I met Whitney in 2023 at the GAMA trade show. She had one game ready to go with a publisher, and sell sheets for several more in tow. I was there with The Op, attending mostly to hype my Disney-themed strategy skirmish game and to demo our team’s other upcoming hobby games to retailers. Whitney was networking and meeting with publishers to find homes for the games she’d been building, so I took a few of the sell sheets to share with my boss, who reviewed games we might want to take on.

We met again at Gen Con later that year. Her game, Charcuterie, was about to launch on Kickstarter with Th3rd World Studios, and the hype was building, especially among the game designer circuit. Additionally, she had a game lined up with Skybound Tabletop, Invincible: Escape From Mars, set to launch in 2024. They’d already published another of her projects, a set collection card game called Pirate Tails.

It was this range and diversity in her designs that made me want to get her opinion on Disco Candybar. I knew from our first meeting at GAMA that I liked the way she thought about product design (it’s a slightly different angle than pure game design). She’d been a board game cafe owner before designing games, so that made her opinions even more relevant, as she has first-hand experience seeing what kinds of games make it to the table, with who, and why. And while I didn’t know if adventure games specifically were her personal jam, I knew she had a good sense of how to turn a spark of an idea into a fun gamified experience.

While my intention with every demo is to get into playing the game itself as fast as possible, I always give a little bit of a preface of the holistic product. “This is an entry-point adventure game that my 10-year-old kid could learn quickly and teach his friends in minutes. It combines the structure of a Choose Your Own Adventure book with fairly quick, strategy game inspired combat sequences. Players go through the story over multiple 45-60 minute chapters, with the depth, character growth, and complexity of mechanics gradually increasing as the game goes on.”

She quietly nodded. I’ll be honest, I was having trouble getting a read on her initial take, and it made me a little nervous. Quickly though, she started asking questions about the product design, and that gave me some hope that my game wasn’t totally crashing and burning.

I showed her the enemy AI system. I usually start there in the prototype, as it’s the simplest system to explain, and everything else in the design grew from that. It’s also a major selling point of the game — self-piloting games often have very complex AI systems built to somewhat realistically replicate an actual human player. Disco Candybar is all about getting some of that feeling while also stripping away a lot of complexity, speeding up the process so players can focus on their own decisions.

More nods and contemplation. Whitney is a tough customer. It means she’s really discerning and thoughtful though, so I’ll take that.

We moved on to the heroes. I explained how the players get to make strategic and meaningful decisions while also handling a bit of turn-to-turn randomness. (I believe that in any co-op game, players need to be handed a degree of randomness to keep the game from becoming formulaic and easily “solvable”.) Before we even got to actually playing as the heroes, Whitney saw something and paused the demo for questions.

“You said from the start you wanted to reduce complexity; that this was an entry-point game, right?” she asked. “I think you might be asking a lot from players just starting in on this to make some of the decisions you’re presenting.”

If you’ve been following this blog, you’ll know it was not the first time I’d heard this. I could have anticipated it, and looking back, I probably should have begun work on a simpler “first encounter” setup already. But by nature, I’m slow to digest and solve for critical feedback. It’s something I need to hear though.

We talked about what the opening story was intended to be. I don’t have much of a plan for that yet, but I’ve been defaulting to a hastily made-up bit about woodcutters running into the local tavern to find heroes who can drive away some goblins. The goblins are a threat, for sure, but one our heroes believe they can handle.

Whitney had two points to make from here.

1. “Why don’t you start with something lower-stakes, but super easy to understand, like arm wrestling at the tavern? Just the most basic thing you can do to learn what the components are for. Don’t even have enemies yet, just a simple ‘here’s how to use <redacted>’.”
2. “What happens after the woodcutter?”

We’ll start with 1. It was a pretty good idea. As I thought about it, I realized it would give me a way to start the story without even putting the AI system on the table in the first encounter (or in this case challenge). Save learning an enemy AI for later in the chapter, where it might even feel more climactic to end that hour of gameplay with. Something for me to chew on.

Question 2 was a slightly more intimidating ask. I had no plan for that. So I bullshitted. I won’t go into the story arc I made up on the spot — I might actually use it down the line and I don’t want to spoil it — but it got a raised eyebrow and a smile. What I will say is that it ramped up the stakes and laid out a plan for a pretty epic journey.

“Okay, I want to play through that story,” she said, grinning.

We went on to talk about the game more as a product. She had a lot of thoughts.

“Do you see this as a system there should be expansions for?” she asked. “Because this feels expandable to me, and you should think about how you’ll do that now, to leave yourself the necessary places and modular designs to allow for it.”

My thought right now, I explained, is that I actually don’t want to get ahead of myself by pushing talk of expansions on prospective publishers. If they want to broach the subject and ask, that’s all fair game, but my goal is to build something that publishers can focus one development slot on, and consumers can play without worrying whether they wanted to take on a bigger investment than one purchase. Plus, I’ve seen the confusion that the concept of expansions can create for intro-gamers firsthand. If a player finds an expansion all alone on a shelf without the base game, or they decide they just want to try the smaller, cheaper box before the bigger, more complicated-looking one, they feel very, very misled.

But she’s still right; If I see that I or a publisher might want to expand on the core game, I need to make sure there are affordances built in that can make expansions feasible and meaningful. Something else to chew on.

She really liked the intersection of the Choose Your Own Adventure structure and the customizable characters. It was something she noted that other games had tried, with varying degrees of success, but that could really stand out in Disco Candybar.

Lastly she noted, just like Scott Brady, that the prototype probably needed some art to really sell the vision of who this was for. Also like Scott, she reached straight for “whimsical and playful, but adventurous”. She pointed me to a particular illustrator who’d done a series of chibi-esque fantasy drawings. I liked them, but I countered with Dan Edwards’s portfolio site, and told her he’d already asked to collaborate on the project. She smiled and told me she thought his style was a good match.

By the end of our hour (and a few minutes), we realized that we hadn’t actually played the game demo at all. Maybe that’s a good thing though; gives me a little time to revisit the tavern arm wrestling scene and make a real “first challenge” prototype before setting up another review with her. I’m not throwing away the current one, not by a long shot. I can, however, just bump that sequence to later in the first chapter and show publishers and reviewers a better perspective on the in-game progression of mechanics.

Back to prototyping…

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