Wednesday, April 01, 2009

Epically long post.

Where to begin! MrTiki was a massive project and a labor of love. It was a virtual world, based on a magical island where almost every decision you made on the site affected your alignment to good or evil - the inhabitants and animals (called "Spirits") of the land vs the villainous, rich Mr. Woo (and his team) who "discovers" the island and plans to take it over and turn it into a tourist trap. I was invited to come on board as the third partner in Dec of 2006, to be the Co-Creator/Art Director/Artist. We all loved this brand we created, and I absolutely loved being the artist to bring it to life. I worked on it up until the summer of 2008, so you can imagine the amount of work that was produced. It's daunting to even think about it, looking back. To start there were only three of us: myself, "Volte6," who was master programmer and infrastructure, and "mrdweedles," game programmer and marketing person. Then Wee joined us, a very talented game developer. Kinh came on board as our amazing writer (who ended up writing altogether about 300 pages worth of damn gripping story). Much later, "TikiMaestro" joined us as our audio engineer and created beautiful theme songs for the world and sound effects for the games, and his wife "WeeOne," later joined as an artist to assist me with overflow. Aside from getting the actual site design/layout/infrastructure developed, we updated weekly with a continuing story line for our readers that included news images, usually involved site events happening on the island, we had a crazy amount of games (including multiplayer), shops which contained insane amounts of virtual goodes in the economy, a working economy system (currency was called "Tiki Tokens"), maps of the world, quests for users to complete, a system to own a "Spirit" feed it/play with it/care for it, a battle system to fight your Spirit against others, we had downloads for users, ... phew, this was an undertaking... a tiki mail system, a forum for users, collectible coconuts, high scores systems with trophies, etc etc ETC.... It was so cool, the site even changed from day to night depending on the time.
We had a steady and growing userbase - I'm not sure on the numbers but I believe we reached upwards of 10,000 users (I could be way off here), without much marketing at all. We also had a wonderful beginning of a fanbase with lovely fansites such as: http://mrtiki.wordpress.com
It was a HUGE accomplishment.. is, rather, and I'm proud of all of us for what we did. Unfortunately some months ago, there was a mishap with our servers and the site experienced a heartbreaking meltdown. I hope one day it all can be recovered and mrtiki can live on in all it's awesome tikiness. In the meantime I believe some of our games can be found on newgrounds.com
Here is a selection of art I produced. I hope you enjoy and thanks for reading and looking.
Click images for larger view.
Site design for homepage in the day and in the night:
Logo sketches to final (bottom right)
Tiki Island Map
Tiki Village Map
Wootropolis map & a couple shop interiors

Misc art: Konoso gravesite, Anantiki holiday scene, Cave of Impending Doom sketch, Tiki Temple interior
Foggy Coast sketches:

Some character dev:


Some Spirit art:
Some game art:
Some virtual goods:
Battle system and Spirit care system interfaces:
 A selection of weekly news images that accompanied the weekly story:
 Misc art: Calendar for users to download:

Concept backgrounds:





I will try to post animations another time. :)

6 comments:

Januel Mercado said...

Cute stuff Nicky! In response to your comment, one of the models actually was John Tucker! The other model's name was Daniela. I forgot her last name though. Tell your boobs that my eyes miss them and tell Ale's ass that my hand says hello. Hope to see you soon!

Nicolette Davenport said...

My boobs say thank you, and I'll pass the message. :p

Awesome, wait.. Daniela Traub? I'm jealous. I miss Mr. Tucker.

Vince M said...

This is an amazing post, Nic. I think it will take me a day to look through it, but I can say that I really like what I see here.

Nicolette Davenport said...

Thanks Vince! It's nice to see you visit. Yes, I don't expect anyone to sit through it, it's a lot. -Just too bad the site went down to see what it was really like.
Hope you're doing well. :)

Charlotte Bondue said...

Amazing and fun work ! :)

Nicolette Davenport said...

Merci, Charlotte!