QuitIt already!: QuitIt Tech Review

So what’s all of this have to do with 2n Productions latest game QuitIt? Imagine if you will if someone told you that the object of the game QuitIt was to poke and tease a character name Lumpy (figuratively and relatively speaking) until the poor bugger coughed up mounds of cash were you can then use to further purchase other ways to continue your amusement and not have any repercussions, chances are you might take the opportunity. After playing QuitIt for an hour or so, I got in touch with Benjamin Lee and the team at 2n Productions to find out where and how this idea came about, and what exactly makes it tick.

Is QuitIt really that alien of an idea?

Many good ideas come from the least expected places, if it’s not a napkin doodle in a restaurant, it’s something a family member or friend could say in passing. And it’s usually those ideas that are the root of something special. After purchasing QuitIt on an impulse buy, I wanted to see where this particular idea would go.

QuitIt! Is a virtual game show set in roughly the same era you would find shows such as The Newlywed game, The Dating Game or possibly even Press your luck (Whammy). You take up the role as an active participant in the audience of the QuitIt game show, you are tasked to “interact” with Lumpy by poking him repeatedly to win cold hard cash. It’s not as bad as it sounds though, Lumpy’s agent got him the gig and Lumpy apparently enjoys his method acting role immensely.

“We were working on another project that was a bit challenging. Our art director, Christopher, drew a blobby Jabba the Hutt looking guy on the white board and said something like “I feel like him.” I think I went up the board and pretended to poke it with a dry erase marker. We were probably frustrated and tired … we started to laugh hysterically over it. We went back and forth riffing on the idea about how funny it would be if nothing good ever happened to the guy. From there, we came up with several fun concepts. At that particular moment, it was just a whimsical idea. A few days later, someone’s daughter came in and commented how much she liked the picture and started drawing him everywhere. We just looked at each other and said “That’s what we’re gonna build next!”

Taking a simple idea further

Even after initial excitement of a new project surfaces it can usually take sometime to get the ball rolling on implementation. The initial idea of QuitIt came around late summer of 08′, but the actual start of planning and pre-production didn’t begin until fall of the same year.

“During our early conceptualization phase of QuitIt! we also started building our multi-platform game engine. We spent October and November of 2008 working on our engine and doing a lot of conceptual work. In early December I built the first prototype for QuitIt! Our initial plans were for a 3D Lumpy that was pretty expressive. But at a point Christopher thought the game would have a lot more charm if he was 2D.”

And I couldn’t agree more – the whimsical nature of the music and SFX associate perfectly with the 2D rendered character. I often find it jarring when something that would work perfectly in 2D gets retrofitted with 3D simply because the technology is readily available. Sometimes less really is more.

“The first prototype was to test whether or not we could build Lumpy as a 2D character. During that time, Lumpy was green and shaped differently. We were a bit surprised that he was actually quite fun looking as a 2D character, especially since he was built using very few frames of animation.”

During the month of December the team took the prototype and settled on the version of Lumpy as you see him today. In the couple of months following, the team allocated a period of time to build the appropriate tool chain which would run alongside their custom engine. The full production swing didn’t actually begin until March of 09′ giving it a full production time of roughly nine months.

Finding Lumpy’s sweet spot

As they should be, I found that the controls in QuitIt are relatively simple, the beauty of the design and the fact that the target platform is an iDevice made perfect sense. Again less is definitely more in an application such as this, it was also a pleasure that 2n forego the implementation of accelerometer based controls just for the sake of the tools being available to them.

“We play tested a lot of iPhone apps. We found that using the accelerometer for directional control often felt clumsy and frustrating. We also noticed that touch gestures, although very intuitive, suffered from the problem of occluding areas of the screen when touching. That is, you couldn’t see stuff on screen because your finger(s) covered it up!”

{click image for larger view}

“We wanted the poker to feel light and springy to move, but also to have a feel that its movement would be naturally dampened if you let go of it.”

The satisfaction is the ability to feel like you’re actually poking Lumpy, and 2n pulled this off to great effect. Not only are they many points of interests on Lumpy, you really got the sense of teasing him with the poker as he watches your movements ever so carefully before your strike. 2n did a great job on giving the end player a real sense of participation, I honestly played straight for 1/2 hr just to see Lumpy’s different reactions to what’s happening on screen.

“Touching or poking Lumpy also seemed like the natural choice. We toyed around with the idea that flicking the poker would be more satisfying. But we decided in the end that you could still see enough of Lumpy’s animation as well as touching him helped to reinforce that you are indeed “poking” him.”

Keeping Lumpy in shape

This may come as a bit of a surprise to many of you, but the artwork in QuitIt was built using a combination of Autodesk® Maya® (yes a 3D application) , the Adobe suite of tools consisting of Flash, Illustrator and Photoshop, and finally tied together with Equilibrium® DeBabelizer® . Programming was done using MS Dev Studio 2005, Xcode, and the always reliable text editor.

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