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Treats and Trials: Postmortem!

 Game Info

  • Group Number 2

  • In Treats and Trials, Players build their own haunted houses out of trap and candy cards. Then, the exploration phase begins and players explore each other’s haunted houses by turning over cards! Candy cards give you candy pieces, but trap cards raise your fear level and can force you to leave without collecting all the candy! The Player with the most candy after three rounds is the winner!

  • Target Audience: Director, Explorer, Competitor, Achiever


The Pitch


This time around, we were pitching our own original game ideas to the class! This assignment was due on halloween night, and since halloween was fresh in my mind I was thinking about halloween games that I could create. I recalled how when I was very young, my grandparents liked to set up a haunted house in their front yard for trick or treaters to explore. (It terrified me when I was 3!) With this on my mind, I thought of how I could bring the experience of exploring a haunted maze to a card game, or more specifically, how to do exploration in a card game.


One of the most important factors of exploration games is the unknown, the feeling of discovery when you turn a corner or peek down a well or summit a mountain and find something spectacular. But how to replicate this with cards? One way that card games create uncertainty is by having cards be face down, so that you don’t know what it is. So then why not hide what’s ahead by having players explore by deciding which card to turn over? I decided to go with the concept of a game where you explore a haunted maze by flipping over cards laid out in a grid, with hazards and treasures to find along the way! I recorded my pitch as a voice memo in my car that night, and by the end of the week I had a partner to work with me on this game.


Nearing the Finish Line!!!


Development of the game went very smoothly. After a playtest with my partner, we were able to work out some basic parameters for the game. Including a number of rounds, and how many traps each round should have. Playtesting early this time allowed us to quickly make a solid foundation right from the start! Which was nice because this project was my first this semester that never had any major changes over the course of development!


Regrettably though, I wasn’t able to devote as much time to this project as I was last semester. As the end of the year drew new and homework began to pile up, burnout had begun and projects in other classes were demanding more of my time as well. I was lacking in both time and motivation to do this project, although I think that using what I’ve learned in past units to start off strong meant that our final product was still pretty great! There weren’t really any major hiccups in development to discuss otherwise though.


What Would I Do Differently?


I think that looking back, I would have liked to make some more additions to the cards you can uncover in the haunted house. I think that the candy bowl card (which grants the player 8 pieces of candy rather than the normal one) is a great motivator for players to explore more, and I think that maybe adding a couple more major rewards for exploration would be fun. Thinking about it now, maybe something like a card that allowed players to play a small minigame with the chance of gaining more candy would have been cool! Or one that allows them to place an extra trap in their next maze, or a trap that steals candy when activated, or one that grants players protection from the next trap that they encounter.


Final Thoughts


Overall, this past semester I’ve really enjoyed this class a lot. I feel like it’s challenged me to be creative in different mediums than I’m used to, and it taught me a lot about the process of developing a game as well as the importance of playtesting! This class also taught me to not be afraid to try weird ideas, as those are always the most fun to work on, and I end up with a final product that feels unique and special and my own! I’ve already got some ideas of where I want to start with my next project, and I feel better equipped than ever for that with the things I’ve learned in this class!

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