Christian Diaz

The Chavo-Album iPad app was about to be released on the AppStore, and we were planning the Phase 2 of the app. Aside from adding more pages and more stickers, we decided to develop an unlockable mini-game that would appear when someone completed a certain sticker page.

I was commissioned to come up with a good gameplay mechanic that would be fun, challenging, and flexible enough to be implemented also on the iPhone version of the sticker album.

The Phase Two planning was a team effort, so we decided to have a couple of brainstorming sessions. Someone from the team suggested that the gameplay should be addictive (Angry Birds was the example we wanted to follow), and then we noticed that El Chavo, the main character of the franchise, used to live inside a barrel so we agreed that a “whack-a-mole” game style with barrels should be a good starting point.

We pitched the idea to the stakeholders and they agreed that it was very good, so I proceeded to detail the gameplay mechanics and features.

I started to detail the gameplay from the most simple concept: the user had to tap on the characters as soon as they appear on the screen, and before they went back into the barrel. Depending on the timing, the user would earn different amount of points based on their reflexes and precision. To unlock a new stage, they should get a high-score on the current stage.

We tried to implement a timer, but we felt that it was not challenging enough so I came up with another idea: to give them unlimited time to earn more points, but implement “lives”. So this brought another mechanic into the mix: to have characters that the user shouldn’t tap, or he will lose a “life”.

Finally, we thought that the difficulty level should be increased as the player unlocked new levels, so we added more barrels and we increased the speed on each one.

The gameplay was defined, but I still had to refine the business model. I knew that we will let the user to continue playing by buying more lives, but we wanted to add more microtransactions that were useful and attractive to the user.

Then I had the idea of adding power-ups that the user could use when he needed:

• The “Amplifier” would allow the user to tap on a barrel, and make it count like if he tapped all the barrels on the same row at the same time
• The “Lifesaver” would allow the user to tap an “enemy” and not lose a life
• The “Mutipler” would allow the user to multiply the points earned for a certain amount of time
• The “Snail” would cut the game speed by half for a ceratin amount of time
• The “Precision” would always grant the user the maximum points that he can earn when tapping a character

But here was another thing: the user should be able to use one power up on each stage, so we implemented more “power up spaces” to buy, up to 5.

The game was completed on a 70% before the company had to close, but there were a couple of demos that we shown to some potential users. The feedback that I had from them was that this game was really addictive and fun, and that it could have a lot of success as a standalone app on the AppStore.

Unfortunately, this game was never implemented neither inside the Chavo-Album or as a standalone game. It’s a shame because we knew that it was really funny and challenging to play, and that it would add a lot of value to the sticker album.