Sometimes the company announces a "team building event" that gets nothing but groans from the staff, the idea of MINI GAME WEEK was one such idea. The basic premise has Propaganda Games shut down for a week and its employees get broken up into 17 different teams with one goal: create a unique mini game in one week. Could be fun? Maybe. Could be a disaster? Probably. Could we create a fun compelling game in 4.5 days? No way in hell.
Sometimes... only sometimes, I am wrong. Mini Game Week was an awesome event and I'm happy to say that all 17 teams successfully completed their goal. We shut down for a week and went to work on 17 different ideas to create 17 different games and they were all playable, enjoyable experiences.
There were games like NORSE NOISE (a singing side-scroller that had a Viking being controlled by the pitch of your voice), PASS THE BUCK (a Propaganda Team Meeting where you had to pass off your "action items" by using the Guitar Hero Guitar), KER-SPLAT (a vertical adventure game where you saved or caught people from a burning building), ROBLOCKS (A 3D puzzle game where you create pathways for your robots or block the paths of others) and FUBAR (create cocktails in this Tetris-block like game before your character gets too drunk).
Our team was called HELLO DAVE and we created a fighting game called 2001: A PUNCHING ODYSSEY. Think of it as MIKE TYSON'S PUNCH OUT meets ROCK BAND in the World of STANLEY KUBRICK. The schtick with our game was that your controller was the Rock Band Drum Kit and the pads were different styles of punches, oh, and you fought with Monkeys. It was a lot of fun and our game also won the award for MOST INNOVATIVE GAME DESIGN. ROBLOCKS won Best Overall Game, PASS THE BUCK won Funniest Game and NORSE NOISE won Best Sound.
Overall MINI GAME WEEK was a fantastic team building and creative exercise, people got to spread their wings a bit and try some new areas of game-making plus we proved that you don't need a lot of time to create something awesome and unique. In fact, we proved it in 17 different ways and I hope we do it again!
Check out some pics HERE
1 comment:
I say screw any future titles we might do (aside from what's currently going on) and let's just create 8 internal teams, each no larger than 20 people, that all release a game for Xbox Marketplace each month.
(Not really... but food for thought.)
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