Fairies and Dragons: A postmortem of creating the first digital Happy Meal

Brian Robbins – Executive producer Fuel Industries

Brian Robbins is the coauthor of the Casual Games SIG/Whitepaper available here.

Fairies and Dragons was the first “digital happy meal”.

Fairies & Dragons is an original property developed by Fuel and intended for boys & girls age 5-9. The marketing vision of the product was that it was designed for online play, TV, and toy format. The company's boss already had a fairy based game in the “napkin sketch” stage, but it only appealed to girls, so they added a second “dragons” segment to appeal to boys. The characters had to do a fairly delicate balancing act. The dragons had to be scary-looking but not so scary that kids would be frightened of them. The fairies had to be cartoony, but they couldn't run afoul of Disney's entrenched fairy properties.

The original idea was to distribute the game on USB sticks because one of McDonalds' requirements is that the toy be playable in the restaurant, as a lot of the toys never make it out of the restaurant. A toy-shaped USB stick was planned, but was eventually scrapped because the USB plug ran afoul of toy safety standards in some countries. Ultimately the game shipped on a CD in a custom plastic case with a fairy or dragon perched on the hub.

Each game (fairy and dragon) included some desktop wallpaper and a couple of mini-games based on the character in your happy meal. One game was intended to be a far simpler “twitch” game with a slightly deeper game for the other so that the games would appeal to a wider age range. Upon getting the go-ahead from McDonald's, they brought on a team of 2D and 3D designers, as it would be a graphics-heavy product, and the quality of the visuals was a top priority for the team.

The presentation was light on technicals, but the games themselves were programmed in Flash, with Zinc and mProjector used to make the Flash games into standalone executables.

McDonalds targeted the games for an 8-week promotion (four fairies and four dragons). The theme was “bite size gaming”. 33% of McDonald's toys don't even make it out of the restaurant, so it was a priority that the toys be playable outside of a computer. The games didn't need to have much replay value. The thinking was that the games would be considered successful if they could entertain a five year-old for 15-20 minutes.

The games contained the most extensive audio production Fuel has ever done. The final TV spot used some of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra to get the proper fantasy mood.

McDonalds' focus-group testing was extensive. The toys were tested and ranked against previous Happy Meal toys and came in an all-time 11^th place, which is pretty impressive given that it was based on original IP and wasn't based on an entrenched entertainment product.

What went right

• Focus groups and testing. McDonalds made sure that the product was solid and resonated well with kids

• SVN and source code control. This was their first major product upon which Fuel did rigorous source control.

• Automation – despite this being a Flash project, they put together a good automated build suite to automate the build process.

What went wrong

• Cross platform issues. Flash wrappers are problematic on the Mac.

• Testing was not started early enough.

• Install choices and perception. People thought the program was invasive and was putting tendrils throughout your system when in truth all it did was change your desktop wallpaper. People didn't know how to change it back and were annoyed by it. In retrospect, they should only have changed the wallpaper while the game was running.

• Language and locale issues. The games themselves were very easily localized because they contained no text. Coming up with a license agreement that works in all languages, though, was a major pain.

The biggest success of the product was that it remained a Fuel-owned property after the McDonald's promotion. McDonald's wasn't interested in owning the Fairies & Dragons IP. They just wanted control of the product for the duration of the promotion.

The slides used for the presentation will be available (hopefully soon) at www.dubane.com/cons/

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