An Update on Unicorn Robot Party - and some Breakdown of Inspirations

Hi guys,

If you have seen my previous posts, you may be aware that I am making a printable card game. The working title is Unicorn Robot Party.

The game is a printable card game aimed at adults that has RPG and deckbuilding elements. The topic of the game focuses around robots and unicorns. The game is one with a base game and expansions as it is designed to be a longer overall experience.

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The Update

The game has been coming along well. In true RPG fashion, your characters in the game do level and I have planned out the levelling for the robot characters. I am not sure if this is the final version yet, but I have tweaked how the robots level multiple times now and the version I have currently is the version I am happiest with so far.

Here is a short snippet of the robot levelling system (not enough to give too much away but just give an idea - and the level numbers are not included in this picture).

I have also been collecting responses to my survey where I asked for kids' responses to certain questions. I have not got many yet, but what I have got has helped and I really appreciate it.

If you are a child or are a parent etc and want to contribute a child's answer to the game, you can do the survey here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/DMZX8T7
If you provide your email on the email question (that question is not compulsory), you will also get a free copy of the base game when it is complete.
I encourage contributions from children of any age, whether toddler or teenager or anywhere in between. It all helps and it's all welcome.

I have also been working on fleshing out the pre-created characters for the game (there are options for both using the pre-created characters and for custom characters) and creating character sheets for them. The game uses story cards and the story from these cards would probably be better experienced using pre-created characters as I intend to add some specific stuff (which if the character isn't there just doesn't apply and doesn't detract from the alternate experience) but it is designed to be an enjoyable experience with both types of characters.

Some of the robot characters actually have elements to them that came from a Warforged character I was playing in Dungeons and Dragons. No robot in my game is the same as that character but some of that character's traits are spread between a few of the robots.

Strong Interests at the Root of the Game
That's not the reason this game came about though. While my Dungeons and Dragons character, 082, did inspire certain aspects of some of my characters, their backstories are different and 082 did not inspire creating a game around robots.

My interest in the topics at hand, being robots, unicorns, gaming and storytelling pre-dates 082.

I've had an interest in gaming in some form for most of my life. When I was a child it is more video gaming than board gaming (though ofc we played some board games but it's not like it is now).

I remember getting a Playstation 1 and being absolutely OBSESSED with Spyro the Dragon (and I just got the rebooted version on PC again now which is pretty exciting!). You didn't want to disturb me when I was playing unless you wanted me to talk to you about it and talk to you about it and talk to you about it. It was a obsession with the game itself though, not the technology as such, as I just am a very obsessive person in terms of my interests which is something that has stayed with me pretty much my whole life. It's not a problem though. The intense interest I feel towards my interests is actually one thing I like about myself.

As time went on, my interests changed and my gaming even reduced for a while there, but later on my interests in gaming expanded. I started introducing my nephew to various types of gaming and I have ever since, and I've also been exposed to different types of gaming myself throughout time, which I've then shown him. I discovered exer-gaming originally in the form of the Wii, but now I also use our Oculus we recently purchased second hand. As someone who had mostly played console games that were either single player or local co-op, it was my partner who introduced me to online gaming and our first online game together was World of Warcraft. We started going to a board games night and through that we gained some friends and also discovered the sorts of board games that come from actual game shops.

These interests stuck. I re-found the Sims through a funny post I saw online and realised it was more fun than I remembered and through that I found funny Sims videos and discovered lets plays and other gaming videos. I started making my own gaming videos. I've been part of a few Dungeons and Dragons campaigns now too. My understanding of Dungeons and Dragons prior to this was limited to Munchkin is a parody of it, and prior to knowing what Munchkin was, my understanding was limited to how I'd seen stuff like cartoons portray Dungeons and Dragons (so nerds in a basement wearing elf ears while they play...?). More recent portrayals than what I had seen at the time seem a bit different and more in depth and less like the whole joke is just that it is nerdy (I mean, that's often part of the joke, just not necessarily the whole joke in the more recent things I've seen).

