Our first assignment was to take a common toy and turn it into a game. We organized into teams that our professors Roger and Bob predetermined and were given a toy. The toy we were given was a paddle ball.
Getting the paddle ball was an insane coincidence for me. A few months earlier I had thought of a mobile game that featured the paddle ball. I wondered if you could make a game that used the paddle ball mechanic with a mobile device. When conceived a few months earlier, I thought it might be fun to hold your phone in the palm of your hand, and bounce the phone up and down in a paddle ball motion to try to keep a bouncing ball on your screen.
As soon as we got the paddle ball, I pitched the idea. The team seemed responsive to it, but recognized it was just a mechanic not a full game. So we sat down and brainstormed a game. This was a great experience. We came up with a few ideas, our producer Jackie, pitched the idea of defeating enemies using the paddle ball mechanic. We riffed on this for a little bit and decided we'd use enemies coming to the middle of the screen and we had to smash them with the ball before they got to the center.
What struck me most about the first hour or so of this team, including this brainstorming session, was how well we all gelled together. The ideas flowed quickly and organically, and we moved fast toward a solid idea. Even though we all had very different personalities, we seemed to be on the same wave length from the very beginning. We accepted ideas regardless of how far fetched they seemed, but could also move in the same direction toward the ideas that we felt we could execute on the best. For me it was electrifying. Not something I experience often working in the studios that I have. Animation is a very different process, and I wouldn't expect an experience like this one, but it was pretty exhilarating. Most of the remaining meetings I would have with these guys would be like this. We seemed to work very well together, and I thought our team was highly functional, respective, and intelligent.
After our first meeting we decided the theme would be a young boy who enjoyed terrorizing insects. The kind who would fry a bug with a magnifying glass, or tape a firecracker to a grasshopper. A character like Sid in Toy Story I.
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