Sometimes having no game plan can pay off: The story of Snail Bob
Developing Snail Bob, a casual web and mobile game for families and kids, was a risky endeavor in hindsight. We had no specific theme plan at the beginning of the franchise. Instead we let a free flow of creativity lead us as we designed the game. It turned out that the random variety endeared players and built fans, but for us as developers, we quickly learned how much more work we had bitten off for ourselves. How it began: We started by creating a short prototype of our new character, Snail Bob, crawling by himself. It was really funny, but we still needed to know more about how players could interact with him. Initially we wanted to give players the opportunity to drag physical objects, but after creating the prototype we discovered that dragging those objects made the gameplay too difficult. We made changes so players could control Bob using different levers, buttons and other tools in order to get him to finish each level.This resulted in an unusual mix between physics, puzzle and point-and-click games. The levels were all quite different. We created a number of unique animations per character per level, with the goal of delivering variety and surprises for players. This of course demanded unique code for each behavior; and often that code is used only once in a game session. Like cartoons of the old days when an artist drew 24 pictures for one second in a cartoon, we could spend several days on one level that the player completes in a single minute.