Little Happies
Little Happies was a photo booth arcade cabinet made in collaboration with Kaho Abe for the GaymerX2 convention. It also appeared as part of the Strange Arcade at IndieCade East 2016.
Kaho & I with the finished cabinet at GaymerX.
The Collaboration
In 2012, Kaho built an arcade cabinet and accompanying photo booth game, called Ninja Shadow Warrior. In 2014, she was invited to show the game at the Indiecade Arcade at GaymerX, but wanted to make some changes to the game and bring in a queer collaborator for the event — so we teamed up to mod Ninja Shadow Warrior into Little Happies!
Because Kaho had designed the physical cabinet and the core gameplay loop already, we spent most of our time re-theming the cabinet and redesigning art assets specifically for the GaymerX convention.
For GaymerX we re-themed the game to be about friendship and the little things that make us happy. We wanted it to be over-the-top whimsy, and we wanted players to be able to play with the cabinet, not just the game.
The Game
The core gameplay remained the same:
Players push the Start button → an image is displayed → players have a few seconds to contort and squish their bodies into the shape of the image → the game takes a photo → the game scores how well the shape of the players matches the shape of the image → the game Tweets a the photo + score.
The images
Every time the game starts, an image loads, and players have to squish and stretch their bodies into different shapes to match it. Our goal with designing new images was to create shapes that would require players to move their bodies around in ways they wouldn’t normally do at an arcade or convention hall. We made lists of all of the cute and whimsical things that make us happy (ice cream, legos, stuffed animals, Japanese food, a bunch of cutesy things), from there Kaho drew all of the little happies, and I arranged them into shapes that would work in-game. This was a super-fun, surprisingly physical and embodied type of level design I’d never done before.
The cabinet
Moving away from the sleek and shiny aesthetic of Ninja Shadow Warrior, we re-pained the cabinet with chalkboard paint, and swapped out ninja stars for shooting stars and rainbows. We also made a giant cloud pillow to sit on top of the cabinet & welcome players over. His name is Terry!
The Players
In action, the game was a hit! We saw individuals and groups playing and re-playing the game. People wanted to replay to get higher scores, see what other shapes were in the game, and to get photos with their friends.
