Visit Baltimore, a local tourism organization, was attending a content creator conference and needed a hook to pull in traffic to their booth and give attendees something fun to play while waiting in lines. In collaboration with their team, we came up with a fresh take on an old classic: a maze game.
Maze games were popularized in the ’80s and ’90s, filling arcades with pixelated characters running around mazes eating tokens, and avoiding enemies. That perfect blend of low-res nostalgia and addictive playability captured the heart of Visit Baltimore’s goal: to give the crowd of YouTubers and streamers another fun and interactive reason to love Baltimore. For the game to be effective, it needed to fulfill several requirements: First, it needed to be mobile-friendly as well as a booth feature, since the crowds at VidCon would be circulating. Secondly, it had to feel Baltimore-specific and give a sense of the city’s unique charm and offerings.
To create a challenging enemy path, our engineer coded every frame as a timeline. In every first frame, a Seagull would move, but it would be limited by the defined spaces of both walls, other Seagulls, snacks—and of course—our hero Crab. This movement makes for more unpredictable (and delightful) play. Meanwhile, our designer utilized vector shapes to give the characters and surrounding maze the angular 2-dimensional feel that 8-bit evokes. In its heyday, 8-bit was the result of limited computational resources—to re-create that feel with 21st-century capabilities required multiple layers of design and software.
Play for yourself, and see what makes Baltimore so special.
All work done for Mindgrub. Creative direction by me. UI design by Emilee Beeson. Development by Robbie Callen.