Alphabear Hustle is a riff on a cooperative version of Spry Fox's classic word game, "Alphabear", built for Snapchat's game platform. Players reorganize a finite amount of letters on a board in order to spell words and earn points. Good performance is rewarded with a myriad of prizes, not least of which are unlocked items for the village-building meta game.
This project was an interesting one. Snap's game platform was in development while we were making this game, and as such, gave us something of a moving target we needed to hit. This was compounded by the fact that "multiplayer Alphabear" was a somewhat challenging title to design, which necessitated a lot of forward-and-backward movement as the designers zeroed in on exactly the way it should work.The art got a little bit of a boost since we were using the bear assets from Alphabear 2. That boost was somewhat dampened by the fact that Alphabear 2 was a 2d title made in Unity, and the engine we were required to use for Hustle was 3d. So, much of my early time was spent experimenting with 2d-in-3d character pipelines so we could take advantage of all of that free Alphabear 2 art.
Eventually that was sorted, my role was split between grunt asset production (with help by Big Green Pillow) and providing the designers with a constant stream of UI mockup iterations. It was all worth it in the end; the game was immediately popular on the platform upon its release.
