Final Manuel Game

After the critique it was evident that I needed to quickly come up with an idea of how to incorporate my paintings into a more viable solution of saying thank you. At this point I realised that I hadn’t really given much thought as to how my concept would work but rather just wanted to paint illustrations for my first project after coming back from the summer holiday. I received a few good pieces of advice during the last crit on how to push my idea forward so that it would meet the unit brief. The one that was most daunting but also stuck out the most was the idea of creating a game to thank Andrew Sachs. This resolution seemed like a difficult one and it was evident that it would take a long time to not only complete it but make it engaging and successful as well. Not long after, I realised that I was most interested in taking this game idea forward so I began using Flash to create a simple game.

I began drawing out story boards as to how the game flowed, which scene would lead to which and what questions and answers would be shown on each page. This required more illustrations as at that moment there was little to ask about my paintings. So I re-watched Fawlty Towers and picked out a few objects within certain scenes that would help set some funny questions.

To add to the humour of the piece I used a number of Manuel’s photographs and made them pop up when the question was answered, a different photograph would appear depending on whether the questions were answered correctly or not. During my re-watch of the series I also noted down the exact words Manuel said and the way he said it and tried to portray that in my speech bubbles.

In the end the game turned out to be one that required the viewer to click on items on the screen to answer a question that appeared. I think it was quite successful but it needed to be funnier. If I were to do this project again I would think about adding audio behind the flash game, maybe ask someone to speak Spanish when Manuel popped up and the typography definitely needed to be addressed.

Screenshots of examples: