If you have been around me the past couple of weeks, you might have learnt a few things about something called Mixology Madness. If you have not, here is a little run down.
I do a subject called Game Experience Design (BCM300) and in that subject we look at the intricacies and theories behind game playing. But one of our tasks for this subject is to create our own board game with a group. My group consisted of 3 members other than my self – Charlotte Pierro, Michaela Shales and Hannah Dower. We created the game called Mixology Madness.
Mixology Madness is a card deck building based game. Players are required to create and build their own cocktails – under the story that they are in a bartending competition. Players can choose their own path, if they wish to work solo and just aim to win, or they can optionally play some action cards and sabotage other players to prevent them winning. We did this on the basis that players can almost play in their own style, we really wanted to give a base foundation of a game that was easy and fun to play, and then players can build on the game and create their own rules if they wished!
The process of making our game was one that went quite smoothly. Initially it was just Hannah, Michaela, and I in our group, we spent the first week or so coming up with our ideas. We all had some pretty different interests in genres, such as fantasy and apocalyptic styles. We had eventually all settled on the fact as young adults, we liked alcohol – big shocker I know! But then came the whole, “how do we make an alcohol game without alcohol (seeing that it can’t be play tested on campus)” and proved itself to be a little difficult but eventually with some ideation, we created Mixology Madness (which took a while to give the name).
By the time we had began developing the game, we had Charlotte join us, and that day we created a google doc to collaborate with one another as half the group were online, we also created a Facebook Messenger chat and assigned roles for everyone to be doing.
Charlotte and Michaela drew up a table with the cocktail name, ingredients needed and the difficulty to make the cocktail.
Whilst Hannah and I began to brainstorm how we might design our cards in the prototype.
On the same day we set our plan for the rest of the semester which was
Week 6 – Create game cards and begin a prototype
Week 7 – Create rulebook
Week 8 – Finalise card design
Week 9 – Rule book finalised & prototype playtest
From here we all branched out and did our on part of the task.
We had a few weeks of quiet time with little work on the assignment – at least to my knowledge. At that point I was working on the cards for our game. I did this on Canva, it was the easiest place to follow my template on a mass scale. And when I say mass, I really mean mass. We had over 100 cards, infact we have around 150 cards. All had to be designed and images found and so on.
Making all the cards was a timely process, I wanted to keep them looking clean, aesthetic and something that would match all the designs and layouts of the cards. So I went for an almost pale mint green colour as the wallpaper to match it all. The alcohol cards have the ingredients needed, an image for aesthetic purposes, a difficultly level and a fun fact about the cocktails! I added the fun facts to make it another little aspect that the players can learn from.
I did find it a little frustrating, because the cards took awhile to make, and at the time I had messaged the group asking them if they wanted to change it or could someone begin our rule book, it was getting a little close to the deadline for my comfort for such a big project. But I got little attention shown to my messages – which I did find frustrating as I felt like I was the only one at one stage doing work on the assignment. It got right to the night before the Friday where we were due to do our play testing, and I made sure I let my group know this – because sometimes its just best to be up front and honest to get the job done. Charlotte managed the rules sheet and Hannah fixed up the actions on the cards, while I then had to convert all 150 card images into a word document to the correct size we wanted, and then I had to print them. Cut them. Cut cardboard. Glue the cards onto the cardboard to make the prototype more sturdy. And then tidy the deck up. This was an over night task and I can confirm I watched exactly 4 Harry Potter films!
In the end, Charlotte and I presented the play testing to a group of girls in class and apart from a few points of advice from them, they really seemed to like our game. This was pretty rewarding to see people enjoy playing our game! Some advice was to specify the rules more and to possibly adapt the actions that players could take as they were a little over powered for the player and can completely knock a player out of the game. We also had to create our presentation video to present to the class. My task was to create part of our video that presented the rules and theme of the game. That was a simple task and there was no issues there, the video was easy to make as we all understood our game.
In summary Mixology Madness is a game I enjoyed making, I am proud of my contribution to the group task. I put a lot of effort into the work that I have done for the group task, and I am really proud of myself for the final product. If given the chance, I’d love to kickstart our product and see how it might go on the market! Thanks to the girls in my group for making sure we all make it to the end of the road!
Till next time
Alex
Charlotte’s Blog – https://perspectivephotography.home.blog/2021/05/13/individual-contribution-to-mixology-madness/
Hannah’s Blog – https://heyhoneytheblog.wordpress.com/2021/05/13/mixology-madness-individual-contribution/
Michaela’s Blog – https://michaelashales.wordpress.com/2021/05/14/my-contribution-to-mixology-madness/
AMC Blogs 
Reblogged this on Game Cultures.
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