As you may know, I’ve recently embarked on a new career as a video game designer. After a ton of work, our first toy/game/life tool is finally available. The Mighty Decider (iTunes) is a collaboration between our small game studio and The Mighty Boosh. For those not familiar, The Mighty Boosh are a comedy troupe from London that starred in an insanely popular tv show on the BBC for 3 seasons. With the recent re-broadcasting of these shows on Cartoon Network, the Boosh are becoming more and more popular in the US.
Last year, the Boosh’s manager happened to be visiting our office in San Mateo and saw a decision making game we were working on at the time. As it just so happened, the swami fortune teller from our game looked almost identical to Naboo from the Mighty Boosh. This coincidence, followed by a trip to London to meet with Noel Fielding from the Mighty Boosh, resulted in us working on this project together.
We had our mind set on doing as much of the game as possible with hand drawn art, so I was really excited about collaborating with the Boosh crew. Noel, who studied Fine Art at Croydon Art College before going into comedy, has already established his painting into several of the Boosh’s assets. His style is wild and very textural, making it a perfect fit for our game.
Noel and the Boosh crew painted all of the foreground characters, while Mike and I painted the backgrounds with watercolors and office supplies. A lot of the game’s final art was actually scanned off of index cards:
To contrast with these paintings, Mike also created an awesome series of 8-bit Boosh characters to use for the transitions… which a Boosh fan turned in to these sexy icons for your iPhone:
So far our app is doing great! Of course the biggest push is from the UK (peaking at #20 in all paid apps yesterday) and in Australia (where we’ve been sitting comfortably as the #2 top selling app in Entertainment for a couple of days). We’ve seen lots of great press world wide, including this BoingBoing post and this Cnet post.
Although the game is more of a toy than an actual game, I learned a lot about game design, Flash programing, script writing, and collaborating with an artist on this title. I’m extremely proud of the end result and can’t wait to officially announce our next project sometime in April.
Tomorrow is a big day for us… whether or not you have an iPhone, you should definitely check out our live Ustream press release with The Mighty Boosh!
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