Rage against hipsters (2015)
This was my second entry to a Game Jam where, together with a small team we created a hybrid game from design to completion in 48 hours. A hybrid game consist of a game where it's in part a board game, and a digital game. This game notably won "Best Hybrid Game" Judges award!
A four player co-op game that tests the players mantle to rise up against the hipsters that are controlling the world. Three card decks are placed on the board, one deck (player deck) contains the band member position, the another will dictate who the (leader) will be and finially the last deck contains the music. All cards are shuffled and placed accordingly, players pick one card from the player deck and draws two cards from the music deck. Any player can draw the leader card and see who it is assigned too. Each player places a card in its appropriate slot faced down, now all players must roll one 6 sided die. At this point the leader flips all the cards over and assigns the dice to a music card. The music genre and die roll is inputted into the system to see whether the hipsters agree that the music being played is "mainstream". Depending on the outcome of the system, the crowd will either love you are hate you with a passion, repeat all steps again until you satisfy the win or lose conditions good luck!
Its the year 2015, the human race has been threatened by an anomaly that spread through all generations like a parasite. Scientists have called this anomaly as "Hipster movement", take control of a band and represent humanity's last chance by playing in a concert to satisfy the growing blight. Good luck you're gonna need it.
Platform: board game/android
Role: Design
Team: Sean Savona (layout & design), Dylan Abela (programmer & design), Marco Vergantini (artist & design) and Nina olsson (artist)
Development Time: 48 hours
cards
This was an absolute blast to make, together with Marco we came up with some of the most hilarious ways in portraying the hipster stereotype and what they would consider as attractive music! the playing board was organised by myself whilst the cards and colour scheme was devised by Marco. All cards and finishing touches to the game board were hand drawn by himself so all credit goes to him!
HYBRID
Creating a board game with such little time was not an easy feat; a lot of time was taken to fit this awesome theme into something playable and fun. This was our most daunting challenge, how we can we make a band compete against a crowd in the form a board game? Lots of ideas were being tossed around until we decided to take a hybrid approach to help us make decisions. This probably sounds counter intuitive, however having the system chose and associate the outcome of what dice and cards you put down created a sense of randomness; similarly what we are trying to achieve with the theme of the game how we don't understand the hipster crowd. That's when we got cracking down on creating the system and making sure that it was not too complex to understand, Dylan constructed a matrix that would result a numerical output and a tune (for a laugh) when the dice roll and card are inputted. The result was quite unique and was well received by other people who participated in the competition!
win and lose conditions
If there was one aspect that we had to get right; its to have a satisfying ending to the original theme, whether good or bad. Ultimately this was a very delicate point which required a lot of testing in the limited time we had. Once the digital matrix was constructed, an algorithm had to calculate how the final result would be determined. This result concluded the players turn depending if the result was too low, if it was then its a game over. The game board illustrates the possible outcomes players must keep track so that they know what the crowd is thinking!
Win conditions
- Reach “Selfie” on the Appreciation meter before any of the loose conditions are met.
Lose conditions
- Run out of cards in the Leader Deck and not reach the goal.
- Roll and receive all -1 or -2 values