Staying Alive – Making the game

The philosophy of Staying Alive – Ozzie killers was a game built around Australian Animals and the joke that anything in Australia can kill you. The joke around the world that anything in Australia can kill you and so we thought we would play on that concept and use the animals, and form a points system allocating to how deadly our animals are.

Once our theme and overall concept was developed we used ideation and brainstorming to develop how our game would work. During our brainstorming we decided that we all agreed that we liked the idea of simple card game, that was easy to play, fun and allowed for mistakes to be made as we went. I think I really pushed this idea of keeping the simple stupid, as when we played games during research I struggled to play and enjoy games that were highly involved or complicated and games that had a lot of actions. Where as personally I felt when I played card games, that had less mechanics and less involved mechanics I was able to enjoy the games more so. Thankfully the rest of my group agreed with this and had the same thoughts as each other.

After doing some quick research we found on The Board Game Family website and their top tips for having a successful family board game. Their tips included, having an easy game for kids to understand, where rules could be explained un under 10 minutes and includes elements of “push your luck.” and challenges to keep the game interesting. This then further cemented our idea of having a “Simple Stupid” type of game, as from our own experience thats what we preferred and everything mentioned above was aspects we wanted included into our game.

This game was developed by myself, Laura, Molly, Caitlin and Jess. We worked well at a team and each contributed equally and fairly to develop our game, while allowing each of us to have our own ideas we also took feedback from each other well, which only contributed to making our game better.

Laura worked on the overall overview of the game, and what the game was about. Laura also designed the playing cards and what they would look like. Really making our game come to life. Molly looked at the market and spoke about our background research of the game. Taking into consideration what helped inspire our game, and also analysed where our game would sit competitively with other games. Jess looked at and researched game loops, rules and mechanics of our game, and made sure it was clear how game was to be played. While Caitlin looked at theme, narrative, the game world and emergent players stories. I then was left to discuss iteration, play testing, what we took from feedback and putting the final presentation together.

If you would like to hear about my team mates efforts and contributions their blogs are linked above.

Please view the below video to look at hear about my further reflection of the game: