INFORMATION :
Genre : Strategic and asymmetric Board Game.
Platform : Tiles and Cards.
Duration : 9 Months.
Team : 5 peoples.
Mission : Create a board game in order to publish it.
Position : Game Designer, Project Manager.
CONTRIBUTION :
- Creation of the original concept.
- Design of cards, tiles and their effects.
- Design of game loop and replay value.
- Manage team works.
THE GAME :
The dream world has been attacked by Unktehi, the nightmare god, who tries to expand his domination over this world. Three ancient American Indian spirits manage to call three kids from the human world to help them. To complete this quest, the spirits are looking for the Dream Catcher that will put an end to the curse and trap Unktehi forever !
Ayu Nagi is an exploration, treasure hunt game composed of tiles. It opposes one player who’s embodying Unktehi, to 1 to 3 other players who are playing the three spirits. The spirits will have to control children's pawns, which can be controlled by every spirit during the game. They will move these pawns in order to return land tiles, to find clues about the position of the dreamcatcher, and retrieve it. They will fight Unktehi, who will influence the board and move his minions to catch the children’s pawns. He will also inflict nightmare points to the spirits. The game ends when the spirits have found the dreamcatcher or when Unktehi has inflicted 3 nightmare points to the spirits.
MY WORK :
Ayu Nagi was my first project at Rubika Supinfogame. We had one year, as a team of 3 game designers and 3 game artists to create a board game, and make it almost publishable. At that time I had almost no experience in creating games.
On this project, I learned a lot of things, because I worked on various aspects of making a game.
It was the first project where I really worked with a team. Before, it had happened to me a few times to have group work to do in high school for example. But there, I got to know people through work and teambuilding to get along. Learn to trust each other in a team, being able to express your ideas to people you don’t know very much at first. But also having constructive discussions, to find the best possible mechanics and ideas. And sometimes, accept to let go of our ideas, even if you think that they are good. And also the part about organization as a team, knowing how to adapt to everyone’s schedule to find when to do the meetings… Be flexible, as much in our schedule as in our ideas. I discovered that working as a team was something I preferred more than working alone.
I spent a lot of time doing iterations, and making paper prototypes to test different mechanics. I learned a lot of interesting things in the game design range, like how to do effective brainstorming, how to simplify an idea to make it clearer, how to associate mechanics together, and develop some that need more depth, how to do playtests to get the best user feedback…