Group members: Andrew, Laura, Rachel, Sanaiya, and Yiming

WEEK ONE UPDATES 

(written by YIMING, ANDREW, and RACHEL)

The group started by having “cozy games” in mind, but the idea of a cozy game is like a ghost: you know that it exists all the time, but if someone asks you to define it, the best you can do is probably give some hand-wavy descriptions. We started by listing some games that we all agree are cozy: Stardew Valley, Animal Crossing, Minecraft, etc, but that didn’t get us too far since they varied so much by genre and art style. We then turned to Ash for help, and she gave us two important concepts: coziness as a genre and coziness as an affect.

Coziness as a genre typically refers to the pixel art aesthetic with a pastel color palette. It can also refer to the toon shading with 3D big-head-small-body anime-type characters in Animal Crossing. More generally, it can refer to a general color palette that evokes emotions like peacefulness, warmth, relaxation, and so on. Besides aesthetics, coziness as a genre is also associated with certain mechanisms in the game, like farming, gardening, customization of any kind, relationship building, etc.

Coziness as an affect instead refers to the general idea of feeling content, relaxed, therapeutic, non-serious, absurd, having fun, low tension/low stress, etc. The affect is also often associated with player self-expression and the freedom of choice and action given to the players. One commonality that games like Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley share is that those games allow players to express themselves through a wide range of activities, such as planning your island in Animal Crossing and choosing a specific role in Stardew Valley: a farmer, a mine explorer, or a fishperson. Self-expression seems to be an important source of feeling content in both of these games as they allow players to imbue personal meanings into the choices they make, instead of being given by the game. 

Readers might observe that in the two aforementioned games, another commonality is that they do not involve serious conflicts. There are monsters in Stardew Valley and bees in Animal Crossing, but they are not serious in the sense that the consequences of being defeated by them are low and often do not associate with the player character’s death. However, this does not mean that coziness as an affect cannot be evoked by serious conflict. As emotions are highly subjective, some people may feel cozy (therapeutic, or healing, might be a better word) when they are playing DOOM: Eternal as they are slaying demons with different types of weapons and abilities. The same thing can be said with Sekiro where all a player does is focus on parrying and attacking. Admittedly, when a player dies in these games, their characters actually “die,” but they get respawned right after, which makes the stake of dying very low. Coziness as an affect is a much broader concept than coziness as a genre.

From our reflections on the idea of coziness both as an affect and as a genre, our brainstorming was first based on Rachel’s idea of making a game about attracting cats into one’s lap – which later developed into another idea of rescuing cats from their enclosures. Unfortunately, a quick googling of “cozy board games” shattered both of these plans – we found out that Cat Rescue and Calico already exist!

Going back to the drawing board, and heavily concentrating on coziness as an affect, we want to make a cute game about self-expression where people can play collaboratively and feel relaxed. This led to the second iteration of our conception: a board game about bunnies! In this game, players would collaboratively work towards managing resource cards and planning together to pick up as many bunnies as possible by earning their trust – bunnies are prey animals and it’s hard to earn their trust, and being able to pick them up means that they really trust you – with the goal for the entire group being to pick up as many as possible potentially within a non-stress-inducing time limit. To encourage collaboration, we also intend to include mechanics and rules that allow players falling behind to catch up. As a group effort, we want this game to have less player-vs-player conflict, but still leave the space for artificial conflicts to potentially arise just like how Laura and Sanaiya fought over Jodi in our play session of the Stardew Valley board game.

Speaking of which, our board game also draws inspiration from the Stardew Valley board game. The key appeal of Stardew Valley that we want to capture in our game is player self-expression. By giving the bunnies unique personalities, we hope that players will gravitate towards befriending bunnies with personalities that they find especially appealing, allowing players to express part of themselves in their choice of bunny friends. To achieve this design goal, our game needs to

1. Have bunnies with appealing personalities either pre-written or randomly generated by some system.
2. Give players enough freedom to be able to befriend their favorite bunnies without a high strategic cost.

