Fruit Ninja, Angry Birds, Graffiti Jump, Temple Run... In the era when iOS and Android were just born, there were too many classic mobile games that made us feel the charm of mobile games. Years later, although most of those "first-generation Internet celebrity mobile games" faded out of our sight, they are irreplaceable and valuable memories for countless players. Let's take a ride on the time machine together, go back to the ancient times of mobile games, and review the rise and fall of those classic mobile games.
Early classic mobile games created many impressive game characters, such as the little boy in "Subway Parkour", the various birds in "Angry Birds", and even the Tom cat who can only learn to talk, which is the classic image that is famous all over the world.
But unlike these characters who are ignited by the game, there is one character who has a noble "bloodline" from the day of his birth, and this character is the little crocodile who loves to bathe.
I don't know if you have noticed that whether it is on the game icon or the game launch screen, there is a Disney logo, so what is the relationship between this childhood classic mobile game and Disney? How was it born?
Today we will talk about the stories behind "Crocodile Naughty Love Bathing", which you may not know.
From game tester to producer
The creator of "Crocodile Little Naughty Love Bathing" is Tim Fitz Randolph (hereinafter referred to as Tim), although the producers of early blockbuster mobile games are almost all grassroots, but Tim's story is more legendary, and his career can be described as open and hanging.
Tim has not only loved games since he was a child, but has been making games since he was a teenager when he was only a teenager and began writing simple games for his TI-85 graphics computer in the BASIC language.
But tim didn't have the idea of making games at the time, so Tim majored in film production in college, and he wanted to start his career in the creative field.
In addition to film production, Tim also studied Japanese, and even lived in Japan for a few years, and he was quite fluent in Japanese, and what he did not expect was that the skill of Japanese became the key to changing his life.
After graduating from college, Tim didn't think about what job he could do or what he could do, and just when he was confused, he saw that Disney was recruiting a tester (QA) for a game that was about to be released, although the position was very average in terms of status and treatment, but it was Disney after all, and for Tim, a recent graduate, the attraction of joining Disney was unparalleled.
What's more, the game project in charge of this position is the NDS game Fossil Super Evolution, which is a game made by disney's Japanese team, so they need someone who knows both English and Japanese to test the game and assist in the translation work in the development team. It was a job tailored for Tim, and in this way, Tim successfully became a game tester at Disney.
While joining Disney is a rare opportunity, game testers are, after all, one of the lowest positions in the game company, and the job is to constantly play semi-finished games that have not yet been released and find various bugs. If he continues to do it in this position, Tim will be further and further away from the dream of "creating his own work".
But the turnaround didn't make him wait long, and while working as a game tester, Tim also tried to make his own games in his spare time, and his goal was to get a real game design job at Disney.
After the Fossil Super Evolution project, Tim joined the console version of Toy Story 3. It was in the process of working on this project that Tim encountered the opportunity to change his life.
At that time Tim made a small game called "Jelly Car", this game is a project he did in his spare time, the idea of this game is very simple, Tim wants to make a game with a physics engine as the core gameplay, you can DIY a car yourself, and then use this car to do various experiments, such as creating some obstacles, crossing gaps on the ground and so on.
Originally, the game was released on Xbox as an indie game, but when Apple's App Store officially opened, Tim found that the touch screen features of Apple devices were more suitable for the games he designed, so he went to buy an iTouch and ported the game to iOS, and the game experienced very well on iTouch. So he showed the results to Disney and offered to make a sequel to "Jelly Car", and disney's mobile game department, which was struggling to find a satisfactory new mobile game project, readily agreed.
Jelly Car
In this way, Tim went from being a game tester to a game producer.
Blockbuster
Tim was thrilled to get a well-known company like Disney to release his own game, but he always developed the game himself, and Tim, who had never brought a team, also encountered many challenges.
When the designer first showed Tim the draft of the Jelly Car 2, he said it didn't look like the jelly car he had imagined, and when the designer asked "what do you think the jelly car looks like?", Tim realized that he had never given a clear definition of the game's art style.
And few people know that the "Jelly Car 2" project was actually jointly developed by Tim's team and Disney's mobile game studio in Beijing, and transnational collaboration is also a problem that Tim must overcome.
But this didn't last long, and Tim's team quickly completed the run-in, and they successfully completed Jelly Car 2. The game was launched on iOS in 2009 and became very popular, with later port versions of PSP, NDS, and Wii.
So Tim's team hit the iron while it was hot to make "Jelly Car 3", and the success of two consecutive works made them the star team of Disney's mobile game department, and the development of the next game was immediately put on the agenda.
