Date of Posting 25/09/2023
Hello everyone. I've recently finished the first few of what should be a whole series of game projects produced over the next few months, so I thought I'd talk about it and the wider context it exists in for a little bit.
Annihilation is the first of 26 "analogue game projects" which I'll be releasing roughly once per week until next April. By "analogue game project" I simply mean a game that is not a videogame, so it's card games, tabletop games, logic or word games, etc. I'm honestly sick of trying to get back into developing videogames but I really want to make more cool game projects so I'm coming at it from a different angle.
I'm doing this as part of the Alphabet Superset challenge which is an idea by artist and YouTuber "Struthless", with a bunch of supportive material and restrictions to help focus the actual product and output, and help control scope in order to allow you to consistently create and release one finished piece of work on a weekly basis. I've made loads of stuff over the years but it's honestly all over the place, it's incoherent, and most of it is unfinished. This seemed like a great opportunity to lock in on something we can focus on and build a coherent body of work which we can use as both a learning experience and to have a bunch of actual stuff we've made to show off.
The basic structure of the challenge is that you set a medium and a theme, then every week you produce something based on a different letter of the alphabet. The medium is as mentioned previously "analogue games". The theme I've picked is "Surviving the Future". There are also some other style constraints recommended and I've tried to go for a sort of corporate documentation/infographic style with each of the games I'll be producing.
As noted, these are all going to be games which are not a form of software, it's all tactile stuff you play offline. You know, what "game" meant before videogames were invented. This is probably going to cover a wide range of things. Annihilation is a single player card game with elements of memory and matching games and also common patience type games, but also perhaps a few additional innovations. But there will also probably things like word games, board games, mini-ttrpgs, dice games, improvisational games, dynamic logic puzzles, and other hybrid styles. I have to make another 25 of these after all, and I have very little properly planned out in advance! The main restriction is that I want it to be stuff people can play without needing lots of specialist gaming equipment, so I'm trying to restrict the required materials to things like a deck of cards, dice (mainly D6s), coins, tokens, pen and paper, etc. I may provide some printable materials that can be used to craft things like boards or something, but primarily I want people to be able to improvise whatever they need out of basic and commonly available materials.
In terms of inspirations for the sort of style I'll be working with my thematics and aesthetics, I think the biggest one would probably be The SCP Foundation, followed by things like Slaughter Valley series by Atomic Shrimp, and the aesthetics and branding of the Federal Bureau of Control from the game Control, as well as a bit of the spoof science show Look Around You. While the concept and series aren't intended to be specifically horror focused or based on the absurd, I think these are the closest aesthetic fits I've been able to sort of link to. Is there a term for that sort of official documentation style? For the vibe of public information films and old memos, of weird bureaucracy and convoluted administrative communications? I guess I'd also say a bit of retro-futurism too, inspired by some cyberpunk/cassette-punk sort of sources. I suppose this will come through eventually as I output more of the completed products and flesh out the materials a bit further.
In this first release, I've tried to go for a fairly straightforward type of documentation, with some narrative information mixed in alongside the rules. I also wanted some more interesting aesthetic visuals to enhance to sort of vibe I'm going for, so I obtained some free to use images from Pexels, glitched them up a bit, made them monochrome and played with the contrast, then included them alongside the actual writing. I think they add some additional flavour to get the vibe across a bit better than simply text alone.
I also decided that if I'm producing things vaguely in the style of "official documents" I should make some logos, so I played around with Canva for a bit and came up with a logo for the "source" of the documentation, Mulligan Institute. I think you'll end up seeing a few running themes in the styling behind the source organisations as time goes on.
I also intend to work with a limited palette of colours, using a lot of black and white flavour content as well as limited colourisation to flavour the different threads of the interconnected narrative- see below.
Because apparently I can't just produce a game and be done with it, these also have narrative links to a fictional future setting with various competing organisations all sending information back in time, which we are experiencing in the form of games with a bunch of extra lore and other information spliced into the documentation. I'll disclose some more about what the actual narrative concept is supposed to be after the project ends, and by which time I'll have had time to ensure that I can tie things all together a bit.
Annihilation is a sudden death card game about memory and management of resources. Like a lot of my ideas, I came up with the basic structure and premise while out running. In universe it's about managing a complex power generation system that relies on matter-antimatter annihilation to produce energy. In theory such a system would be able to produce a huge amount of energy with only a tiny amount of resources, which is why it seems like an appealing system. However the system is impossible to safely automate, so you have to trigger all the reactions manually- and from there we have a game! Complicating the matter is the fact that the layout of the field is a secret- you only get to peek at one card per turn, and have to use your memory to try and match everything together before running out of space for the incoming materials.
I'd recently finished listening to "The Half Life of Valery K" (Natasha pulley, 2022) when I came up with this, so I guess radiation and physics were somewhat on my mind at the time. The discussion of the "Demon Core" incident regarding runaway radiation and safe exposure etc probably inspired some of the peeking mechanics. The organisation behind this game, "Mulligan Institute", will be popping up a few more times as we work through the series.
I had to playtest it for a good couple of hours testing different variables along the way to see what made it more/less playable. Initially you could only hold 5 cards in your hand and store 5 in the dump. I expanded this to 6 after realising just how quickly both these facilities filled up, much quicker than I could remove cards from the field. I then increased the number of Peeks you could do per turn to 2, making it much faster to secure knowledge and much less risky to actually play cards. This did make it more easy to win, but in some games I was simply never coming across the require matching cards to be able to Annihilate and free up space in time. This is why I eventually added the ability to Annihilate cards already in your hand, complementing the ability to Annihilate matching cards already on the field. This allows you to free up space if you're confident you won't need these cards later, and buys enough time for the cards you need to be dealt to you. I felt this was now far too easy while being able to peek twice per turn, so I brought that back down to once per turn, and the game felt pretty decently balanced after that point.
I think it's quite fun, I'm sure there could be improvements made but I'm satisfied with what I produced, and it's the first in a series so it's important to get it out the door and use what's been learned in order to move forward with the remaining projects.
I've already released two other games by the time I got around to writing this up: Bunker Busters and The Crows Know , both of which are very different from Annihilation. I'll aim to provide posts about each of them, talking through some of the ideas and creative process, and probably outlining some of my methods too. Hopefully that will be useful or at least interesting.
Coming soon are two games for which I have the basic concepts down, but I haven't confirmed the details yet, so no names. But they are going to happen and they'll be weekly like the others. I'll post more as I get time to write about it.