Reaching these design goals without sacrificing the game’s strategic interest seems like it will be a difficult challenge, and we might ultimately have to reach a compromise between these aspects of the game.

WEEK TWO UPDATES I

(FROM THE HIGHER-LEVEL, 

written by SANAIYA and LAURA) 

Top: This turtle has the right mindset. Image from the kinder part of the Internet.

Bottom: HEY, NO—I SEE you eyeing the turtle, Harez Hilton! You’re literal prey—yet STILL on the hunt for an unethical story?! Go bother someone who’s already out of the closet!

I look to the heavens, outfitted with stunning rainbows and slow-vogueing clouds, for a glimpse of the man, the myth, the legend. You know his name: Bob Ross, prime purveyor of the mantra that “there are no mistakes—just happy accidents.” Once I find him, I ask him, “Is it possible to make so many happy accidents in just one week? Fighting over Jodi? Misinterpreting all of Stardew Valley? Expanding one copyright-claimed turtle pun into a brand new card game?” 

And he says, calmly, “Yes, it’s possible.”

At this point, like two old tubes of paint, Bob’s calming baritone mixes with the perpetual voice crack that is my internal monologue: “Jesus Christ Sanaiya…you’re so sleep-deprived…stop talking to me…go bother Ash…and elaborate on that last thing you said about the turtles.” 

Enter stage left our new card game concept: Slow and Steady Wins the Drag Race, borne out of a pun Rachel conjured on a Discord group call, twenty-ish hours before our bunny pitch. (Rachel is now Pun Extraordinaire; I cede my supremely tiny crown to her.) As the slowest person on my high school’s cross-country team in 31 seasons and a fierce endorser of locker bay nicknames like “Turtle Girl”…yeah, I fought for this idea. Great ideas are everywhere, especially in wordplay. 

Speaking of play, let’s talk about the higher-level symbolism that informed the local-level mechanics/gameplay of Slow and Steady Wins the Drag Race (or, for short, just Slow and Steady). 

Firstly, shoutout to the “Tortoise and the Hare” for being a really good allegory for coming out of the closet…yet another happy accident! (For our purposes, tortoise = turtle and hare = bunny; I apologize to anybody who’s ever set foot in UChicago’s Zoology building.) I mean, we know the way Aesop’s fable goes: Tortoise/Turtle moves along, all slow and steady, while Hare/Bunny rushes the first half of the race and ends up hurting itself in the second. 

• In a similar vein, the protagonist of Slow and Steady is a lovable little turtle who needs a little help. We the players, aka this turtle’s friends and allies, work collaboratively to accrue enough Confidence Points so the turtle can safely, slowly, and steadily come out of their shell. This is the first narrative arc of the game. 
• During the second narrative arc, players help the turtle perform up to their potential at their first drag competition. (If you’re curious, the turtle’s drag persona is the glamorous Mary Shelley, who reads to filth like Frankenstein’s Monster and carries around only the finest literature in her carapace.) 
• Eren suggested a brilliant story structure to weave these narrative elements together: go back and forth between the first and second arcs. Why does this suggestion work so well?
  • Different aspects of competing in the drag competition will require different levels of Confidence. It’ll probably take fewer Confidence Points to sign up than it will to put on the gown and beat the makeup than it will to lip sync for your life onstage. 

It doesn’t line up with the reality of the queer experience to think of “coming out/developing confidence” as a past thing and “expressing your queerness” as a present thing. A better dichotomy is thinking of confidence as an internal process (happens in your head) and expression as an external process (happens in the real world). It can be quite narratively rewarding to flip-flop between the internal and external, the thoughts and the ensuing actions—like the masterful Pixar movie Inside Out!

Enjoy trying to decipher these Brainstorm Boards.

