The pandemic has forced the entertainment world to move away from live performances for now, but gaming is, and continues to be, a haven of high activity for people of all ages. Taking inspiration from the music and branding of The Dead Daisies, and wanting to delve into a new way of marketing, gaming seemed an obvious choice. The objective was to reach a much wider audience, and with the gaming market expanding at such a rapid rate, the idea of creating a musically inspired game, Daisys Revenge, was born.
The idea was to create a game for the “Baby Boomer” generation, tapping into a simple retro game idea, re-introducing it to millennials, Gen X & so forth. This ignited the thought to develop a simple, but cool looking, rock music fuelled, duck hunt style of game.
The look and feel of the game was inspired by The Dead Daisies very own Bustle and Flow music video. Taking advantage of all of the assets in the video being created in Unreal Engine, Creative Works planned to use the software’s cutting edge tools to easily create assets like fire, particle based effects, camera lens and atmospheric fog into this new game concept. David, The Dead Daisies band manager, and Creative Works wanted to create a sort of Trojan horse within the music world, bringing the music and gaming worlds together in an explorative way.
The creation of the character, Daisy, went through many iterations. The team wanted to create a strong female complex persona who had a darker side and was not afraid to go out there and take on the world. Originally Daisy was created with a dirty white dress as seen in the early versions of Bustle and Flow, but David led the idea to “create a character who is instantly recognisable with a ‘kickass’ vibe”, which is where thoughts more aligned to a character that was more within a Tomb Raider or Game of Thrones genre of strong female leads. Using the backdrop of Daisyland from the Bustle & Flow video, styled with the idea of a badass Daisy, a narrative was formed and a game mechanic was developed from there.