Revitalising Kargar - Global game jam 2020
The tail end of January marked the beginning of 2020's Global Game Jam; a massive days long game making event happening all across the world. With "Repair" as the theme, teams were tasked with creating a project that related to that concept in some capacity. It wasn't a competition, it was all about expressing creativity and having fun.
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After a few preparations went wrong, the group was left half of its original size and the Flying Aardvarks were reduced to three team members, with an artist acting as a 4th lending support remotely here and there.
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We took a very different approach as a result, the limitations of our team forcing us to consider options carefully. Eventually, we settled on a game that was very rules-and-design heavy; making use of the producer, designer skills and the programming talents we had.
Revitalising Kargar is a 2 - 4 player co-operative board game driven by the wildfires in Australia. Taking inspiration from other board games like Forbidden Island and House on the Hill, the objective is to successfully repair and fortify destroyed animal habitats within the fictitious magical forest of Kargar whilst containing raging fires that are spreading across the map.
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Players have limited supplies and time, so it's imperative that players work together in order to adequately juggle all the resources needed to rebuild habitats and prevent fire spreading.
With a collection of coloured paper, glue, scissors, pencils, rulers and notebooks; we began by playing other board games for reseacrh and inspiration. We created tokens by cutting out sections of paper and slotting them together to create player pieces, fires to be doused and resources.
The board consisted of 13 tiles positioned in a rhombus shape. Players would start in the centre, and needed to explore and discover what was on each tile of the map. To give the game replayability, tiles - except for the starting tile - are randomly placed face down on the board. As players turn each tile over, locations are revealed and actions can be taken.
Each player takes it in turns to move across the board; with one action and movement at their disposal. Players can move two spaces and discover two tiles in one turn, but forfeit their action OR move one space and then conduct an action - those actions being searching, gathering resources or trading. Once each player has moved, the round ends. Fires spread at set locations based on whichever card is picked up at the end of each round.
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Players can also acquire spells by searching tile spaces or by exchanging food with the Roving Wizard, who roams the board at random. He also moves at the end of each round.
If any habitat is ignited and isn't doused quickly, it burns down and the game is over. Similarly, if the Teleportation Circle is destroyed, the players can no longer leave and the game is also over.
My main contributions to the project consisted of writing out the rules and refining them over and over. The nature of the project required a lot of playtesting and editing the rules. The game's rules went through several iterations, and are still arguably far from perfect. It was important that they were written clearly, as it's not as easy to pick up as a digital game where players could play around. I also took care of the paper work required to submit our work for the GGJ; and documented the development of the project through lots of photos and tweets.
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I also kept in contact with our artist who was working remotely, and filled them in on the development and what we'd need from them. Keeping up motivation and keeping aims clear is always critical, but especially in such a small team with so much to do.
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Due to the fact that there were only three of us there in person, assigning distinct roles to each person was rather redundant and we simply took on new tasks as we needed to; whether that be cutting out materials, writing information on the tiles and pick-up cards or drawing the illustrations on the tiles.
My role & Contributions
This game was so much fun to make because it was totally different from any other project I've worked on. The very hands-on approach brought a real sense of teamwork out and we all had a ball throughout.
