A Peek into a Mind

Just arrived to Ashkelon for the weekend. I’m Pretty tired. Just waiting for the other computer I’ve brought from work to finish a task and I’ll go to sleep.

This has been a pretty interesting week, though.
We got a job to design Shrek 2 and SharkTale branded games. Sunday evening we went to see Shrek 2 which is a great flick (as expected!). Very funny. Great work from DreamWorks.

Sharktale, btw, is DreamWorks SKG next animation movie, out on the screens on October 1st. It’s an underwater mafia-kind-of film with a lot of comedy and cultural winks DreamWorks-style. Voice over are of course famous actors (Will Smith, Jack Black, Renee Zellweger, Robert De Niro and Angelina Jolie just to name a few). We got the mission to design the mobile game (or games, that will be decided later) and prepare a specifications documents for the development studios that will get the actual development job.

We didn’t really get a lot of information first hand. We didn’t see the movie, of course and we’ll only get a general script next weekend, which will be too late for starting to work. We couldn’t figure out the whole film story out of the material we got till now, of course, so most of the info we used we got from the movie trailer available on the net and from the several screenshots we found of Activision Shark Tale upcoming PS2/XBOX game.

Anyway, we developed a whole plot ourselves and we basically got the document written. The only thing left is to add some sketches for the developers to see to get the visual idea of what they are being expected to do.

We tryed to keep the story and mechanics of the game pretty simple since it’s a mobile game, after all (s40, anyone?), and it got to be ready for release in 2 months. 2 months are not much for developing anything, even a mobile game. So we made the engine specifications pretty simple and the game is going to relay more on the plot and the actual graphics and gameplay, which should be polished to death. We do the plot so we make sure it’s interesting. About graphics and polishing gameplay - well, we’ll have to trust the developers…

Last note - I wish to make a gamble here. I’m saying that the Rastafarian Jelly-Fish characters, Ernie and Bernie, are going to be a hit. Ziggy Marley (the son of..) and Doug E. Doug are voicing them and they are ho-so-cool! Mind my words. Watch for those Rasta-Jelly-Fish!