Exploding Kittens
Work Summary
Position: Senior Game Designer
Worked with a small team rapidly iterating on more than five separate game prototypes for an unannounced digital party game pack. This culminated in a presentation of two distinct vertical slice demos and several working prototypes.
Personally led the rapid development of two of the unique game prototypes. Both were selected to be part of the party pack demonstrated to our publisher.
Mentored a junior designer, whose own game prototype was also selected to be in the publisher demo.
Game Info
Genre: Digital Party Game
Expected Platforms: PC, Consoles, and Mobile
Release Date: Project Cancelled
Engine: Unity
Cancelled Project
The Quiz Game Challenge
I joined this project in the middle of development. While there were several prototypes that were working quite well, I started by taking over two prototypes that hadn’t quite found their stride. One of them was a quiz show game. It mainly suffered from a lack of identity or unique selling points. There’s already plenty of trivia games where you just select multiple choice answers.
I changed up the formula in two significant ways:
Focus on input methods that took full advantage of a touch screen interface. Timelines, maps, spot the difference, etc…
Made the questions strange, obscure, and difficult.
This created a dynamic where players weren’t intended to guess the exact right answer, but instead would give an approximation of what they thought was right, with the closest answers gaining points. These questions covered everything from history to psychology, geography, sports, and art.
This new approach, quickly prototyped in Power Point and sprinkled with chaotic humor, was surprisingly fun and brought of a level of surprise through play that was missing from previous versions. It also allowed players to be partially right, so incorrect players could still get some amount of points instead of pure binary success and failure.
This demo went through several iterations to increase replayability and to fix scoring edge cases. It went on to be one of the most solid demos in our pitch to the publishers.