Institution
TU Dublin
Medium
Media
Graduation Year
Class of 2025
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Next Day! is a cooperative party board game where you and your friends have to deliver as many packages as possible as a team. All while covertly completing challenges to win the Deliverer of Incredible Kindness award. I started Next Day! as a passion project. It showcases the type of game that I would like to play with people. Initially it was a complex story game, but while testing, I found that I wanted to play with friends in a more social setting. I designed the game to invoke feelings of joy and satisfaction as players worked as a team, but as the game goes on, players slowly start to show their true colours and either turn against each other or try to keep the momentum going as a team. Next Day! is a co-op party game that has many play styles; you can try to make each other laugh, play for the highest score as a team, or try to selfishly gain as many challenges as possible. I want to display the process of making such a game, as the process is tedious and undervalued. There have been many hours sitting and studying how people interact with each other and the game, refining after each comment, laugh and turn. I was inspired by games such as Sleeping Gods, Cards Against Humanity, Exploding Kittens, Mario Party and much more. I looked at games where player interaction created comedic moments. I wanted players to feel as if they made the comedic moments happen. The art style invokes a sense of child's play, which covers up the dark meaning behind the packages and events in the game. Inspired by games such as Muffin Time and Exploding Kittens.The packages and events in the game are all designed to give a WTF moment. Wanting to invoke the same feelings and reactions as in Cards Against Humanity, I paired the simplistic, childish art style with events that people find hard to imagine. For example, the cute kangaroo in the game is being delivered to a steak factory. The initial reaction of seeing the art on the card is a sense of gigil, but when players see the address, it slowly dawns on them the fate of the baby kangaroo. Later in the game, an event occurs, and players can either force-feed the kangaroo, sing it a song, or kick it. These options are in three different extremes, and depending on the player's style or position, they may play it differently. Just like in Cards Against Humanity, choosing the "bad" option doesn't always punish you but will reward the team with the WTF moment. I found that players who choose to sing to the kangaroo wish to not deliver it to the factory, so I made it so if that option is chosen, then the address changes to a police station where now they can free it. The other 2 options create havoc in the team as they continue on with the job. Making rewards that fit different personalities and playstyles requires a lot of refining and testing, and I make sure every event is designed to give a satisfying result no matter the playstyle. I want this showcase to show how the game has evolved from paper sketches into a playable game. You can see where things went wrong, when features were introduced, refined or scrapped. How playtesting influenced the speed of development and what prototyping for games looks like. This is rarely showcased to the public, and much of the work we do as designers is hidden.The final "product" will be ecologically printed by a factory in France. This is because I want to promote fun games with little impact environmentally. I want to show the world that just because something is eco-friendly, it doesn't need to be dull and expensive. The factory uses recycled ink and recycled paper and is run off of renewable energy. As an added bonus, the game will never have to be on a plane or leave the EU, making the carbon footprint at launch minimal.