To honor our previous pitch, we TRIED to keep the bunny theme around and even transformed one into the “villain” of the first narrative arc. Enter (and immediately exit) stage right Harez Hilton, a metaphor for the obstacles Shelley encounters on their odyssey towards authenticity. (For context, Perez Hilton is a gossip blogger who used to prematurely out celebrities, like NSYNC’s Lance Bass…a rather misguided method of fostering LGBTQ+ inclusivity and visibility.) But we needed a more universal, less personal way of conveying Shelley’s odyssey: 

“My issue is that if people know our reference, then they will think that oh, this game is about fighting this individual that we know in real life. Players need to feel closer to the game and play cards that have self-expressing meaning.” (Yiming)

Ultimately, aiming for realistic coziness falls higher on our priority list than does indulging in another (admittedly good) animal pun. So amidst all this complicated reptilian lore is one eloquent point, that we hope to articulate more fully in our mechanics: Being queer—and longing to express that queerness—comes with incredibly beautiful resources (chosen families, affirming media representation, arts & culture & stories & love) and equally difficult challenges (trauma, disapproval, legislative oppression—especially against drag queens & trans folks, unjustified hatred). Realizing the dream of queer confidence is something that takes both collaboration—say, a little help from our friends—and strategy/discretion…a complex combination that gives Slow and Steady its signature mechanical flavor. More below!

WEEK TWO UPDATES II

(FROM THE MECHANICAL/LOCAL LEVEL, 

written by pun extraordinaire RACHEL and musical king YIMING???) 

We aim to design our games to reflect mainly two points:

1. Overall, we want players to experience the significance of helping a friend express themselves through our mechanics, which means our cards and overall game rules should reflect this
2. We would also want to have a “flashback” type of structure in our game between the first narrative arc and the second one.

At the beginning of our design process, we wanted to make a deck-building game, and Ash recommended us to play Sushi Go Party!, which is a deck-building game where each player competes for scores. In every round, the players draw some cards as their hands, play a card, and then pass their hands to the next person on their left. When everyone’s hands are empty, everyone sums up their scores. The highest score after 3 rounds wins the game. 

We enjoyed this deck-building process, but after some rapid prototyping, we found out that this deck-building method does not fit our game. Back to the two points above, we first decided to have one adversary (called the challenge deck) that all players fight against for a cooperative experience. Second, we want the drafting phase to be more planned so that all players can draft strategically against the challenge deck. We decided to have 3 rounds in our game, and each round signifies certain queer experiences, such as signing up for a drag race, doing makeup backstage, and finally competing in the drag race. Each round consists of the drafting phase and the combat phase. 

We came up with this design for the drafting phase (for a more detailed explanation, please see the rule book):

1. Each player should have a deck of basic and special cards.
2. Each player draws 4 special cards from the special cards deck
3. Face-down, place two special cards side by side from the special cards deck by the challenge deck
4. Reveal the leftmost card of the two face-down cards. 
5. Players now should collectively plan, and each player drafts 1 special card against this card.
6. Reveal the other face-down card and repeat step 5

In this way, players collectively draft against the challenge deck while having a certain amount of planning. We also came up with this design for the combat phase (for more detailed explanation, please see the rule book):

1. Gather the undrafted special cards from the players, shuffle them, and randomly add 2 cards into the challenge deck. Return the two revealed special cards to the challenge deck.
2. Players add their drafted special cards to their deck. 
3. Shuffle the challenge deck and deal four cards face-up, side by side, in front of the open space.
4. Each player shuffles their own deck and draws 3. These 3 cards become their hands this turn.
5. Each player plays one card in response to the dealt special cards from the challenge deck. 

The challenge deck’s special cards signify the challenges that the turtle may face in their journey to identifying themselves or to their queerness. They can be negative emotions towards the turtle themselves or judgment from the external environment. Therefore, as friends of the turtle, the players work together to provide help to the turtle in hopes of defeating the challenges and helping them build up the courage to accept their identity.

