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We were engaged to create an interactive CD-ROM based game as part of CNB's youth oriented anti-drug programme. The game needed to be an entertaining way to introduce Secondary One students (aged 12/13) in Singapore to the various party drugs, and their ill-effects. As part of the requirements, the game needed to be easily accessible to everyone in the target demographic, which meant making it intuitive for both gamers as well as non-gamers, and easy to run on computers, preferably without complicated installation.

We were also required to oversee the entire process from packaging design to manufacture to distribution across local secondary schools. In order to avoid installation procedures, we decided to create a Flash-based game. Set in a fantasy version of Singapore, the player would need to track down "drug demons", who for some reason tended to visit well-known locations like the Zoo and the Causeway, to gather map pieces which would reveal the final boss stage's location.

For content, we spun off the game's story from an earlier CNB anti-drug project - a video called Somebody's Watching (which was also included on the CD-ROM). We felt that expanding the world set up in the video would serve to further establish CNB's anti-drug branding as a holistic effort. The game, however, would also be a perfect standalone vehicle that could be played without any prior knowledge.

In order to cater to the various possible level of gaming skills of the target demographic, the game consisted of 9 stages featuring different mini-games that offered a wide range of game types, ensuring that anyone could play. To provide for varying degrees of playability, a skill-based scoring system with a low passing grade but a steep expert curve was implemented. That way, non-gamers could complete the quests and continue following the story without the frustration of being halted due to lack of skill, while gamers still found it a challenge to better their scores.

The game had a slight controversy in our choice of a female as the lead character. We introduced a new character named Sarah as the younger sister of the male lead featured in the above video. She's a spunky and adventurous tween whom players control, on a quest to save her brother from the lure of drugs. While traditional thinking dictates that adventure games tend to have male leads, especially when it comes to the market of 12 year old boys, we stuck by our decision in order to emphasise the motto of the game: that even big brothers can be lured into the world of drugs, and that anyone, no matter how young or of what gender, can make a difference in the fight against drugs. (To be fair, we did give her Brother his own mini game; at the boss' stage, no less.)

An early playable demo of the game was used in a focus group with students from Whitley Secondary School. Our choice of lead gender received positive responses, ranging from being "ok, as long as the game is fun" from the boys, to enthusiastic calls of "girl power!" from the girls. We had a crazy time handling the entire creation process from scripting to gameplay design to getting 50,500 CD-ROMS delivered to 164 schools across the country. The game proved so popular that we were required to do a second production run as CNB received more requests for the CD-ROM than their allocated stock buffer. The game was used for up to 3 years after its initial launch date. Back to Portfolio Home