Our most recent game design challenge asked you to design a game around the works of one of the world's most beloved authors, Dr. Seuss.
Trying to take the worlds that Dr. Seuss created and move them to a game setting is difficult, but in many ways, it was an ideal situation as presented in this challenge. The license holder didn't make any demands, and you were even given free reign to pick and choose among books, characters, and fictional worlds. The Suess camp took a hands-off approach, letting you, the game designer, be the master of your area of expertise. In a real game development situation, those kinds of situations are rare. (Read, for example, Jez Harris' experience trying to squeeze fun-blood from a stone with the Catwoman IP.)
We received some fantastic and creative entries that spanned the realm of edutainment, lyrical fighting, and world creator. With a world as creative and crazy as the ones Dr. Seuss crafted, almost any type of game works (maybe not a first-person shooter, though, Halo fans).
The game design trick to take away from this challenge was to find a specific part of the world that would translate well to a game and come up with an interesting mechanic that fits the world and works well with the audience. Seek out one or two things that would work well in a game, and word backward from there.
Games that dealt with wordplay and rhyming felt the strongest in the end. Meter, rhyme and rhythm are major parts of Dr. Seuss' works that making a game revolving around those pieces is the most natural way to go. We were expecting to see more literal adaptations, such as a game where you attempt to get the Cat in the Hat to leave your house in an adventure or puzzle-solving way. The fact that there weren't any entries like that, entries that took the very easy and blatant road, says a lot about your creativity.
Bonus points were given to any and all entries that used rhyming. Unfortunately, no submissions talked about Fox in Socks, Manveer Heir's personal favorite Seuss book as a child. Tears were shed.
Congratulations to this week's top designers!
Best Entries
David McClure, Unemployed, London, Seuss Fighter (see page 2)
Seuss Fighter is, as its name implies, a fighting game, but the battles are a result of each player's ability to create rhymes with either nonsense words, which results in less power, or real words, which results in more power.
Nathaniel Slotnick, student at ITT Technical Institute in Oxnard, Seussification (see page 3)
For Seussification, Nathaniel Slotnick has invented the Mipole, a group of miniature people. We were thrilled to see an entry that dared to be as inventive as Dr. Seuss was in his books. We might not know exactly what "Mr. Irrvy, the middlest Who in Whoville" means, but children will certainly imagine an answer for themselves. Rewards in the game are that the players get to have the original Dr. Seuss books read to them.
Everett V Hubbard, Westwood College Online, THINK!, inc (see page 4)
THINK!s are user-created machines. To participate in the world of THINK!, inc., the players absolutely must be imaginative, designing their machines, painting them, and setting them loose on the world's landscape.
Honorable Mention
Patrick Mousel, student at Flashpoint Academy, Chicago, Tuftumbler (see page 5)
In this Flash-based action game, players must replant and cultivate the truffula trees found in the story The Lorax. Seussian tales such as The Lorax, but also "The Zax" and "The Sneetches," two short stories, often had a moral lesson. The Tuftumbler game teases out Seuss' "save the trees" mantra in an appropriate way for a game because the message is not made to be dogmatic.
