Koomi’s Adventure (2000)– Flash animation / Hidden object, educational

In my junior year in college, I made an educational flash-animated game for preschool children. Flash animation games are now a common thing and hidden object games are a staple of casual games, but not so in 2000 Korea. Most of the flash games in the market were arcade, card, and board games. I worked with friends Ju-yeon and Janny to create a game about a worm named Koomi who has to identify certain objects in several different settings to find his mother. The game was supposed to be an educational game, because the objects that one has to find are not random, but strongly integrated with the story. For instance, in a jungle scene, Koomi would have to find certain animals that live in the jungle.

WHO (2002)- Mobile movie/ interactive game

In 2002, my friend Naccy and I won first prize for SK Telecom’s Mobile Film Festival, a competition for cell phone video content. SK had just started 2.5 generation mobile film services in which people could subscribe to a premium service and download “packets” of short video clips . The competition was to create a screenplay for 10 to 12 clips that had to be downloaded in 2-minute segments.

We figured out that creating a movie in the conventional format wouldn’t work because people may not want to download all of the segments if they were not amused. What motivation could we give viewers to watch the entire movie with content other than porn? We came up with a murder mystery scenario in which one has to download all the clips to solve the mystery. The first clip shows the scene of the murder and the father of the murdered girl asking you (the viewer) to solve the mystery. The next 10 clips are interviews with 5 of the suspects. By piecing together everyone’s story and interpreting subtle cues, one can figure out who murdered the girl. The last clip shows what really happened.

We won the screenplay competition and were given $10,000 to film the movie, which was then made available exclusively for SK Telecom premium service members. Unfortunately, not many people (including ourselves) subscribed to the expensive cell phone premium service at the time and a year later, improved technology was supporting mobile TV or downloads of entire movies, so the point of making videos catering specifically to 2-minute segments became unimportant.