2009 - Scrabble and others

After finishing work on Red Baron I've worked on at least half a dozen different projects - almost all of which I'm not allowed to talk about. Most of them were just pitches and little more than a few mock-ups for the pitch document.

Some went a little further and one even got signed but later dropped. It was a racing game tied to a TV franchise. Initially I was doing environment art for it but later got the chance to work with Lua, making in-game mini-games to be used for things like defusing bombs and lock-picking.

Unfortunately the project had been suddenly dropped by the publisher, possibly due to worse than expected figures for the TV show but that's just my guess. Everyone was really gutted having worked on it so hard but 2009 was the year when the economic world crisis finally caught up with the game development world so it wasn't that unusual to see it happen.

One project that got signed, produced and most importantly published was Scrabble. A fun little game for the DS and PSP. The production went unusually smooth and the publisher must've been happy with it as we later got another similar project from them but this time for an XBox 360 downloadable game - Risk Factions.

Scrabble is pretty much what it says on the tin - an electronic version of the world famous board game with the added convenience of being able to play it whenever you take you hand-held to. Also, in addition to the regular the game it has some dicionary training mini-games.

My job beyond the initial planning and pitching stage was rather minor - mostly technical help with graphics for it. The DS is pretty fussy about the images you give it to display due to clever workarounds it uses to deal with its limited hardware capabilities.