Date: 2022
Type: Game
Summary: A rhythm-based role-playing game featuring the music of Bob Marley. The game is no longer available, at least on Apple's App Store.
LBC Studios’ flagship title was Hempire, a mobile game about weed. Their second title, Tasty Buds, was also a mobile game about weed. When I joined the team, they’d just secured the rights to the Bob Marley IP—the first game studio ever to do so—and they were going to use that to make a mobile game about… Bob Marley’s music.
Bob Marley: World Tour was a rhythm RPG in which you played as a manager for a Bob Marley cover band with a constantly rotating roster. The game’s “home base,” Hope Island, was presented as a place musicians could visit when they felt stuck or lost, built to honor Marley’s legacy. Each gameplay stage involved tapping your phone in time to a Marley song, usually a remix incorporating other genres such as hip-hop, Latin, soul, or pop. As you progressed through the game, more performers came to Hope Island to join the crew.
Although I joined LBC as a QA tester for Hempire and Tasty Buds, I was able to collaborate with the Marley team occasionally. For one of these collaborations, I wrote an early-game arc focusing on one of the starter characters overcoming a personal flaw. The gaps between each section in the PDF below represent places where you’d break to play a song. The details in red are items I planned to flesh out later, once the game designers gave me more information about upcoming characters and song genres.
Mobile’s many limitations meant that I had to be strict about both the pacing of the arc and the length of each individual line of dialogue. However, both still had to feel natural, and the characters needed to feel different from each other as well. This was actually fairly easy when it came to the arc’s main character; as he was from the Deep South in the United States, he had access to all kinds of colorful Southern sayings, so I got to spend some time reading up on those. Some I especially liked that I didn’t get to use for this arc were “as useless as a screen door on a submarine” and “could start an argument in an empty house.” Aren’t those fun?
Unfortunately I left the studio before the game went live, but I enjoyed the practice, even if it was just for a little bit!
