to maintain the level of quality that goes into Laika’s work, and why you have to make the best game possible (or don’t bother making anything at all).
Bub is a character from the film ParaNorman–he’s a dog who’s been run over by a car, and now he’s a bisected ghost. In the game, he has slingshot-like properties; you can pull back his rear half and launch him to collect bones.
“Bub’s story is parallel to the film,” Mike said. “We wanted it to exist in the world of the film, without just being a replication of the story of the movie. We wanted to breathe life into it, and have it be its own thing.”
“You’ll find Bub’s story there, but there’s also a lot of other cool things, like Norman’s horror movie posters,” he added.
“Our biggest intention was to extend ParaNorman into the presence of the fans, giving them not only a glimpse into the parallel storyline, but to allow them to have a closer look into Norman’s world, to understand what that’s about and get a sense of Laika’s work, and everything that went into the film,” Michelle said.
A piece of concept art for a game idea that was cut early on by the team.
“That’s a big thing,” Mike added. “Because everything at Laika is created by hand, we went out and photographed all of the sets, all the tiny little details, and recreated that real-life, 3D world in a gaming platform. As you look around the game, it’s all the real stuff that Laika really made. And flicking the dog around, you’re on a much smaller scale than you are when you’re watching the film. You can interact with those details much closer, and get to spend more time with those environments, which the film might skip over.”
“From the very beginning, we wanted to work closely with a partner,” Mike said. “We didn’t want to just hand over a concept for them to execute, we wanted to work with them and make it together.”
After some searching, the team eventually discovered and made contact with legendary game-maker Graeme Devine and GRL Studios.
“We’d been looking for a game developer for a long time,” Mike said. “It’s hard to find small, indie game developers who will help to do work on a brand. Out of nowhere, someone said, maybe you should check out Graeme. We looked at his background, all the games he’s worked on, everything he did at Apple, and we were like, there’s no way we can get this guy. But it turns out, he’s a huge fan of Laika, and this was a dream job for him, so from the beginning it felt like it was going to be a really good match.”
The team was keen to set up a collaborative process, and see what evolved out of that partnership.
“The process evolved over time,” Michelle said. “We started with everyone having individual responsibilities to everyone coming together–as most interactive projects do.”
The first step for the team was to narrow down the available concepts as a group, to figure out the direction they wanted to take things in.
“You quickly learn how difficult it is to actually make a game,” he said.
The W+K team and the development team divided the work equally.
“We were working our assess off side by side,” Mike said. “We were all pushing each other. After we’d all decided 2-Bit Bub was the way to go, we realized it was a super complicated game, with a lot of assets to gather, a lot of work to be done with the movement and mechanics of the character. We ended up sitting in the studios with them as it was all developing, and we learned a ton about how game design works.”
The timeline for the game development was very truncated, according to the team.
“A game like this should have taken nine months, or a year and a half,” Michelle said. “We made it in four. That’s from when the idea was selected to crunch time, and the last six to eight weeks were when it moved from prototyping to final execution.”
Of that time, Michelle spent about 40 days in the studio with the developers, in total.
“My longest stretch at a time was 19 days,” she added.
Mike asserted that this was an essential method of collaboration.
“Because Laika has such a high level of attention to detail, we had to be their eyes while we were there,” he explained. We had to say, ‘Those shadows aren’t interacting with the environment perfectly, it has to feel like something handmade.’ They appreciated that we wanted that game to get better and better. It was challenging, yeah, but the game is better, because of it.”
“You’re not just looking over the 3D artist’s shoulders to tinker and tweak, either,” Michelle said. “You’re testing each build, reviewing the next one, all at the same time.”
“And all your free time is level design. What’s a new interaction, what’s a new dynamic, how do you make all these pieces stretch and become more fun,” Mike said.
“Fun is a hard word,” Michelle added.
Mike agreed: “It’s subjective, you find out.”
Mike and Michelle explained that the reason for all of the attention to quality and detail was both to support the client’s vision, and because they knew there would be little to no media support behind it.
“It needed to be a good game, first and foremost,” Mike said. “That’s also why we built in social sharing elements. We hoped that, because you have these awesome little posters with really funny copy, that people would read them, enjoy them and get drawn into this world a little more. If they wanted to share them, it would help give others a chance to download, play and enjoy in the same way.”
“From copy to graphics, we were really mindful of how these elements could live in the social platforms,” Michelle said. “When someone did tweet or share an asset from the game, we wanted there to be some intrigue and interest there. It was really a way for fans of the movie to get an extra piece of that world as well.”
“A lot of the time, social aspects in games are really spammy,” Mike said. “You have, ‘Tweet this high score, share this new achievement,’ things that will only clog up people’s feeds, that they don’t care about. Everything we did, we wanted to make a great extension of the movie–something that would be valuable and interesting.”
In addition to making intriguing, low-key social sharing elements, another conscious decision the team made was to make the app free.
“There’s no in-app purchasing,” Michelle explained. “We wanted this to be purely an experience that compliments the movie and gets fans really excited to see the film.”
“It’s kind of a dangerous thing,” Mike said. “There’s this idea that things that are not free, don’t have the same value as things that cost quite a bit. This game could easily have had a high price point, and would probably done just as well. There’s always the balance of, are people going to invest in this because there’s a price on it, or do they think it’s cheap in quality because it’s free?”
It was very important to the team to make something beautiful, and quality, they say.
“It’s important not to make crap,” Mike said. “So many brands make the worst games just to say, ‘Let’s be in the game world,’ instead of making something that’s truly quality. The crazy thing about a game is that it lives forever. A year from now, this game will still be downloaded, people will still be interacting with it. You have to make something that’s lasting. If it feels like a cheap one-off, it’s not going to help your brand.”
“We also didn’t want to license a big-name game and then just re-skin it,” Michelle said. “We had a whole new mechanic, a whole new dynamic, new levels and designs and characters. We didn’t have any media pushing to it and it still did well, especially given that we have a small, niche target audience. It was important to help us build up the brand of Laika, to contribute to their foundation of quality work as they start to tell their own story.”
“We decided that this is how Laika’s games should be made–the way their movies are made,” Mike said. “The right way, and the hard way. Their movies will stand the test of time, and we hope their games will, too.”
Download 2-Bit Bub for iOS (for free!) here, and if you’re at SXSW this year, you can attend the 2-Bit Bub panel on Sunday, March 10 (5-6pm, Hyatt Regency Austin, Texas Ballroom 5-7).
Check out this post for more information on W+K’s presence at SXSW 2013.