Sparky the Road Clown

Project Info: Sparky the Road Clown

Sparky the Road Clown was my first big personal project with Unity 3D. Started in 2009 with Unity 2.5 and a small white Macbook (remember those?)

This game started many years before 2009 as a name in my head, 'Sparky the Road Clown' -- the idea was that he was a rodeo clown that took one too many hits to the head, and he was now given to standing in traffic, yelling at the cars. My son has never liked clowns... so it seemed like a great game to start with.

My son has never, ever liked clowns (can you blame him?) and he did NOT like the idea of a game about clowns, until I told him you could whack them with a giant spinning hammer. Then he was all in. So I recruited one friend to help who is amazing at character design and animation, Chris Magee. And another who was excellent at voiceover work, Rick Tarrant. And Sparky the Road Clown was born.

I got busy for a while with client work and put it on hold for several months, but came back in 2011 to finish it and release it in December of that year. Along the way, I found that basically everyone hates clowns. Or is scared of them. Or both. Whoever thought it was a good idea to put IT on network TV in the 80's is probably to blame.

The app Sparky the Road Clown has been retired. It didn't look very good (it was aimed at the iPhone 3 specs) and it has really not aged well. I do hope to revisit it one day and make the sequel, which would be Sparky driving the car, and he's now running over mimes. Because the only thing more fun than running over clowns... is running over mimes. That seems to be the general consensus, anyway.

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