People have known about the tongue-burning, tear-inducing
qualities of peppers long before Columbus reached the Americas. Before
Wilbur Scoville, however, no one knew how to measure a pepper's “heat”.
The doodle team thought his work in this field—and the development of
his eponymous Scoville Scale—deserved some recognition.
Born in Bridgeport Connecticut on January 22nd, 1865, Wilbur Lincoln
Scoville was a chemist, award-winning researcher, professor of
pharmacology and the second vice-chairman of the American Pharmaceutical
Association. His book,
The Art of Compounding,
makes one of the earliest mentions of milk as an antidote for pepper
heat. He is perhaps best remembered for his organoleptic test, which
uses human testers to measure pungency in peppers.
Early concept art and character designs
Doodler Olivia Huynh has been thinking about Scoville and his test
since last summer. From the start it was clear it was going to be a
chance to do something fun. She writes:
Spiciness is somewhat of a universal, comical experience, which I
think opened the door for us to do something we usually might not be
able to, like a fighting game. I started making storyboards for how the
game could unfold while engineers worked on building prototypes. Then I
started sketching and making draft art to put in the prototype, so we
could see what the experience would be like in interactive form.
Ice cream win: draft and final animations
After that I started working on backgrounds, boss characters,
meters, and then all the character animations, and ending animations. At
some point we thought about setting it in a human mouth, to clarify
things, but then realized that was probably too weird (thankfully).
Designing the boss peppers and animating Scoville's reactions to eating
them were probably my favorite parts.
Happy birthday, Wilbur!
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
Art
Olivia Huynh
Brian Kaas
(design assistance)
|
Engineering
Corrie Scalisi
Tom Tabanao
Jordan Thompson
Kris Hom
Jk Kafalas
(prototyping)
|
Production
Gregory Capuano
|
External Help
Manuel Clément
(music/sound)
Andrew Chavarria
(blog post)
|
Comments
Post a Comment