You’ll recall last time we talked about how Chime had matured into something beautiful, like a fine, full-flavored cheese. Oh cheese, beautiful cheese. This time round, we’ll talk about OneBigGame and take a peek at the challenges we’d face to make the game ready for release.

So Zoë had a game that they really wanted people to play. If only there was someone out there looking for a game to publish to the waiting game-playing public. Oooh, and imagine if that someone had a vision – to make games to help others, not for profit. Wouldn’t that be perfect for a fun, experimental game like Chime? Wouldn’t it?

In short, yes it would, and that someone was OneBigGame (check out their website http://www.onebiggame.org/), set up by Martin de Ronde to provide a platform for the games industry to help children’s’ charities across the world. This was the greatest project in the world to work on! Not only would we get a chance to experiment and play around to make the best game we could, we’d be doing it all for a great cause.

Anyway, we now had a solid goal for Chime – to get it ready for publishing it on LIVE Arcade on the Xbox 360. To this end, it came out of the Lab and a dedicated team was set up. We called this team the Chime team. Shazam!

The game we’d inherited from the Lab was, to put it bluntly, fantastic. From a design point of view, we had two things to do to make it ready for release:

• Refine any rough edges in the gameplay, but keep the core mechanics
• Make sure it ticked all the Xbox LIVE boxes, making it ready for release on that platform

Both had their own challenges, which you’ll be able to find out about in future installments of ‘Designer Blog’. See you soon…

Next time on Designer Blog…

• We start looking in depth at Chime’s final round of gameplay tweaks

Mike Movel – Lead Designer