Mario Chuman
Make-o-Matic 3000
Description
Use your imagination to recreate iconic characters from Dav Pilkey’s bestselling series.
Make-o-Matic 3000 takes inspiration from the the themes of creativity and the How 2 Draw end pages from the Dog Man series.
Summary of Contributions
Initial Brief
For the 1.0 release of Home Base, our team was given the greenlight to include a brand new world of content revolving around Dog Man. The Dog Man series is one of Scholastic’s best selling properties so this was an honor and opportunity to create a showpiece game that would celebrate the brand.
For Dog Man Island, it was decided that we would include two minigames. One of which was Tagging Supa Buddies, a game that I designed for the Planet Pilkey app, and the other would be a Home Base exclusive. For this assignment, our team had the creative freedom to decide on what gameplay style to come up with as long as it fit in the theming of the brand.
My pitch was focused on two elements: capturing the themes of creativity of the brand while also reinforcing the characters of the books to readers. The Dog Man Island in Home Base only could hold a maximum of four fully interactive characters due to technical limitations. So both minigames would have to show off the characters in fun ways.
Design Philosophy
The solution was to take inspiration from picture matching minigames and have players try to memorize and recreate characters from the books. The medium of the game being primarily made for phones would mean that the controls would be intuitive and sharing creations would be simple. Additionally, the biggest design quirk that I pushed for was encouraging users to go out of their way to make mistakes. While the game would reward accuracy for gameplay and structure purposes (as doing well would unlock new characters and having players memorize characters aligned with our publishing goals), players would not be severely punished for extreme errors. In fact, the humor of making a ridiculous recreation was an intentional side effect. Making something that makes you laugh is not only a key part of the brand, but leaves you with a fulfilling experience.
