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| Procter & Gamble wanted a game to promote its new line of dishwashing detergent, Cascade Complete. The main theme they wanted to get across was "Skip the Sink." If you used Cascade Complete, you wouldn't have to wash your dishes before putting them in the dishwasher. |
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| A box of Cascade Complete would occasionally descend from the ceiling, automatically cleaning all dishes on screen and sending them straight to the dishwasher. When playtesting the game, I noticed people would sigh with relief when they caught the Cascade powerup - which I took as a good sign. |
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| The protagonist of the game is a professional woman with no extra time to spend messing around in the kitchen. Artist Zachary Present brought her strong personality to life using minimalist vector illustrations. |
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| Below is the approved concept sketch that was used as the style guide for creating all the art used in the game. The final artwork for the game ended up being much brighter and less cluttered. |
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| Here is a second concept sketch for the game, more modern-looking, which was rejected in favor of the "retro" look. |
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| Even before the concept sketches above were made, Procter & Gamble wanted to see a prototype of the game play. Below is a screenshot from an animated Shockwave piece I created to show them how the game would work, using one of the South Park characters as the protagonist. The prototype had only one station, the sink, where players deposited the plates. The washer was added later in development. Note the original name for the game. |
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| I study old video games, particularly those from old home systems such as Intellivision and the Atari 2600, to find simple and compelling game mechanics. In some ways modern web games and classic console games share similar limitations. The gameplay for Skip the Sink was inspired by Activision's Kaboom! in which the player controls a bucket trying to catch explosives dropped by a mad bomber. I added the mechanic of having to move the plates from one side of the screen to the other after catching them. It's OK to get inspiration from other games: the trick is knowing which ones. |
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| What I didn't know until recently was that Kaboom! itself was based on another game, Atari's Avalanche. Avalanche itself looks like a variation of Breakout, which in turn looks like a variation of Pong. And Pong, as everyone knows, was one of the first video games in the arcade. |
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| Let's play Six Degrees of Pong! I wonder how many steps it takes to get to Grand Theft Auto 3.... |
| Cascade Skip the Sink Credits |
- Lead Engineer: Martin Maurer for Tree-Axis
- Artwork: Zachary Present
- Server-Side Programming: Bret Barker, Don Reed
- Producer: Tom Jacobson
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