Mush
Contagioncommunity driven viral "game"

Tags : #flash #as3 #html #css #javascript #php

Made by me : Flash modules , PHP backend , Graphics , Sound design

With NewSunshine we wanted to make a sort of teasing event for a game to come (Mush made by MotionTwin).

The idea was to infect the community by making them hit the Alpha specimen of the Mushs, the almighty Jean-Pierre. When hit, Jean-Pierre would free spores that would go infect our friends. This way, contamination would spread faster and faster over time.

In the end more than 46.000 people used the application !
(You will need to create an account on Muxxu to see/try the app)

This project was made quite quickly with last minutes update to enhance it live which was both stressful and cool to do.
In the end there are X main parts :

A module to contaminate people by hitting a mushroom
A profile page
A module to write crypted messages publicly that only infected people would be able to decode
A page showing the people infected by us
A statistics page showing the conamination progression
A crypted TV for counter-mushs communications
And some backend admin tools

This project all started from this little useless toy i made to have fun with random mushrooms generation and cubic curves :

I then made this other useless toy to try to animate a mushroom in a flabby way (just because i like flabby things!) that the user could hit (just because... why not...?) :

flash plugin missing — (hit the mushroom ten times to wake him up)

From that we imagined the whole event with NewSunshine and got to work.
I made most of the graphics, all the flash modules and parts of the backend and he did most of the HTML stuff and most of the backend. He also helped me a lot on graphics like the eyes and mouths parts for the mushrooms generation, or for all the HTML pages.

The idea was to generate a random avatar for every single possible user. We created a collection of 64 mouths and eyes as a basis and i added the "flabby" style mushroom to it.
A fully random mushroom would then be generated depending on the user's name and ID so it would be impossible for two people to get the same avatar.
The player would actually first get its "normal" avatar that looks like a box, and when infected it would become a mushroom. So two kind of avatars would be generated having only the mouth and eyes in common.

To have a bit more fun i tried to animate how these things could "walk".
In the end i made this little avatar generator :

You have no flash player but here is a video :

(write anything on the input to create random avatars, click to make them jump)

Then the rest came up little by little to give the actual project.
The project is actually an application inside site, that uses an API, like a facebook application if you wish, this means you can't access it without being logged in on its host site.
If you don't want to create an account or don't have a device with flash support, here are some videos of the project.

Here is how the infection process works, by hitting Jean-Pierre straight to his face : This is the crypted TV stream that players could decode if they were following clues given on forums : And this is.. ahem.. a classy easter egg that "fires" when konami code is made : Please notice the frame by frame animation of the smoke that took me about 4 darn hours to create !
smoke