The Making of “Carmen Sandiego: The Crown Jewels Caper” in Google Earth
By Jk Kafalas, Creative Engineer, Google
Editor’s Note: In March, we launched Carmen Sandiego: The Crown Jewels Caper in Google Earth. This was the first in a series of games made in collaboration with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, the home of Carmen Sandiego. It was a lot of fun to build, which you can learn about below. Look for two more capers coming soon.
My earliest memories of Carmen Sandiego are largely of the quiz show that aired on PBS in the early 90’s (“Monday through Friday at five!”). This caused my interest to pique when I saw the “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego” game for the Super Nintendo at my local video rental store.
The heavily played copy at the store was missing the indispensable World Almanac that typically accompanied Carmen games, so my playthrough was interspersed with many shouts along the lines of, “Hey Dad?! What country used Kronen as their currency?!” and responses to the tune of, “How the heck should I know?!”
Nevertheless, I had a great time tracking down VILE henchmen across the globe, inching ever closer to that elusive crimson criminal. I don’t think I ever caught up with her. Fast forward a couple of decades, and I stumbled across the rare chance to help bring this iconic figure from my childhood back into the limelight.
The Original Demo
I work on a team called the Brand Studio Experiments Group within Google. We look for interesting Google technology and platforms that can be used in novel or innovative new ways. With my background in game development, and an avid thirst to make and play games of all kinds, many of our experiment pitches end up along the lines of, “How can we make a game out of this technology?”
When we saw that Google Earth featured guided tours and geo quizzes — see this fun one by Atlas Obscura — we realized the app had all the components necessary to make a simple geography game. What more perfect vessel for my favorite geography game, Carmen Sandiego?!
In the summer of 2017, we got to work on a demo. We taught ourselves KML, or Keyhole Markup Language, which is the markup language used to build things like guided tours and games in Google Earth. I quickly pulled some graphics from some playthroughs of the old Super Nintendo Carmen game that I found on YouTube, slapped them in, and we were off to the races. The KML got pretty complicated pretty quickly, so we kept the demo short, just long enough to get the point across, and hopefully get people excited.
We presented it to the Google Earth team, and their reaction was overwhelmingly positive. We all agreed that we needed to make this happen.
The Partner: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
The original Carmen Sandiego game was published by Brøderbund, but today Carmen is part of the family at learning company Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, a leading provider of K-12 classroom solutions and creator of award-winning books and media. Now that we had a demo, we wanted to reach out to see if we could get them on board. In early 2018, we were ready for a meeting with HMH to show them the demo and discuss our vision — and they were extremely enthusiastic, and timing couldn’t have been better! As it turns out, they were in the final stages of a plan to roll out a brand new Carmen Sandiego to the world, including a Netflix animated series, a live-action movie, books, in-school outreach — the works.
They let us in on the secret that Carmen was being reintroduced as a roguish heroine, rather than the criminal mastermind she’d always been portrayed as. It was important to them that we make room for this narrative somewhere in the game, but other than that, they were incredibly accommodating with how we approached it. They shared a bunch of great resources with us, and contributed to the game’s development firsthand by fleshing out the narrative, locations and witness clues to stay true to the learning style of the original games and ensure that their story of Carmen’s reveal as the protagonist was just right. We were ready to start building!
Art Direction: Fewer Pixels!
It was important to us that this not feel like it was simply a promotion for the new animated series, but rather its own incarnation of Carmen, worthy of being the newest entry in a long line of amazing educational games. We wanted to showcase the interactivity of Google Earth as much as the new Carmen, and also wanted to draw in two very disparate audiences: Adults who remembered playing Carmen when they were kids, and kids who are just experiencing Carmen for the first time (and who might have already seen the new show).
To bridge this gap of old and new, I wanted the overall design to have the look and feel of a 90s-era video game with elements of the new Carmen sprinkled throughout — from the striking title screen to the animated narrative sequences (more on those in a minute). The new Carmen artwork and the glamorous places she visits in the game would be pixelated, enhancing the nostalgic kick for returning Carmen fans, while still looking recognizable to kids familiar with the new Carmen.
We started with the game’s UI. I dusted off my old hat as a game UI Artist and tried to whip something together reminiscent of the old Carmen games — simple, pixelated, and hopefully unobtrusive.
A request from HMH was that we have “interstitials,” or short animated sequences that could play out when you’re on the right track. These showcase full-screen artwork and a brief animation. Again, this was an opportunity to bring in the new Carmen but still have fun with that vintage pixel style. Some of these interstitials we were able to piece together from assets directly from the animated series, but others required more custom work. So I reached out to a superb local San Francisco artist Gus Gutierrez, and asked for a hand. (It helped that Gus had some experience with pixel art!) Here’s a peek at his work, which you’ll find in the game:
Design Challenge: Witness Characters
One design challenge we ran into is that the original Carmen games all had one core component that didn’t exist for the new Carmen project: Witness characters! No matter where you go in a Carmen Sandiego game, you’re hitting the streets, interviewing witnesses to gather clues. These characters were always very amusing and endearing, so it was important to us that this element not be left out of our game.
Here we turned to Chromosphere, the production design team for the new animated series. They were stoked by what we were doing, and quickly hopped on board to provide us with around 40 different witnesses, including a Japanese volcanologist, a Russian ballerina, and a Greek ship captain.
Bringing it to life in Google Earth
Much of the work for this project was the creation of the very complex KML running the game’s logic. Many of the content experiences you see in Google Earth were created by Ubilabs, developers and designers based in Hamburg. We knew that if we were going to pull this off, we would need their mapping expertise.
Ubilabs had the herculean initial task of scaffolding out the game’s decision tree. A game of Carmen Sandiego consists of several “correct” locations, as well as many more “incorrect” locations. Per HMH’s gameplay outline, the game is broken down into five correct cities and nine incorrect cities. In addition, each city (even incorrect ones) has 3 locations at which you can interview witnesses. You can imagine with that number of options, the logic can get pretty hairy pretty fast. Here is a visual breakdown by Ubilabs of the first caper’s KML node structure:
Once we had the logic sorted, we looked at adding some additional bells and whistles to the game, including what we called the “Indiana Jones” flight path visualization, connecting your current location with your next destination via a red line. Early builds of the game also featured a pixelated world map and even sound effects. Unfortunately, the pixelated map proved too performance-intensive, and since Google Chrome has audio muted by default, the sound effects were not being heard by most players and needed to be cut.
A new generation of gumshoes
There have been a lot of iterations of Carmen Sandiego over the years. Almost everyone I talk to remembers playing a different version — whether it was the original PC version, obscure versions like Where in North Dakota is Carmen Sandiego, the Facebook social version from a decade ago, or even just some fond memories of Rockapella’s earworm intro to the PBS quiz show. My favorite part of this experience has been that I’ve had a chance to contribute to this library of educational games.
The response from our users has been incredibly heart-warming. It’s clear to me that people appreciate Carmen Sandiego as much as I do, and I hope that in some small way this awesome team was able to help bring Carmen to a whole new generation of gumshoes.
