Pixel Records was meant to be a free guessing game for IOS. The idea was to guess the album cover while racing against time, earning points and unlocking new records. One could either share or download them.
The game was divided into 3 main levels with a different amount of records to unveil. If the player unlocked 50% of the albums in the current level, the next one opened up, and so on.
The game was a combination of the classic multiple choice/fighting game. The player was given a choice of six options and a powerbar worked as the clock. The longer it took the player to answer, the lower the score. All scores were ranked using Apple's Game Centre.
A false reply was punished with a 20 second loss and after 3 wrong answers the cover locked itself and wasn't playable till 5 new covers where answered properly.
One of the biggest concerns during the process of the game was cheating. There's really no way to prevent users from doing this, but I came up with a solution. First was to make the pause menu blur out the record and turn it into monochrome. The second step was for all the record illustrations to be in the lowest level of image interpretation, but still keeping it's essence.
This means that if the user captures an image of the cover and tries to google it, he won't find any similar images. All the records are below the 10-20% image recognition rule, making this unsearchable.
All covers where done pixel by pixel on Adobe Illustrator and no plug-ins where used in the process. Colors were hand picked to take position and trigger emotions that wouldn't have been possible using a filter. The initial amount of covers done for launch was a total 150.
iPad version of Pixel Records featured a broader look over the record's library. This version featured 9 covers on screen with a scroll, just to keep numbers on each Level to work smoothly according to the iPhone version.
Menu skins changed according to the level of difficulty that the user was on. Wood texture, being for the lower levels, brick for medium levels and metal for the harder levels.
