PooMaster — A Casual Mobile Game

The theme had to earn a reaction, not just a look. Each of these beats does a mechanical job and an emotional one — where the humor turns into something players feel and pass on:

• Juice — the poo is lively; splashes when it hits the bucket. Every level opens with a full-screen waterfall of poo. The poo inside the PooMachine is squishing and shifting. Real enough that a drop falling toward a person's head creates genuine tension, cartoon enough that the tension resolves as a laugh instead of a wince.
• The poo machine — At the end of each level — won or lost — a candy machine that vends poo instead of candy converts your poo into coins (currency). The currency conversion was a feature added specifically to trigger an emotional reaction as part of the core loop; staging it as a spectacle was the design decision. Usually games don't give their conversion step a screen. This one earned its screen by being funny.
• Poo share — Sometimes a poo sticker pops out of the poo machine to be shared straight to social. Three jobs in one beat: a volatile surprise that makes the machine worth watching, a collection to complete, and an organic distribution loop emphasizing the theme that costs nothing to run.

The player moves a bucket left and right to catch each drop of poo. Two control options went into A/B playtests with two groups from the target audience: one of kids, one of young adults.

• A — snap points. Tap the left or right side to move the bucket between fixed positions. Old-school arcade. Two-handed. The logic: fixed spots are easier to hit, so the game is easier to learn.
• B — finger slide. The bucket tracks your finger across the screen. One-handed. Demands real precision.

I expected B's precision requirement to be the problem — the test said otherwise. Players reacted to B naturally and with an easier learning curve — the precision I'd worried about was what produced the near-miss tension the game needed.

B also fit the audience's actual context: one-handed play is what makes a game playable on a bus. I locked B right after POC and built the rest of the game on it.

My research pointed to a visual style no one else owned: build the whole look around the poo — theme, characters, and feel. One of the signature moves was the birds. Instead of generic fowl, I designed cyclops-looking birds — rare in mobile — each with its own personality, behavior, and animation, aiming for malicious enemies with humorous characteristics: the congested bird, the diarrhea bird, the plain one, and so on.

I produced the concept art and core UX flows myself, then directed the team (2D artist, UX, animator, VFX), iterating on character design and UI/UX until the game looked like nothing else in its category and still read as made for its audience. The real work lived in the gap between "differentiated" and "differentiated and emotionally engaging, right for kids and young adults, gameplay clarity at a glance" — that's where most of the art-direction iteration went.

• Test the thing you're afraid of. My worry about B's precision was the reason to run the test, not the reason to pick A. If I'd trusted the instinct I'd have shipped the safer, flatter game.
• A theme isn't decoration — it was the product. Every craft call, from the splash to the machine to the stickers, existed to make one joke land repeatedly. Treating game feel as the delivery mechanism for the theme is what made the kids react.
• Store ratings are a design constraint, not a launch checkbox. I learned that at upload, which is too late. Where a theme lands on a rating board is now something I'd establish before art direction, not after.