The perils of working on licensed titles.

Steve Schulze

I'm writing a bit of an article for an Australian games magazine as part of a series on games development, in this case covering the difficulties of working games based on licensed IP - movies, tv series, cartoons, whathaveyou. For anyone who's ever had the mis/fortune to work on them, licensed games are a genre that have their own set of often bizarre challenges based on the whims and demands of an IP holder who often doesn't have any real understanding about games development and is unwilling to relent on aspects that are detrimental to the function of the game or are just plain bizarre.

I thought it might be good to collect some stories from other folks who've done their time working in the genre. I probably really only need a couple of examples, but it should make for a fun thread to read anyway.

For example, I remember working on a Spongebob Squarepants platform game, that we weren't allowed to have the enemies attack Spongebob. After much toing and froing it was decided that each enemy would instead be running around flailing at an annoying insect sized creature that was buzzing around their head and they would only accidentally injure Spongebob if they happened to collide with him.

Coupled with the no playing around fire and no unhealthy food rules, that was an interesting project.

Kurt Russell Fan Club

Hey, I know some of the guys who worked on that one

I was on the ill-fated Sin City game. We made a pretty decent demo and it was looking more like the films than like Mad World. We then started again from scratch, cleaning up a lot of the work and doing it properly. It was great, the visual style was really developing and the gameplay had a combination of gunplay and melee and was fairly close to Arkham Asylum (though this was earlier, 2007-2008, so it wasn't inspired-by).

Marv was the main character, but there were two new playable characters. This was the first problem. The second was that the script had some serious issues but it was being written by a friend of Miller and wasn't up for discussion. The motivation for the game, the whole hours of killing, was so Marv would get his precious coat back. What was basically a throwaway comment in the books and film turned him into a ridiculous Linus-style character.

There were other problems, but they weren't huge. Mostly stuff that would come out in the wash later on Overall it was a massive shame we got cancelled, but I'll never get past the cringe of that story and all the work we put in (in vain) to try to change it.

Steve Schulze

Ah right, I'd forgotten that was being developed locally at one point. It was Krome doing that, yeah?

Any other folks have anything interesting or funny? If you're concerned about discussing past concerns you've had one project or another in print, I can always obfuscate details and I'm happy to take PMs if people would prefer.

JacqueChoi

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Steve Schulze

It's more an amusing anecdote than anything particularly bad - something a little curious that we needed to work around.

JacqueChoi

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easterislandnick

I was working on a Power Puff Girls Edutainment title, working on the cut-scenes, we had loads of illustrator examples of characters and backgrounds and were piecing them together in Max (possibly as splines, it was a long time ago.) I was mainly doing backgrounds in illustrator, padding out examples they had given and creating new scenes. Anyway, we kept getting negative feedback for assets being 'off model' but the 'off model' backgrounds were always the examples that they had given us that had actually been used in the show and the cheap knock-offs I had done were sailing through the Cartoon Network checks!