Dr. Sweet Tooth Design Process

The mobile phone and tablet game app,Dr. Sweet Tooth, was designed by ZebraFox Games. While the game is simple and fun to play, it is as difficult to master as it was to design and create. Many hours went into the first brainstorm session and concept designs, and many more went into story-boarding, programming, creating the art, and writing the story. On top of these efforts were the efforts of testing, tweaking errors, adding sounds and music, formatting for the Android marketplace, marketing, and there are even plans to translate the story into Korean.

The unique square style of the game echoes the look of the game’s predecessor, Zombie Diggers. As is clear from the following screen shot, Dr. Sweet Tooth continues the line of square characters from Zombie Diggers, and before that, City Blocks, both early creations of ZebraFox Games.

ZOMBIE DIGGERS	FELIPE FEMUR

As is apparent from some of the following note pages, skins that would cost money were considered, but ultimately ZebraFox Games chose to make the game completely free with to pay-to-win features nor pay to look good options. As apparent in the following images of original Dr. Sweet tooth notes is the change in story mid way through production. We wanted to make the name Sweet tooth fit better and what better way to do that than with a character with the ironic profession of a dentist. On top of this, we wanted to tie Dr. Sweet Tooth in with a previous game, Felipe Femur. In the Felipe Femur story, the werewolf Gummy tells the protagonist that the dentist took his teeth. This dentist was Dr. Sweet tooth. In fact, in the finished comic style narration, one can make out Gummy the toothless werewolves home just behind Dr. Sweet Tooth’s office building.

The original story board shows a mere mad scientist with a ray gun invention that cloned food and would clutter the world with sweets. But to the dismay of Dr. Sweet tooth a group of competitive eaters stand in his way of the world’s destruction by sugar. In the second iteration, Dr. Sweet tooth is made a dentist, a victim himself to cruel judgement, and he also has motivation for targeting a competitive eating contest. While he is a victim of circumstance, Dr. Sweet Tooth makes the awful choice to seek revenge by teaming up with the shady King roach. In this way, the roaches that appear on the rotting tiles in the game are accounted for.

STORYBOARD & NOTES	COMPLETED STORY	GAMEPLAY SCREEN SHOTS