Hi guys,
I have been working on my card game Unicorn Robot Party.
What is Unicorn Robot Party?
Unicorn Robot Party is a card game aimed at adults that has story, RPG and deckbuilding elements. The game is designed to be sold as a printable game (digital download) on Etsy however I am also looking at a board game print on demand company to make an already printed version. The topic of the game focuses around robots and unicorns. It has both a Story mode and a PVP mode. The game is one with a base game, which is what is currently being made, and expansions. It will have expansions as it is designed to be a longer overall experience with multiple stories. The game also involves the use of dice, used in a similar way to how dice tend to be used in RPGs.
Card Previews
The game has pre-created characters and playing with the pre-created characters is how I would recommend playing the game, but it can also accommodate custom characters. Each character has their own deck which includes abilities they have, such as attacks or ways to boost their future actions. There are also more random / less specific versions of the same types of cards for custom characters to make this aspect work with the custom characters.
Other than artwork I have created all of the cards for the pre-created characters personal decks. I have printed those out and I am in the process of making my own deck of them for play testing and the like, and I have chosen to hand draw some art on some of them and I thought I would share them with you, both as a preview of the sorts of cards that are in the game, but also to show off some concept art / hand drawn pictures.
The first one I have (pictured below) is Fake Magic Show for the character Easton, who is a robot.
This card is used to impact the results of future actions against a group of characters within the game and you have a choice about what the impact is.
The second one I have is Draw for the character Rain Star, who is a unicorn.
This card gives a boost to the character's next strength check and also heals them for 1 if they are missing any health. The drawing within the drawing in the case of my personal hand drawn cards is also based on my design, Unicorn Championship Fighting, which I sell on Redbubble and Threadless. This is Unicorn Championship Fighting:
The next card is Horn Stab for the character Electric Aura, who is a unicorn.
This is a melee ability which all unicorns have called Horn Stab. The damage varies per character though and also varies with how many dice characters have in their strength stat as levelling up throughout the game sometimes involves adding another die to a stat. The change per level is the same for all characters but the bonus added to the D6 (dice with 6 sides) is different.
The final one is a card that I like conceptually but I kinda shat the bed on this one when making a hand-drawn picture for it.
This one is Adoracharm for the character Little Allie, who is a unicorn.
This one is essentially a safe card for two rounds of combat in Story or 2 rounds of PVP. You use your magic to enhance your adorableness and this one requires two different skill checks. It requires a skill check using logic to perform the adorableness enhancing spell and a charm skill check for the actual adorableness to see if it works well enough to make people not want to attack you. If you succeed at the adorableness enhancing spell (the logic check), you have an extra D6 to the charm check for every 5 levels the character is.
With the picture for this I tried to do the cute eye thing with the little white bits of light in the eyes, but somehow I messed it up and made this creepy looking unicorn instead. This is one reason digital art can be easier as it is easier to fix stuff like this and work out how it should be to make it look right.
These are all the cards for this card preview. Here there are pictured together below:
Thank you for reading my post. I hope you enjoyed it.
LINKS
Teenagers over 13 or Parents of Children, get a free copy of the printable version of the base game for Unicorn Robot Party by completing this survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/DMZX8T7
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
Thank you for reading!
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That seems fun!
I've come up with a board game during last Christmas and I've made already version 0.2 of it. It's surprisingly difficult to keep everything in balance, but hope your game will be successful :)
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Cool. Don't find many people making a board game unless you go to specific communities for it (ie board game development subreddits etc). You see people making video games but you don't often run into individuals making board games. It obviously happens because there's a lot of indie board games rather than them all being made by only big companies, but I haven't come across it much outside of specific communities.
What sort of board game are you making? Are you thinking of releasing it commercially?
Also, yes keeping stuff in balance can be a tricky part of things. Mine originally started as story only (sort of somewhere between a choose your own adventure book / telltale game etc and an RPG like dungeons and dragons) and I had to work out how to make NPCs right in terms of difficulty and player strengths (made harder by character's levelling and NPCs being at least partially random by a lot of them being cards you draw) but there wasn't too much balancing concerns. Then I saw the potential for PVP as well though and that made me have to consider balance a little bit more too so one player isn't OP and doesn't just dominate the game.
I hope your game is successful too.
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I didn't even realize there are communities making board games, but I stumbled upon one when I was trying to find gear to make the first version of the board game. I was surprised, even though I shouldn't be, as it's so easy to find people with similar interests on internet if you really try. Otherwise it would be quite impossible, as you said, there aren't too many people making board games.
My board game is a kind of treasure hunt in a dungeon, filled with traps and monsters. I would make a post about it, but if I would ever be able to publish it commercially (which is unlikely), people could finally recognize me from Steem. So it's a shame that when I finally have something cool to post about, I can't post about it without risking my anonimity on Steem :D
It's interesting how your game evolved like that. PVP has great potential and if you manage to get it work out well, it can be really awesome! Do you have people interested you'll test the game with? With enough people testing there's always someone who can come up with the OP or game breaking playstyles.
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Yeah the internet is good for that. Sometimes it is websites specifically for the interests but other times it is stuff like subreddits or facebook groups. Tags on here can work similarly too but it's still different to something like a focused subreddit to a degree (not better or worse, just different). I've had chats with people on here before about video game development and taken part in one of the steemitjams(steemit game jam) but unless I'm looking under the wrong tags, card and board game development seems a little rarer on here. Ofc there's stuff like subreddits before it because there's more reddit users than Steemit users, but hopefully we see a bit more over time on here. I see board game and card game reviews on here (still not as common as video game content though) and that's cool but not much on the development side of things.
It's interesting being online too because it gives you a different idea of what types of people are doing things too than you might find otherwise. I have a couple of video game development programs ranging from ones where you do most of it to semi-drag-and-drop ones and I remember reading a discussion about the age of people using it and there were a lot of people in their 70s and 80s making video games with it. It's not the demographic I would have expected but I'm not totally surprised either. Just not what you expect to see. Much like Shirley Curry for that matter (80 something year old who makes Skyrim videos).
Your game sounds interesting. I've played a few dungeon based ones (including one where you essentially made the dungeon which is kind of flipping stuff like Munchkin on its head) and they all tend to be reasonably different from each other. I hope it works out well. Conceptually it sounds interesting. I don't think I've seen much of traps in dungeon based board games before. Most of the time it's just been monsters I think.
I do have people to test mine with. My partner and I have friends we do Dungeons and Dragons with about once a week and we play board games with them and some other friends too, but less often than D&D normally. They're people who play a range of board games so they are good for testing that sort of market (I guess the market of people who play the sorts of games you would buy at actual games shops as opposed to people who only know stuff like Monopoly) and we'll definitely do it but I'll possibly try a wider audience for playtesting too.
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Go away bread, I saw it first 🙄
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