Week 10!!!
For week 10 we worked on pitching and communicating our GDD’s. We will be repitching ideas with revised ideas in a more communicative and relaxed manner.
Components:
- Elevator pitch (what makes you game unique, not about the details, describe in a sentence or two, make a statement)
- Game loop (be specific on what the loop is and what the player does)
- Design pillars
- Audience – incl platform specs, market research, and if you know this audience (who they are, what games does your audience like and why does this game appeal to them?)
- Genre (Steam) – do a competitor analysis
- Newzoo
- Statista
- Google Trends
- Steam D8
- Twitchtracker
- VG Insights
Videogame Movie Club: The Super Mario Bros. Movie (1993)
The Super Mario Bros. Movie I actually had the privilege of watching first time over the summer with my little sibling. The Super Mario franchise is one I know very well, so for once I feel qualified to judge the quality of the movie based on the game.
On its own, the Super Mario Bros. Movie is actually… pretty good! Were it not an adaptation, I believe it would go down in history as a cult classic; as its own strange and unique thing that one would watch every so often just to delight in its shameless ambition and creativity. But that’s just the problem: it is an adaptation, and in that, it fails spectacularly.
The film bears almost no resemblance to the Super Mario Bros game that Nintendo worked so hard to make enjoyable to the public. Super Mario Bros is a bright and colourful, carefree game that became popular for its aesthetics and mechanics and mascot characters Mario and Luigi. It’s particularly popular with kids for this reason, and Nintendo soon characterised its entire company around being family friendly. So the Super Mario Bros. Movie is a bizarre step away from this premise. Instead of adapting the fun, rural, bright world players of the arcade game exhibit, it’s set in New York with a dark and gritty aesthetic. The plot is grisly and attempts to explain the lore of the Super Mario World in a way that doesn’t adhere to the tone of the games. It’s not an accurate representation of the world, the characters, or the playstyle.
In an interview with Rocky Morton, one of the co-directors of the Super Mario Bros Movie, he states,
“We were going to tell the real story, and that the game itself was a perversion of the original story, which the movie is.”
This is a fundamentally backwards way of viewing an adaptation – particularly a Mario adaptation, whose tone and themes are simple. Distancing an adaptation from its IP discredits the reason why the IP is popular to begin with, and almost admits to a feeling of shame or superiority over it. But a big part of adapting is being able to commit to what you are adapting, whether you personally think it’s good or not.
In my opinion, a much more successful translation of the Super Mario franchise is the Super Mario World TV series that aired on NBC in the USA. While not… the most high-production cartoon, it certainly captures the spirit of Mario, as it’s set in a jurassic world where the main characters of Mario, Luigi, Yoshi, and Princess Toadstool go on a wacky adventure each episode, backed up with super-powers and side-characters from the mainline games. It’s a lighthearted, easy Saturday-morning cartoon show for the lighthearted, easy Mario games; a great companion piece and a good, if not entirely accurate at times, adaptation.
Luckily since this was more of a relaxed pitch, I was only required to show my website rather than make a big presentation. In this I highlighted information about target audience and marketing, some of the mechanics, and explained the new idea of creating your own escape route.
Crit:
- Needs some more supplementary art
- Game could be getting to complicated