A Spooky DevLog 10

When first designing our game, Universal Monsters, it reminded me a lot of another game that I enjoy: Exploding Kittens. Games that have “action” cards instead of depending on a regular deck of cards (a number or a suit) are very fun to me because I haven’t played many games like that before. I really love our card game because it's easy to play/understand the rules, the backstory is fun, the design is neat, and of course, the game itself is very entertaining to play. Something that is really fun and keeps the game going is that there is a special card- the joker- that can be played to keep the player trying to win from winning. It’s always a mystery who is gonna win since it’s anyone's game because that special card evens out the playing field.

We recently made a change to the rules which affected the amount of time that each round takes. Like the game Magic, by Richard Garfield (and team), we had a powerful card that a player would play and choose another player to play this card on. They could pick up (or steal) one of their “item” cards and put it in the discard pile. This kept the player from winning and could potentially mess up their game entirely. Magic had a card like this called “Control Magic” where they could steal a card from their opponent, hindering their opponent's game (Garfield, pg. 543, paragraph 1). Ultimately, this kept the game going on too long, so we took it out of the rules like Garfield did. 

There was another issue regarding the wording of a card. We said that if you played a certain card, then you could pick one player to show you a card of theirs. This left room for miscommunication because which person selects the card that is shown to the other? The player who set down the action card or the person who is holding the deck in their hand? Eventually, we rewrote the rule because “{we} could never tell what was going to confuse someone,” (Garfield, pg. 546, Paragraph 6) like Garfield and his friend had to do. 

The chapter from the Altice was helpful because it pointed out how important the design choices were. My group has been very picky and pushing to make our game look as nice as possible and it was nice to see how Garfield did this, too. He chose the shape of the cards a certain way because they slide better. Although we are sticking with the basic rectangle shape for our cards, changing the shape of cards to fit the needs of a game better is something I’ve never considered. We also talked about how we were going to include the Universal Studios aspect into our card game to allow the name make better sense. We opted for the logo to be in the bottom right corner of every card. On top of this, our illustrations are the same monsters as the movies and their objects were selected to match their theme and needs of each character. Lastly, looking forward, we discussed how we would make different expansion packs– what they would look like and how they would fit into the original game. This has been my favorite group and favorite project so far!