Don't Wake Mommy PrintNPlay Game

Arctic Arena Process

 This was the process for a piece I worked on during my free time in between classes the past week. I am very proud of how this came out, but I know if I push myself hard enough I can do better the next time around. My wonderful mentor and friend Andy Timm (concept artist for Hi-Rez) gave me some very constructive criticism, and things to consider for future compositions or if I chose to go back and recreate this piece.

Print N Play "Don't Wake Mommy" Playtest

Friday night I had the interesting opportunity to see my classmate Alisa, and a freshman student enjoy my print n play game of "Don't Wake Mommy". It was fun, it definitely had a lot of sabotage, a lot of deceit and of course laughter.  Along the way however I observed them and together we uncovered a few tiny issues.

First of all, I needed to get more interesting things to happen in the red and blue cards. There were 4 of  each card, which lead to a lot of repetition. It was only a matter of the crunch time, and that was an obvious and easy fix. Also another thing that was a peculiar issue was the color palette of the character markers. Now and then we would confuse each others markers simply because of how washed and similar they were. I chose to saturate the colors on the character cards and markers so that this was no longer a problem. Another issue was the abundance of red tiles vs blue tiles, and not being able to reach the end goal of 30 candies. My solution to this was reducing the amount of red tiles, and also adding more candy winnings on the blue cards vs the spankings or candy loss on the red cards. Those were the biggest issues, there was also a matter on how tricky it was to collect the candy because of how they were simply cut pieces rather than having an outline. I also took the liberty of making  one of the playable characters more interesting to play as.

Update: There was another flaw in my game's layout that was not brought up until I spoke with my teacher and played the game with him. My game does not have any skill, it is mostly based on chance. To remedy this I changed the mechanic of the red and blue cards. You can hold blue cards and use them against your players, and red cards do not punish you until there is a card where you have woken up mommy.

Combining 2 Games and Making 1

As a workshop in my Game Development Class we had the objective to get 2 board games and combine as many components as we could to make a whole brand new game. I brought a game called "Red Dragon Inn 4" and my companion Alexis brought Munchkin Oz Edition.

From "Red Dragon Inn 4" we combined the mats, the markers, the drink me deck, the gold, and the character decks. From Munchkin we combined the doorway cards and die.

Basically the set up was each player chose a character, then had 10 drink me cards and 10 doorway cards on the mat. Before the game begins they draw 7 of their character cards. The players roll the die to see who rolls the highest. Whoever has the highest number wins the round and the loser has to be punished. The player rolls the dice again to see how many cards they must take from either the drink deck or the doorway deck. The winner of the round decides for them. If the player has a card to ignore one of the drink or doorway cards, or to even punish the winner a little bit as well now is when they can do so.

If a player draws a drink event card it is considered a "pass" card, meaning no action needs to be taken. If a player draws a doorway card that says a certain amount of treasure, they lose that amount of gold, if they have no more gold they take health damage, which is the red marker on the mat. If one of the markers ever reaches the other side the player loses.