Bubole

bubole.pl
2009

Bubole is an online game/chat room. You can customize your own Bubol and enter a global chat room. There you can interact with other players that are currently on the site. You can talk, squeeze bugs, fight or create another Bubol and send it to a friend via customized email.

To play, go to bubole.pl. The site requires Adobe Flash Player, so you can also watch a let’s play video below.

This was our first online hit. In 2009 we’ve already published our first book, but our main income came from web design. This was a moment when Adobe Flash was king. We started each day by visiting FWA (which used to feature only Flash based websites) and watching new interactive music videos, promotional gamse, surprising portfolios or any other online experiences.

Those were the golden days of web design. Everyone was experimenting, pushing boundaries and testing the limits of UX and GUI. Adobe Flash gave us the tools to create anything we wanted, from beautiful typography, to crazy 3D environments. Webpages featured on FWA were remarkable and changed our views on the web. Thanks to FWA we understood that browser could be a perfect vehicle for lots of things we couldn’t do in a paper book.

Bubole was our first attempt to not only see how one can find audience online. Also, we really wanted to get the Site of the Day award from FWA.

Design

After figuring out what Bubole should be like, we drew some of the monsters on paper, scanned them and tried to see how they would look with different components. Immediately we could see that customization was a right way to go and very quickly started designing GUI and specific user paths.

Aside from drawing over 200 components, we decided that we needed a font for all of the texts in the game (including users input fields). It had to look like it was drawn by the same person who drew all of the monsters. We created Bubol – our first finished font with alternative characters for each letter and layered styles that created colourful, dimensional effects.

Production

First, all of the hand drawn monster components had to be traced in Adobe Illustrator. This means that every drawing was represented not as a set of pixels but by Bézier curves, and saved as a set of coordinates. This allowed perfect scaling and produced much smaller files. You couldn’t do it with photographs, but it was perfect for our drawings.

When the images and font were ready, we had to write the game. We wanted to make it free and as available as possible, so we decided to use Flash and share it under a dedicated URL. Right about then Adobe released a new version of Flash with ActionScript 3 and announced Adobe Stratus – a free service that would enable connecting computers via Flash application using peer-to-peer connection. A perfect solution for Bubole to chat and fight each other.

The game worked perfectly. Connections between players were stable and very fast. We only needed sounds. We didn’t had any money for this project so we improvised. We used cheap microphone (it was like $2 cheap) and recorded ourselves trying to imitate sounds that were needed. The outcome was terrible, but somehow quite funny and fitting the game aesthetic. Two years later, when we won gold EDAward for Bubole, the jurors sad that the sound was perfectly remastered to resemble a cheap recording.

Recognition

Bubole was our first FWA Site of the Day and that was amazing. We were not only proud, but this redirected a lot of traffic our way. Very quickly we hit up to 40 thousand unique users per day. Keep in mind that it was 2009 and this was a standalone website. Not a viral video on YouTube or a post on Facebook.

After that, we received a lot of messages praising Bubole. Our favourite story was from a user who spend 48 hours there (without taking any breaks). He said that it happened during his exam session at the Warsaw University and everything was a good enough reason not to study.

In 2010 we submitted Bubole to EDAwards. They gave us gold and it was the first gold for Poland in the short history of this competition, but I must admit that the whole thing was very disappointing. We had to pay to enter the gala where we received the award (we got only one free ticket) and it was not cheap (especially for us at that moment of our career). The most disappointing part was that this award didn’t generate any positive reaction from anybody, so it felt a little bit scammy. Aleksandra as usual didn’t want to get onto the stage, so Daniel had to act the clown on his own.