The Silly Face Society

Hi folks!

I'd like to introduce you to The Silly Face Society.

SFS was initially conceptualized as a quick little game that our small team of two would be able to produce quickly, but because the idea immediately started becoming more ambitious as soon as it was outlined (and we both had day jobs!) development ended up taking a lot longer than we'd anticipated. Almost a year later I can proudly say it's done and we're super excited to hear what people think of it!

Though I've never posted on TIGS, I do lurk occasionally during my aforementioned day job and I'm aware of some of the notions that exist of "social" games. We're trying not to take the evil approach to social, so the game is free with no in-app purchases required to progress. The reason I'm posting this here is because there are lots of super clever people making awesome things hanging around these forums and any opinions belonging to those types of people are the most important to us.

So! What is it?

The Silly Face Society is a casual (or social, whatever you'd prefer) game for iOS devices based around making ridiculous faces at your device's camera. We're including both a passive mode of play (akin to Draw Something) and also what we call 'Party Mode' (similar to Apples to Apples / Cards Against Humanity or even pomme) I've outlined the two modes below, or we have an older clip of the game in action you can check out

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The object of the passive game is to send a picture of yourself making a ridiculous face to another player and have them successfully guess the description of the face you're making. You can find a friend by entering their username or, if you prefer, you can use Facebook connect to view other friends who play the game.

Selecting a friend to play with presents you with a list of different descriptions to choose from - You'll have to take a picture of yourself acting out the description using the front facing camera on the device. The easiest description you can select is a noun, such as 'Rock Star' or 'Fatso'. The next difficult option adds another word like 'Barfing' or 'Screaming' to one of the nouns from the pool of words available in the first option, so you wind up with combinations like 'Barfing Gangster' or 'Screaming Juicehead'. The hardest option takes the second option and adds yet another word giving you descriptions like 'Drugged One-Eyed Socialite' or 'Evil Stink-Eyed Body Builder'. There's one last easy option available at the bottom of the list, which is simply a drawing assembled from two-parts (Eyes and mouth). Of course, if none of the options are suitable you can grab a new list of descriptions at the cost of a few monocles (our version of points, or coins) which you'll earn for correct guesses.

After you select an option and photograph yourself acting out the description it's now your friend's turn. They'll see that there's a fresh challenge waiting for them when they open the game and upon tapping your picture on the menu they'll be presented with the Guesstron.

The Guesstron is the guessing interface (yes, the knobs do work) and it features a moveable panel for each word in the description of the face you've sent. Each panel has five positions it can be set to - One is a correct word from your description and the other four are duds. Your friend will do their best to line up the panels on the Guesstron to match the description of your face before hitting the guess button. The number of guesses available to them varies based on the difficulty of the description, and after they are depleted or the description is guessed correctly there is a brief ceremonial unveiling of the new silly face and a printout is displayed showing the guesses, the amount of monocles you've received (If the guess was correct!) and a few other options to share the picture or comment on it. At this point your friend is presented with the description list and the cycle begins anew.

Party Mode takes the concept of the passive game and places it into a real-time setting. Each round a random judge is chosen, and everybody else in the room is given either an image to imitate, a description to act out, or a ticket to do the most ridiculous face they can in order to win the judge's vote. The first person to 3 or 5 rounds won wins a game.

You can check it out on the app store:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/silly-face-society/id563130918

As mentioned before it is free and can be played on any iOS devices with front facing cameras running iOS 5.0+

Let me know what you guys think

Thanks!