They wanted to make a puzzle game because the genre was popular on the App Store, but the process of determining the direction of the project was not easy, and the gameplay of the game went through many brainstorms and iterations before it was finalized.
The team had a whole bunch of ideas, and it was a mess for a while, but at some point, "water" became an element that everyone kept talking about. There were few physical mechanisms designed around water, but Tim believed that if it could be done well, it would succeed. So Tim's team made a prototype based on the mechanism of using the touch screen to control the flow of water, and after testing in the company, Tim found that everyone liked the prototype, so after getting enough feedback, the game officially entered development.
Of course, this prototype is the later "Crocodile Little Naughty Love Bathing".
The birth of a small crocodile
Few people know that the most iconic little crocodile image in this game is actually conceived after the gameplay has been decided.
After determining the core element of "water", the team added elements such as soil and mud corresponding to water to create puzzle solving, but the problem arose, Tim found that although the gameplay was there, it was difficult to design a story to explain to the player why the water was directed to a specific place, so the team paused development and began to brainstorm how the story could correspond to these visual elements.
At first, they thought of the direction of "filling something underground with water," such as filling a pipe, but it was still very abstract. What exactly is going to fill an underground? The bathtub is fine, but why is there a bathtub under the ground? Again it became a problem of unclear. At this time, Tim laughed and proposed an idea, "Maybe the bathtub is OK, why not design the concept of crocodiles living under the city?" Then the idea snowballed into the final form.
Early conceptual design
"Crocodile Naughty Love Bathing" received unprecedented attention from Disney's mobile game department, and Disney decided to create a new official character specifically for this mobile game: Little Crocodile Swampy.
This is the first time Disney has created an exclusive original character for a mobile game, when other mobile games want to get the authorization of Disney characters are difficult to ascend to the sky, "Crocodile Little Naughty Love Bath" actually carried the aura of Disney's first mobile game original character from the day of its birth, which is why we said that it was "noble in blood" at the beginning.
So the next time if you're stranded on a desert island, in addition to drawing Mickey on the beach, you can also try to draw a small crocodile.
On September 22, 2011, "Crocodile Naughty Love Bath" was officially launched on iOS, and after only one day of launch, the game surpassed "Angry Birds" on the paid game list and successfully reached the top. In its first month of launch, the game was downloaded more than a million times and topped the Charts in dozens of countries for weeks on the App Store.
A year later, on the first birthday of the little crocodile, Disney announced that "Crocodile Naughty Loves to Bathe" has been downloaded more than 100 million times. The number of downloads of this game is more than the total number of downloads of all the mobile games previously released by Disney's mobile games division.
Speaking about the character of The Little Crocodile, Tim said that creating an impressive character was an important part of game development, "We wanted to create a character with a full personality, which would make the puzzle more vivid and interesting. We also want to create a world big enough that stories don't just exist in our games, but also spawn other art forms."
In fact, as Tim said, a year after the game's launch, Disney launched a 12-episode online short film "Little Naughty Underground Adventure" for the game, and the little crocodile, a character born from the mobile game, finally has its own Disney animation.
The end of a fairy tale
No matter how beautiful the fairy tale, there must always be an ending, and the end of this story is not perfect.
When "Crocodile Naughty Love Bathing" became popular all over the world, some people may feel that this is the starting point for the glory of Disney's original game characters, but in fact, this has become the initial and final glory.
After "Crocodile Naughty Love Bathing", Disney mobile games have launched several derivative versions, in 2013, Disney's star character Mickey as the protagonist of the version was launched, and in the same year, the sequel "Crocodile Naughty Love Bath 2" was launched. But after that, Disney firmly embarked on the route of licensing its own classic animated characters to make games, or developing them in cooperation with external studios, and never gave birth to such a popular mobile game original character as Swampy.
There were no new games, no new animations, and the little crocodile who loved to bathe gradually faded out of sight with time.
In 2020, Tim, the creator of Crocodile Little Naughty Love Bath, decided to leave Disney after 11 years at Disney to become an independent game developer and continue to make the physics engine game he does best.
He started Walaber Entertainment under his screen name, and in 2020 launched his new title, The Professional Gymnast Simulator, on Steam, but the well-made, fun-playing game hasn't sold well, with only 54 reviews on Steam so far.
That naughty little crocodile was born with the brightest aura, and created a miracle of 100 million downloads in just 1 year. But after a brief peak, it is getting farther and farther away from us.
Tim, who created it, also worried that the crocodile would not be "cute enough", but it became a childhood memory of a generation, and we joked that it was a crumb crocodile that did not bathe without a drop of water, but still indulged in it and played one night after another.
It's not Disney's brightest star, but it's always the most special one.
Resources:
Where's my Water creator goes from QA to hit game designer at Disney Mobile