Beauty and the Beast Activity Center
Developed at Creative Capers Entertainment
Publisher: Disney Interactive
Genre: Activity Center
Platforms: Windows & Macintosh
Return to the magical world of the Beast's castle. Join all of your favorite characters as they throw Beast a magnificent surprise birthday party, and dance the night away! Solve the mysteries in the West Wing and help Mrs. Pott's and Chip in a fast paced arcade game. Make beautiful stained glass creations, decorate the ballroom, choosing the music, the dance steps and dress up Belle and the Beast. Now you are ready for the ball!
Main Hub
The host characters introduce the player to all the different activity rooms and indicates activities to be completed. From here, the player can reach any section of the game.
Belle's Writing Desk
With this activity, players can create invitations, stain-glass window graphics, or colour scenes and print them in full colour.
Cogsworth's Library Mystery
In this game, players develop their deductive reasoning skills by asking Cogsworth questions until they narrow in on the solution to the puzzle.
Ballroom Hub
Because the dance section of the game is actually four more activities, the ballroom hub host character provides the guidance the player needs to set up the final dance.
Music Selection
Choose which instruments the musician will be playing for the final dance.
Wardrobe Selector
Choose the dress that Belle will wear to the final dance sequence.
Time Vs. Features
Our engineering team of TWO, including me as the lead software engineer, was expected to finish this game in about 6 months. This included augmenting the existing Disney game engine to support new features and media formats required to implement the game, writing the game itself and ultimately passing it through Disney's stringent QA.
Some of the game engine capabilities that we had to add included the following:
+ Support for Macromedia Flash elements, so that more assets can fit into the game within the RAM footprint.
+ Support for QuickTime movies: I was surprised that this was not already in the engine, but it was easy enough to implement.
+ Support for printing: We incorporated a 3rd party plugin to achieve print capability.
I'm glad to report that despite all the revisions and feature creep, we still delivered (relatively) on time!
©Richard Yeh