I was a creative director at my studio for a week!
We had another awesome game jam week at Doborog. Last time, we all made projects by ourselves. I designed an FMV game about aliens preparing their own for an Earth invasion vis-à-vis silly stock videos. At the beginning of our game jam weeks, we have company kickoff meeting where we announce what we’re working on. I told everyone I was open to collaborating, but I don’t think my colleagues are as deeply into the weird cult genre of video games that use live action video clips as much as I am. (I don’t see a lot of streamers playing Slam City with Scottie Pippen, but they should be, damn it!)
Prior to this jam week, I got permission from my boss Erik to adapt a strategy combat card game I’ve been working on for years into a Clone Drone game. Clone Drone is our studio’s central IP. The Clone Drone games are about robots with human consciousness who must slice the limbs off of their robot captors.
The card game I developed has the working title Body Slam. (I wrote about it a few weeks ago.) Players take control of a fighter spread out over six body part cards: head, arms, legs, and chest. Each body part has an associated set of cards, which form a deck. During play, fighters break each other’s parts with attack cards. When a part is broken, its associated cards can no longer be played, unless the player decides to transfer damage to their chest, bringing them a step closer to being knocked out. The player who gives a final blow to their opponent’s chest wins the game. The game was inspired by a comics publisher I wanted to work with. I thought the game would give their artists a unique six card canvas on which to draw amazing fighter characters! Unfortunately, the publisher doesn’t seem to be in a financial position to develop Body Slam, so the game has been on ice.
Erik and I agreed in writing that I would continue to own the card game after the jam. This was an exercise in development, not an excuse to co-opt something I spent years developing. That said, the mechanic of breaking individual limbs was a perfect match for Clone Drone, a combat-based game with limb-chopping mechanics. I never developed a proper theme for Body Slam and Clone Drone’s world of arm-slicing robots seemed like a perfect fit.
At the jam kickoff meeting, I announced the project. Once again, I said I’d love to collaborate. To my surprise, our QA Lead Jonathan said he wanted to join my project. He wasn’t sure what he could contribute, but he really liked the idea. I was happy to have him on-board. A major coup was when Dylan, our Lead Level Designer and an expert programmer, decided the card game sounded cool and came on-board. Now I wouldn’t have to struggle and most likely fail to program a game I was quickly realizing was beyond my depths! Our Community Manager Carissa is a very talented pixel artist who didn’t know what to do for the jam. I smiled and told her we could use some character art, which got her excited. We had a creative director, a programmer, an artist, a willing assistant, and a day later, our Marketing Specialist Josh who missed the kickoff came on-board to make music. This was a true team!
My first task was to demonstrate how the card game worked. Since time was ticking – we only had a week – I hastily setup a demo on the dining room table. Luckily, the week before I was at Gen Con, so I had fresh memories of how to give a good card game demo. Over Slack huddle, holding my iPhone above the table, I awkwardly flipped cards and explained the rules. Before I was done with the one hour call, Dylan had already prototyped basic card logic in Unity, something that probably would’ve taken me an entire day.
Early on, we determined this would be a single player strategy card game like Slay the Spire, as opposed to a multiplayer game like Marvel Snap. Multiplayer was too ambitious for a week. This meant my first task was to design a lot of new cards. Most of the ones in Body Slam have mechanics that are easy to understand in a card game, but would be too specific or difficult to program in such a short time. For example, I have a series of cards where players can either deal damage or choose to take damage for a strategic benefit, like drawing cards. A player being able to choose between two possibilities would’ve required a system for prompting the player on what they wanted to do when that specific card came up. Too complicated! Dealing damage or drawing cards were within scope, and central to gameplay, but not a choice mechanic that would only be used on one or two cards.
I took characters and weapons from Clone Drone in the Hyperdome, thought about their in-game mechanics, then translated them to my card game. In Hyperdome, the short sword is a basic weapon that’s always available to the player at the start of the game. So I made a “Short Sword” attack card that deals a decent 2 damage, and would always be in the player’s hand when they started their game. I also had to do a lot of rebalancing. In a multiplayer card game, you want the players’ decks to be evenly matched. In the video game, the player would fight a succession of Samurai-Bots with easy, medium, and hard difficulties, so I needed to create decks for each that would challenge the player incrementally. I found that giving a Samurai-Bot fewer defense cards made them much more vulnerable to attack, and allowed the player to defeat them faster.
As I was redesigning the cards and cutting game rules for scope, I also needed to draw art for the cards. Carissa would handle the character portraits for our hero Blink and the three Samurai-Bots enemies, which included broken variations on each of the parts. Jonathan is more familiar with 3D design, not 2D art, but was helpful sourcing background images and creating the card layouts in Canva, which I introduced him to. So I would take on the card art for the 24 cards. I was inspired by Dylan’s doodle-style, MS Paint art he made for a few test cards. I’m self-conscious about my art abilities, but I figured working in a doodle style would signal that this was more of an in-progress draft, in contrast to the polished look of Carissa’s illustrations. I took screencaps of our characters for reference, and drew over stills of action movies to try and capture the feel of the attack poses, even if my ability to draw perspective, anatomy, and proportions is at a 6th grade level. And I’m being generous.
Throughout the busy week, my main activities were designing new cards, drawing card art, entering card data in the Unity backend (thanks to a user-friendly system Dylan devised), and most importantly, guide and encourage to the team. Josh decided to base his tracks on a roguelike deckbuilder with a terrific soundtrack, Dicey Dungeons, which was an inspired choice. Jonathan played through Hyperdome to find the perfect arena backgrounds to stage the game. Carissa went above and beyond, creating animations for body parts breaking. And every day, Dylan’s engine got closer and closer to realizing the vision for the game, with defensive cards that could block damage and even the ability to play as a Samurai-Bot to fight Blink!
Finally, we reached the end of the week. Dylan and I made literal last minute adjustments to gameplay right before the demo meeting. Everyone on the team had something cool to show-off, like our artist Isaac’s prototype for a Clone Drone endless runner, and Erik’s bold experiments with [REDACTED DUE TO NDA]. Our team went last. I was a little nervous, hoping my art wasn’t too primitive and no game breaking bugs would sabotage our demo. Thankfully, Clone Drone Overload (as I titled it) engaged the room. My colleagues took turns playing against the Samurai-Bots, openly discussing their strategies for besting them. They fought strategically and cleverly, maintaining enough working body parts after a grueling three battles to deliver a kill shot to the final purple Samurai-Bot. At the end of the demo, Erik said it was the best game jam week in the company’s history. He also praised my artwork unprompted, calling it “evocative.” Okay!
Josh posted a video about the game to TikTok and YouTube. There are many comments from players who said they’d be excited to play it. On Doborog’s Discord, one fan is actually trying to reverse engineer my game from the video and create a fan version. Erik is considering developing Clone Drone Overload as a studio product, but it won’t happen in the immediate future. If we decided to move forward, there’d be some legal stuff for us to hash out. But I’m just happy that my card game got some life outside of cardboard playtest sessions. It’s been a long time since I had the role of team leader for a project I felt creative ownership on. It was fun! I know from experience the role can be exhausting and heartbreaking too, but this was a reminder that I know how to creative direct when I want to. And maybe I want to.
🎲 Your Turn: Have you ever led a team before? Did you enjoy the experience? Was it difficult? If you were given a week to make any kind of creative project you wanted and a team to help, what would you make? I’d love to hear from you! Reply directly to this email or tell the whole world by hitting the orange button below to leave a comment.
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