Concept, game mechanics, art direction, physical toy design, packaging. Stop the Robots is the first game imagined by Cubedesigners, co-produced with Zanzoon over 18 months. Grand Prix du Jouet 2020, Cooperative Game category.
Since 2006, we have been designing interactive games and toys for Zanzoon, a French publisher of educational games. About fifteen projects en quinze ans, sur des typologies très différentes : Memory Games, Early Learning Toys, interactive accessories. A long, trusting working relationship that allows you to take risks.
It is in this context that Stop the Robots was born. Not a classic customer brief, but an idea from our side, proposed to Zanzoon, developed jointly over 18 months. For the first time, Cubedesigners was not a service provider but a co-designer of a toy.
The concept
Stop the Robots is a cooperative game for children aged 7 to 12. Players work together to stop robots before they take control. No competition between participants: everyone wins or everyone loses together.
Cooperative games have been growing strongly in recent years, driven by titles such as Pandemia or Hanabi for adults, and more recently by variations for children. The challenge was to offer an original mechanic that is not a simple adaptation of what already existed.
Game mechanics and puzzles
Beyond the concept and the artistic direction, the Cubedesigners teams were involved in all aspects of the project: development of the game mechanics, design of the puzzles, balancing of the difficulty levels.
This is unusual territory for a Design Studio. Designing puzzles means thinking like a game designer: what information to give to the player, at what time, with what room for interpretation? How to create tension without frustration? How to ensure that the game remains playable by 7-year-olds without being boring for 12-year-olds?
This work was done in iteration with the Zanzoon teams, with regular test sessions with children in the target group.
The design of the physical toy: the Smart Talkie
Stop the Robots incorporates a physical element, the Smart Talkie, a sound object that interacts with the game through voice recognition. We made the Industrial Design : ergonomie d’utilisation pour des petites mains, robustesse adaptée à un usage enfant.
The object had to have a strong visual presence, consistent with The game's graphic universe, while being manufactured within the cost constraints of an affordable toy.
Art direction and packaging
The graphic universe had to speak to children aged 7 to 12 on the theme of robots: dynamic enough to be attractive on the shelves, clear enough for the concept to be understood in a few seconds.
For the illustration of the packaging, we called on Régis Torres, an illustrator whose work on King of Tokyo we knew, and whose work we had followed with admiration for years. A collaboration between our art direction and its characteristic graphic style, for a result that clearly stands out from the crowd in the cooperative games department.