All of these forms of gaming have remained as interests to various degrees.

As for robots, that interest did come about more recently but I'm not sure what exactly triggered it. I have always liked fictional robots. They are often either funny or interesting characters (or both) depending on their universe, the character and their level of understanding of things. A deeper interest came later on though, and I'm not 100% sure where it came from, but I think it was because of my interest in Anki Cozmo. I was interested in Anki Cozmo before Vector as I only found out about Vector later on from a worker in a shop that sold Cozmo who told me about how at the time, Vector was coming out soon. My partner and I also assembled robots at an event (which you can see pictured above) and the design of these robots was a collaboration between Flinders University and the Adelaide Hackerspace.

I also have an interest in AI and machine learning which comes into play with my game too including the use of AI / machine learning to provide some of the content for the cards. I am trying to make an AI to create some of the content and the game addresses AI related themes as well. I have worked along with an example of an AI writing creator in Python and essentially written the same program, but did it as the article went through it, trying to gain understanding while doing it, and I don't completely understand exactly what every line does but I'm learning it, slowly. I don't know if that's what I will ultimately use, but I do have that program created at the moment (mostly copied really, but that still happens sometimes due to the nature of programming - normally moreso with simpler programs - and it was a tutorial essentially so I don't think they mind people using it). At the moment, I still don't really have enough data to train it and use it properly yet (or at least it probably wouldn't do a very good job with so little data - don't forget to complete the survey if you are a kid / have kids / have access to kids who have permission to be part of this and you would like a free copy of the base game: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/DMZX8T7).

I also want to have an AI create items for the item deck, create punishments and create room descriptions and I don't yet know if these should be completely separate programs or not. It seems like separate programs would work better as AI and Machine Learning programs seem to do their best at learning one thing and describing a room is different to creating items but at the same time, there are AI programs that do multiple things and I'd imagine there is the possibility of even having each part trained and created separately but still having it ultimately tied together or within the same program. There seems to also be people trying to get AI programs to work together and to also be more adaptable in the way they learn. I read about this the other day here: https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/ai-can-learn-real-world-skills-playing-video-games

I'm not completely sure where my interest in unicorns came from. I've just always somewhat liked unicorns, whether they are an innocent, pure traditional type of unicorn or more along the lines of the unicorns from Charlie the Unicorn or like the ones from Gravity Falls who act like jerks or any other type of unicorn. My interest has increased and expanded over time due to exposure to different things, but that interest has always been there to a degree.
One of my first shirt designs within my business was unicorn related. It was this one: Unicorn Championship Fighting.

With storytelling, that interest has just been around forever. I used to want to be a writer as a child and I wrote stories. I have written and made up stories for as long as I can remember. Doing this through a game seems like a lot of fun. A lot of work too, but also a lot of fun.

So basically that's I guess sort of where this all comes from. It's based on some very big interests of mine and I am finding creating this to be a big but enjoyable task and I feel really excited about it and I'm loving seeing all the little aspects of it coming together over time as I progress through making this a reality.

Conclusion
Thank you for reading. If you fill out the survey, thank you for contributing to my game. I'm really excited about all of this and seeing my ideas coming together as actual things like character sheets and written levelling systems as I'm getting each part made is really nice. It's nice to see it out of my head and as an actual thing. I really hope you all enjoy it too when I reach the point of releasing the base game, and then I hope you enjoy the expansions in the future too.

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LINKS
Survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/DMZX8T7

Unicorn Championship Fighting (Redbubble): https://www.redbubble.com/people/birchmark/works/23416350-unicorn-championship-fighting

Vote for my next ORTI character here: https://poll.ly/#/LBp54z3X

Birchmark Website / Portfolio: http://birchmark.com.au/

Redbubble: https://www.redbubble.com/people/birchmark?asc=u

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/BirchmarkAu

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Thank you for reading!
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