Case study · The Grinch: Christmas Adventures
Bringing The Grinch to Mobile
Led design on a console platformer’s move to iOS and Android, for two thumbs on glass.
The game
The Grinch: Christmas Adventures is a Dr. Seuss platformer by Casual Brothers and Outright Games, brought to iOS and Android by Exient.
- Role
- Design Lead
- Date
- 2024
- Team
- 1 designer, 1 artist, 2 engineers and 1 QA, with me as lead. I set the direction, ran the build reviews, and stayed accountable for what shipped.
- Skills
- Design Direction
- Team Leadership
- Cross-Platform Design
- Interaction Design
- Cross-Discipline Collaboration
- Tools
- Figma
- Confluence
The challenge
The Grinch: Christmas Adventures was designed for a controller: two sticks, face buttons, a player sitting back. Moving it to iOS and Android meant rethinking everything for touch. A spec doesn’t tell you how a port feels, so I set the bar through builds instead: run it with a phone in my hands, find what broke, say exactly what was wrong.
A Gamepad Game, Remapped for Two Thumbs
The Grinch has you move, jump, throw snowballs, fire a lasso and steer a snowboard, often several at once, all of it designed around buttons you don’t have to watch. I had the designer map a virtual stick and buttons straight across from the controller, and ruled out gesture controls: swipes are sequential, and a platformer needs you holding a direction and pressing something else at the same time. The direct mapping kept the timing, and anyone who’d played it on a controller already knew where everything was.
Still the Same Game
The bar was simple to state and hard to hit: someone who’d played The Grinch on a console should recognise the phone version as the same game, not a smaller one.
That ruled out both shortcuts every port offers. One is quietly dropping whatever doesn’t work on the new platform, which is how ports shrink. The other is bloating the interface to cover the mismatch, filling the screen with controls until the game is just a slot in the middle.
Thinning Out the Snowboard Controls
The snowboard sections came across from console intact, but the full platforming control cluster was still sitting on top of them. I asked the designer to drop the cluster on those runs and leave one boost button in the corner, because a downhill run doesn’t need the platforming verbs. They play the way they did on console, with the controls thinning out to match.
What Shipped
The mobile version went out in December 2024 on the App Store and Google Play, in time for the Christmas window.