The Got Milk? Game

The Got Milk? game was commissioned by the California Milk Advisory Board as part of the launch of the gotmilk.com website.

In the game the player is a baby trying to eat cereal and cookies scattered around the house. In order to eat the treats, though, the baby must find milk. Once the baby's milk bottle is full, he can stand up and run around gobbling everything in sight.

Even though the Got Milk? game was one of the first commercial games we did at Gamelet, it is one of my favorites. To me it is still one of the best examples of successfully combining marketing requirements with technological limitations to produce a compelling interactive experience.

This was one of the first games built using Gamelet's GameRing engine. Written entirely in Java, GameRing used sprites for animation. Partial sprite sequences for the baby and a cookie are shown below. The bright green color is the transparency color, which GameRing knows not to show when rendering the image.

Below is the map of the first level in the game, shown at actual size. When playing the game, only a portion of each level is visible at any one time. The map also has a transparency color, which GameRing fills in completely with a tile pattern. This technique constructs the final background image dynamically, which minimizes download time.

Here are some of the sprites for objects the baby encounters during the game. Multiple sprites were packed into a single file to speed up download time. GameRing then processed these "filmstrips" and isolated the individual images.

The second level has a secret room containing the Mother of all Milk Cartons...

...which is opened by a key hidden under this computer table.

A visual editor for the GameRing system allowed non-programmers to create and test the game levels. This separation of game design from game programming, made possible by tools like the GameRing editor, was one of the reasons we could deliver high quality games as quickly as we did.

The final game artwork came out almost exactly like Antonio's concept sketches. Antonio is an amazing artist who created each image used in the game pixel by pixel.

Strangely enough, my initial preference for the game's protagonist was a computer (a "milk monitor", get it?) similar to the Banana Junior from the popular Bloom County cartoons. Luckily, I was overruled.

Got Milk? Credits

Lead Engineer: Bret Barker
Artwork: Antonio Sanchez
Producer for SFInteractive: Lisa Herbert
Producer for Gamelet.com, Level Design: Tom Jacobson