Doodieman Voodoo

Tom Winkler built Doodieman Voodoo around a cartoon character of his own and a single unrepentantly juvenile idea. You are given a voodoo doll, a name field, and a menu of eleven ways to launch something at it. That is the game. There is no score, no timer, and no way to lose, and nobody involved in making it was pretending otherwise.

An Animation Reel With a Menu Attached

Every option on the list is a separate hand-drawn set piece. One sends the projectile arcing high across the screen; another flips it off the character's own head; another bounces it off a trampoline before it reaches the target. What differs between them is not the outcome — the outcome is always the same — but the choreography of getting there, and that is where the developer put the work.

The humour is scatological and completely unsubtle, and the game is aimed squarely at whoever finds that funny. What redeems it as a piece of craft is that the animation is genuinely good. Each of the eleven has anticipation, a beat of hang time, and a punchline, which is more attention than most toys of this kind received.

Eleven Options and a Name Field

The name field is the small piece of design that makes the whole thing work. Typing something in personalises the doll, and the game leans into it — the target is no longer an abstract shape but whoever you have decided is having a bad day. It converts a passive animation reel into a stress-relief toy, which is the actual use case and the reason it circulated as widely as it did.

There is a second small touch worth finding: clicking on the Doodieman character himself makes him sing. It has nothing to do with the rest of the game, it is not signposted, and it is exactly the kind of throwaway extra that Flash developers dropped in for the handful of people who would click on everything.

Controls

Click an attack from the menu to run it, click the text field to name the doll, and click the character to hear him sing.

Why Games Like This Existed

The Flash portals ran on a specific economy of attention. Something had to be understood instantly, take under a minute to enjoy, and be worth sending to a friend. Games with depth had a place there, but so did toys — punching bags, dress-up dolls, physics sandboxes, and this. They were quick to build, they got enormous traffic, and they asked nothing of the player beyond a click.

Doodieman Voodoo is an unusually pure example. Strip it to its parts and you have a menu, a text field, and eleven animations, with no systems connecting them. That would be a criticism if the game had ambitions it failed to meet, but it does not have any. It knows precisely what it is: a two-minute distraction with a punchline, made by an animator who wanted to draw eleven jokes.

Getting the Most Out of It

• Work through the list in order rather than replaying favourites. The animations vary a lot in length and pacing, and the longer ones are further down.
• Fill in the name field before you start. Every subsequent animation uses it, and doing it after the fact means replaying the ones you have already seen.
• Click on the character, the background, and anything else that looks drawn separately. Extras in games like this are hidden in plain sight.
• Do not expect it to develop. There is no unlock structure and nothing changes after your first pass through the menu.

Treated as a game it is threadbare. Treated as a comedy short with a selection screen, which is what it is, it does the job in the two minutes it needs and gets out.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many attacks are in Doodieman Voodoo? Eleven, each with its own animation. They all reach the same target but differ in how the sequence is staged.

Can I name the voodoo doll? Yes. A text field lets you set the doll's name, and it appears throughout, which is the main thing that gives the toy any personalisation.

Is there a score or an objective? Neither. There is no scoring system, no timer, and no way to fail. Seeing all eleven animations is the whole of the content.

What happens if I click the Doodieman character? He sings. It is an unadvertised extra with no effect on anything else in the game.

Do the attacks unlock gradually as I play? All eleven are available from the very first screen, and using them does not change or add to the list.

Who made it? Tom Winkler released it in April 2013, built around a cartoon character of his own creation.