Get Home Fatty!
Mobile Game Design
In an interactive studio at NCSU, we were exploring the underused capabilities of mobile devices to concept and pitch our own innovative game ideas. My pitch, Get Home Fatty!, takes advantage of a device’s gyroscopic tilt functionality to simulate the shifting weight of an obese character’s movement, as the player tries to “roll” himself home from school as fast as he can.
Created as a humorously exaggerated autobiographical piece, the object of the game is to get home before your brother, so you can have the last “good” after-school snack.
The class thoroughly enjoyed my pitch and embraced the idea, with some computer science students even helping me develop a working beta version of the game. My process materials are shown below, and the beta can be downloaded at the bottom.
Backstory:
You are George (aka fatty), a 12 year old middle-school boy whose life revolves around video games and dessert. You are overweight, larger than all the other kids, and nobody seems to like you. You’re always uncomfortable except when safe in your bedroom playing games. In them, you’re awesome. In real life, you’re an anxious, sweaty mess.
Objective:
Get home as fast as you can! If you beat your brother riding the bus, you’ll enjoy the last remaining after-school snack. While the bus is faster than you, it must also stop at each blue house on its route to drop off the other kids, giving you a chance to win this epic after-school snack race. Will you taste victory, or look on helplessly as your nemesis devours the delicious trophy?
In a fully realized version of the game, each level would have new and increasingly difficult obstacles culminating with an entertaining splash illustration of your intensely joyful victory binges or devastatingly envious failures. The over-the-top drawings and humorous obstacles act as rewards for playing and incentives to see what horrible thing could possibly come next on your continuing races with the bus.
On a conceptual level, the game intends to elicit memories of childhood after-school adventures from the audience in a fun yet exaggerated self-deprecative way. In addition to helping the audience laugh at themselves, the game attempts to demonstrate the significance of seemingly trivial things to an insecure and lonely child.
As an extra credit portion of the studio course, I had the pleasure of working with a couple talented computer science students to build a Beta version of the game using the Unity Game Engine. Feel free to download and give it a test run.
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