In order to begin our card design, we needed a basic format. We chose to have each card have its own power (analogous to both power and toughness in Magic: The Gathering and Hearthstone, as well as attack in Legendary Encounters and Ascension). In order to defeat a card on the challenge board, you need to attack it with a resource card that has a power greater than or equal to the challenge card’s power. Having one number determines the strength of a basic card allowed us to focus on more interesting card effects. In order for players to win, they need to increase their total confidence. To increase confidence during a round, players need to defeat all of the challenge cards on the board with one or more turns left over that allows them to play resource cards unopposed. Confidence is increased by the power of each unopposed resource card. However, confidence can be lowered during a round if the players are unable to defeat all of the challenge cards on the board. Confidence is lowered by the power of each undefeated challenge card.

Our most important goal for designing the cards was to allow players to select cards that encourage strategies to counter the challenge deck’s cards. One of our first ideas for this was to write some cards with two different flavors, which I will call “horde” cards and “strong” cards. In our rules, we prohibit one resource card from attacking two challenge cards, and we prevent two resource cards from attacking one challenge card. This means that (unless a card says otherwise) you cannot have multiple weak cards fight a single strong card, and you cannot have a single strong card fight multiple weak cards. So, if the challenge deck plays multiple weak cards, the players need to counter with multiple weak cards. If the challenge deck only plays a few cards, but each of them is strong, then the players need to counter with strong cards themselves. This creates a dynamic that encourages players to tailor their decks to the challenge deck that they are fighting. So, we decided to make a few “horde” cards that focus on creating many different low-powered cards (such as one card that acts as two “2 power” cards) and make a few “strong” cards that focus on making a small number of high-powered cards (such as one card that merges together the power of two different cards).

We continued coming up with ideas for cards without much other guidance, taking inspiration from other card games, particularly trading card games. At some point, we came up with archetypes to organize our cards into in order to focus our future design and help balance the game. These archetypes include:

• Horde cards
  • Creates multiple low-powered cards. Focuses on the overwhelming enemy with strength in numbers.
  • Weak against Strong cards
  • Includes Supportive Friend/Disapproving Parents, Break cards, Ask for Help/Take on Too Much
• Strong cards
  • Prioritizes the power of individual cards above all else. May even create fewer cards in order to have one really powerful card.
  • Weak against Horde cards
  • Includes Stronger Together/Compounding Problems, Perfectionism/Perfectionism
• Bypass cards
  • Bypasses combat to affect confidence directly
  • Not particularly strong against any archetype, but can help mitigate losses and increase winnings
  • Includes Pride/Envy
• Card Management cards
  • Might not directly affect board state. Affects what resources the players and the challenge deck have access to.
  • Generally very powerful. One way to balance is to make playing these cards cost an opportunity for board progress.
  • Includes Acceptance/Denial, Ponder Life’s Meaning/Caught in Makeup, Confront your Feelings/Bottle up Emotion
• Basic Synergy cards
  • Becomes more powerful through the use of basic cards
  • Can fit into any other archetype(s)
  • Generally become weaker over time due to dilution of basic cards, unless care is taken by the players to concentrate basic cards among one or two players
  • Includes Relaxing Sleepover/Public Shaming, Cherished Memory

Making these archetypes explicit allows us to balance card quantities between the archetypes and recognize if a particular archetype is too weak or too powerful. They also help with inspiration for future card designs, as they are helpful for prompting creative ways for new cards to fit into an archetype, or finding ways for cards to blur the boundaries between these archetypes (or subvert them entirely)! For example, Optimism increases the power of all challenge cards played this round by 1, which synergizes the best with horde cards while simultaneously playing the role of a strong card. Also, Follow Through, which allows its excess power to go towards increasing total confidence, has the potential to act as both a strong card and a bypass card depending on how it is played.

Once we designed a decent number of cards, we created rudimentary prototypes and playtested to make many balance tweaks. We are aware that we still have a number of balance issues, but we are working on them, and we will hopefully have most of them fixed by the final due date.

Early virtual prototype on playingcards.io.

