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Postmortem: Oz -- The Magical Adventure
Following the success of GMD's Bananas in Pyjamas PC games for children, we began looking for content for a new game. We wanted to create a completely 3D animated quest game marketed as a "kids' first adventure game". What we didn't realize was how much we were going to learn from the kids themselves. From the beginning we knew that we wanted to design our own proprietary game but there was the issue of brand awareness. By creating our own content, we wouldn't have a brand that had a market presence. The solution was to adapt a classic children's story. We looked for an adventure story that had the right elements and was in the public domain. L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz fit the bill on all counts. Initially titled The Mysterious World of Oz, we based our game narrative on the sequel to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (the second of 14 Oz books written by Baum). A small team, including me, worked up a pitch document and we took it to Milia in February 1998. The initial premise was that the Scarecrow (now King of Emerald City) had been dethroned and the child had to reinstate him. The child had to travel around the four lands of Oz, trading for clues and objects that would be kept in an inventory. At Milia we met with Dorling Kindersley, well-known children's publisher and international distributors of our other titles. DK was interested but concerned that the premise was too removed from the original story of the Wizard of Oz. They also suggested the inventory was too difficult for the target age range, and that we should lose the word "mysterious" in the title. After much deliberation and copyright searches, we decided on the title Oz -- The Magical Adventure.
We returned to the drawing board and revised the premise, adapting the original story to an adventure quest. We decided that the game should be approximately two hours' playtime, be played at one of three levels, and that the game state should be able to be saved at any point. We wanted the game to look and sound amazing, to have a real sense of a narrative, and to include activities that were original and challenging, activities which could be replayed for different rewards, ensuring the game's longevity. We stripped back the four lands to three, and rethought the way the child would solve the quest. We discarded the inventory and replaced it with one object that showed progress through completion, in this case a medallion. Our final game narrative is as follows: Dorothy is kidnapped by the Wicked Witch of the West and imprisoned in the Witch's castle. With the help of the Scarecrow, Tin Woodman and the Cowardly Lion, the child must find nine missing jewels from the medallion that is the key to the Witch's castle. For each jewel, the child must play an educational activity. Once the child has all the jewels, Dorothy is freed and they return to Emerald City where the Wizard has a surprise for them. We met up with DK again at E3 and repitched the game premise and preliminary sketches of our characters. We proposed making the characters junior versions of themselves so that the child would be playing with characters closer to their own age. DK liked our new proposal and negotiations began in earnest. It took three months to finalize the deal, and on July 1 we kicked off. My role was creative producer, a role that combined art-directing and producing. As was shown later, my dual role led to some interesting, often schizophrenic situations, usually involving arguments that I had to have with myself. But for now, it was a matter of putting together a team and creating a design document. Design Block The first phase of design was a ten-week period we called design block. The design team was made up of the executive producer, the lead programmer, and me. We quickly ascertained that we wanted Oz to be very different visually from other kids' games on the market, and that we wanted the activities to be well integrated into the story. We were determined to create a game that was educationally sound and entertaining, in an approach we called "play to learn." For the next ten weeks, the design team met two to three times a week for brainstorming sessions. Meanwhile, I wrote the game narrative and briefed the scriptwriter. The lead 3D artist and the modeler/animators worked on preliminary character sketches, landscape designs, and animation tests. From the outset, we wanted to create a look that didn't scream computer graphics but rather had a more organic, toylike quality. After looking at a lot of traditional animation, toys, and games, we came up with a stylistic approach that combined the texture and movement of claymation (such as Wallace and Gromit), the lighting and humor of Tim Burton's work (like The Nightmare Before Christmas) and the surreal qualities of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. We wanted the child to feel like they were playing with puppetlike toys that they could reach in and take out of the Oz world.
Because our production was in Sydney, and DK, our distributor and development partner, was in London, we needed to come up with a way to have reviews and sign-offs. While the distance didn't faze us, the time difference was a bit of a pain -- although in some regards it worked to our advantage. Between the distributor's U.K. office, U.S. office, and ourselves, there was always someone working on Oz, 24 hours a day. The first strategy we employed was to set up an extranet to enable DK to see our work in progress. Initially we put up the game narrative, style samples, character descriptions and sketches of the landscapes. Once these had been approved we put up 3D models and activity prototypes. The extranet was a great way to showcase our work in progress but we needed regular communication. We set up weekly conference calls and e-mailed daily, making sure we confirmed all decisions and changes. Meanwhile, our lead programmer was creating programmer art prototypes of the activities, which we started testing on kids. We were surprised by the kids' clear likes and dislikes, even at this early stage of crude artwork (more on that under "What Went Right"). By the end of October we had a design document with nine leveled activities and five puzzles detailed and prototyped. We were in pretty good shape. ________________________________________________________ |
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Features
Oz
-- The Magical Adventure
