How to Playtest Your Game

The game has finally reached a point where we're ready to show it to the world! Well not yet exactly, but we did show it to a few friends. As any self respecting game designer would know, play-testing a game is one of the more important parts of the game design process. In fact, if there are any doubts about a game mechanic, play-testing it is the way to go. In this article, I talk about how we conducted preliminary play tests for the game, and some of the interesting things we learned during the play-tests. The Play-testers First let me talk...

Customizing Candidates in Party Animals

I'm a little sad that we broke our streak of consecutive monthly devblog updates last month, but it was quite the hectic month for us as we tried to get work done in between dodging family gatherings for Christmas (A perennial nightmare for Filipino introverts).  We did get quite a bit of work done though, which I'm excited to share with you all today. Procedural Party Animals In the process of making Party Animals it was always in the back of our heads to make some aspects of the game procedural in order to increase the replay value...

The Machinations of Politics Part 2

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Meet the Candidates of Party Animals

Election fever is starting to hit our home country of the Philippines, so I thought the time was ripe for a quick devblog about the candidates of Party Animals.  Each candidate has a specific set of bonuses that will nudge players towards a specific play style and ties in to their personal history.  We only have three candidates for now, although we have more candidates down the line, and ideally we'll be able to let players customize the candidate of their choice.  With that said, let's meet the candidates! Mousilita Ereñeta Mousey...

Stories and Tradeoffs in Political Party Animals

This is Ka Eldereta.  He is a tribal chieftain that represents the interests of the indigenous people of Summer Island.  His name is a play on words, as “Kalderetang Kambing” is a traditional Filipino stew made with tomatoes, liver paste, carrots, potatoes, and most importantly, goat’s meat.  Filipinos have an almost embarrassing affinity for wordplay and puns, and it’s something that we wholeheartedly embrace.  For example, we have an excel spreadsheet of animal names for Owls that includes “Owlfredo” and “Owlberto”.  If...

The Animation Pipeline for Political Party Animals

As we inch ever slowly to a closed Alpha, we’re slowly building up our social media presence.  If you haven’t already, please do follow us and spread the word on Twitter and Tumblr.  We’ve had a pretty good run of bi-weekly testing and for the first time last week the latest version of the game was played by people from outside the team.  The results were encouraging, since both our friends Kyle and Gwen had fun playing (see Gwen's victorious pose), but there were definitely numerous things that we still have to work on. In the...

Patronage Politics and New Mechanics in Political Party Animals

Ryan's note: Hi all, I asked Marnielle to write this month's devlog, and he talks about the mechanics that we're slowly adding to the game. The development of Party Animals has been hanging around for over a year already (or years) but the truth is that the game’s mechanics are not yet zoned in. We’re still looking for the fun part. We’re at the stage when we are adding new mechanics and testing them out as soon as we can then decide whether to keep them, change, or discard. If we’re not having fun with it, our target players most probably won’t....