WEEK THREE UPDATES

(written by YIMING, SANAIYA, and ANDREW) 

We appreciate all the feedback we received during the second in-class playtest. We found out two main issues of our game:

1. Some challenge cards are “swing cards”—in other words, they have wildly inconsistent difficulty levels. Depending on the other challenge cards they are drawn alongside, and depending on the resource cards the players draw, these challenges can be very easy or very difficult for players to overcome. There is no predictability! To some degree, “swing” cards enhance the players; experience, and no one challenge should be consistently easier or harder to overcome than another challenge. However, overly inconsistent challenge cards, as outliers in the challenge deck, threaten the precious overall equilibrium between resources and challenges.
   1. Another card-related suggestion involved changing the language of cards for maximum clarity & concision. For instance, “whoever plays this card draws a card” is a great quote—but only if it comes out of Yoda’s mouth, not out of our Slow and Steady deck. (“Whoever plays this card” is redundant in the context of a card effect. Of course someone’s gonna activate the effect!) In the interest of directness, we shortened the quote: “Draw a card.” Beautiful and brief!
   2. To carefully pick out the “swing cards,” we playtested one more time within our own group. We found out that the root cause of these cards’ “swing” lies in their effects, which might greatly increase the game’s difficulty: take “draw another challenge from the challenge deck” as an example. Combined with our rule that the players must activate the newly drawn challenge’s effect, these effects might create a cascading effect that spawns so many challenges that players cannot handle. In other words, the difficulty of the cards is not self-contained. Therefore, in our process of fixing these “swing” cards, we made efforts to make their difficulty somewhat stable & more self-contained.

2. As it stands, the rule book does not serve its purpose of accessibility. The iteration of the rule book that we used during the second in-class playtest ended up confusing our beloved classmates & game testers! To aid their understanding, we have edited the rule book to include the following:
   1. (First of all, shoutout to Ash for helping us with rulebook cleanup during OH!) 
   2. A tutorial round, which is perhaps “the most important amendment to our rule book,” according to recently-crowned Rule Book Ruler Andrew. He continues his decree with fellow Rule Book Ruler Yiming: “Rachel implemented the tutorial round ad-hoc during the second in-class playtest—what a gracious and intelligent way to address the testers’ feedback in real-time! The tutorial worked out so well that we decided to transcribe her sage guidance into writing.” 
   3. Some visual aids. 
      1. To improve our rule book, we have incorporated two visual diagrams. Through these diagrams, we the game developers intend to shed a (much-needed) light on the anatomy of basic & special cards—what they can do, what they can’t do, the terminology they use, etc. 
      2. Last (but far, far, far from least): create a game board in the same vein as Legendary Encounters, which would streamline & organize play. In a fit of reptilian inspiration, we modeled our game board after an abstract turtle. The main board represents the shell, and the individual player mats (“Friend Mats”) were meant to represent the limbs (the turtle’s arms/legs). However, due to sizing constraints, we decided to separate the Friend Mats from the main board. Now, the limbs are just limbs, existing in service of the theme of our game: turtles, obviously! 

Game Board Concept (Sanaiya’s) → Main Board Prototype (Laura’s!!)

Friend Map Prototype (Laura is a fantastic designer…even Ash said she nailed the aesthetic!)

WEEK FOUR UPDATES (written by DOORDASH UBEREATS) 

What’s up, gamers! You may know me from the “DoorDash UberEats Cam” thread on the Intro to Game Design Discord server. 

But if you need a refresher…I’m named after two of the three companies in the Food Delivery Unholy Trinity. I’m a frog made from bisexual-colored felt. And when the world sees me + my boo Mary Shelley strolling by the paparazzi—who yell, “Tell us your beautiful coming out story!” (a surprisingly earnest and deep question coming from the paparazzi)—the world melts. And without further ado, my dearest, my prettiest homo sapiens-shaped paparazzi, is my account of the newest updates in the game that charts Mary’s life story**: Slow and Steady Wins the (Drag) Race. 

(**I’d rather Mary speak her own truth, but a lip sync goddess needs her rest. So, obviously, I and the Shelley Squad—Andrew, Laura, Rachel, Sanaiya, and Yiming—have gotta hop in on her behalf!) 

FROM THE HIGHER LEVEL: DESIGN 

When I was a tadpole, long before I got my big break as a 3-follower strong Discord influencer, my whole school used to height-shame me; they’d call me all undergrown and bug-eyed. But it’s never been a better time to be a fun-sized frog…I can zoom in on Slow and Steady’s card design like no other amphibian can! As a social media influencer, I strongly believe that a few filtered images and one clever caption are worth a thousand words (but never the whole story!!). 

From top to bottom: Ye olde vintage basic card template → a visual recording of Ash and Eren’s design feedback from the last playtest* → an absolutely fabulous final basic card template, courtesy of Laura! (She went through so many incredible card design iterations to get to this final one.) These are all pictures I snapped with my custom-made macro lens camera. 

* Transcribing all of Ash and Eren’s card revision proposals from the photograph (because Sanaiya has illegible handwriting): 

• “Somehow, you should try to separate the power levels from the rest of the card. Increase contrast.” 
• “Playtesters loved Laura’s Shelley designs—try enlarging them!” 
• “What can you do to better integrate the heart and the broken heart into the overall card design?” 
• “Do not write Basic or Special on the cards themselves. Let the color of the card border be a stronger way of telling whether a card is a Special type (black border) or a Basic type (white border).” 

After Mary’s human friends brought all of these card changes to fruition on Canva, it was time for the Shelley Squad to change the “Anatomy of a Slow and Steady Card” diagrams in the rulebook accordingly. Of course, I couldn’t resist the “ka-ching!” of a few more photos; here’s one of a diagram rapid prototype: 

FROM THE LOCAL LEVEL: MECHANICS

Speaking of the rulebook, the Shelley Squad discovered during the last playtest that Slow and Steady Wins the (Drag) Race’s rules were in need of a full-beat makeover! With a graceful hand and a penchant for clear prose, Andrew laid down the foundation with a brand-new example round, geared towards noobs like Sanaiya who are learning how to synthesize all the different Slow and Steady card effects. 

Even though I’m an amphibious creature—which means you know I enjoy hopping from task to task—separating the game’s drafting tasks and combat tasks needed to happen to engender the best play experience possible. A game loop that players can outline as Draft-Play-Play-Play-Play, the Shelley Squad discovered, is far less dizzying than our original loop of Draft-Play-Draft-Play-Draft-Play! 

Mascara, highlighter, lipstick, lights and camera and action: to test out Ash and Eren’s game loop, Rachel and Yiming gracefully leaped into virtual playtesting—and then shared their findings with the rest of the group at a marathon Thursday playtesting session! 

FOLLOWING THROUGH: THE SHELLEY SQUAD IN THEIR OWN WORDS

Friday started off like any other day…but then I, DoorDash UberEats, was made aware that the Shelley Squad NEEDED TO TURN THE GAME IN!! Through my time-induced panic, I was able to jot down the following reflections from the Shelley Squad (don’t ask me how frogs can write; Sanaiya obviously cursed me): 

• “Maybe, we can get Slow and Steady published through the Weston Game Lab!” (Yiming & Andrew, our glorious Team Generalist and regaling Rulebook Czar)
• “I’m ready to open my own game development company…after all, you can’t spell gamer without GAY!” (Laura, our lovely Graphic/UX Designer) 
• “Hell yeah! I’m so proud of this group! Everyone did such an amazing job!!!” (Rachel, our marvelous Mechanic) 
• “Our workflow improved so much when we bridged the gap between the local-level mechanics and the high-level narrative/design, when everybody helped each other out, when nobody was locked into one specialty.” (Sanaiya, our snazzy Editor) 

As Mary Shelley’s loving partner, I know I definitely want to continue developing this game—especially its story elements!—with the Shelley Squad…even though the quarter is over. The quarter may end, but the ideas are always churnin’; the creativity is always workin’!