![]() ![]() This was what I envisioned the game to look and feel like. I did some concept art as part of the pitch for the game below: that would then interact with the environment. ![]() Puzzles are solved by an Incredible Machine approach where players are given a number of basic tools like water, fire, gasoline, etc. Players would be tasked as firefighters trying to rescue trapped victims from calamitous situations. The concept was a 2D based game that retained all the look and charm of the Flash episodes. Most of the credit for this goes to Jeff Tseng, who was formerly a Director over at Secret Level, with whom we were originally developing the game with along with Phill Simon from our very own sister company, Mondo Studios. This leaned more towards clever puzzle-solving than twitch gaming. ![]() The second, and more original idea was the one everybody gravitated towards. Unfortunately, the market had been saturated with these type of mini/micro game clones that didn't really do all that well so the bean counters didn't like that idea and it got shot down. We were holed up in a hotel room, passing the Gameboy back and fourth at all hours of the day and night, trying to beat each other's score. Genius! I remember Ghostbot Director, Alan Lau and I getting COMPLETELY obsessed with it during an E3 trip, many, many years ago (back when E3 was still awesome. Just when you're ready to throw your Gameboy/controller against the wall the game devilishly drags you back in for more. I'm a HUGE fan of this series and thought that type of crazy and frantic collection of micro-games would be perfect with a bloody HTF twist! I also love how inherently unfair those games are. The first idea was a collection of micro-games, Ala Warioware. There were two concepts that floated to the top of the heap, both of which I really loved. Unless there was a good spin or new dynamic to these genres we ruled them out in favor of doing something more original and befitting of the property. I also heard a lot of fighting game or even first-person shooter ideas which, frankly, doesn't quite fit the world of HTF. Ironically enough, we ended up with a semi-platformer type game (much to my disappointment) but we'll get to that a little later. It's definitely the easy route to go have some of the characters jumping around avoiding obstacles and hazards while collecting (insert shiny object to collect here). In the initial brainstorms I was adamant about NOT wanting a regular platformer game that has been done to death by licensed properties that come from other mediums. In fact, before doing Happy Tree Friends full-time, many of us on the show worked in the video game industry doing various art and animation jobs so, it's only fitting that it comes back full circle. Anyway, one would think that a violent cartoon like Happy Tree Friends would work really well translated into a violent video game (what could go wrong?) so, this pairing was only a natural evolution that we would eventually explore. Honest! Ok, who am I kidding, I'm in this for the long haul!!!Īhem. I've been a gamer (both video and board) from the moment I held my first pair of dice (2d8, if some of you fellow nerds out there are keeping track) and joystick (Atari 2600) and continue to enjoy a healthy obsession passion for the hobby. We usually get the developers/publishers side of things on how games are made so, I just wanted to share the process from our side and show you guys some really fun development stuff that we generated along the way.Īs many of you might know, I LOVE games. Last year we worked together with video game publisher giant SEGA to produce a Happy Tree Friends download only game called False Alarm for XBox 360 Live and PC. ![]()
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