Compete to build and maintain the superior Ark in this wallet card game.
Roles: Game Designer, Video Editor.
Tools used: Microsoft Word, Adobe Premiere.
Group project – 4 members, including me.
ARK is a game we created in the 1st year of my studies at Sheridan College. It’s a 2-player card game where players must select animals to bring onto their respective arks, and then arrange them in a way that keeps them from killing each other. Living animals award points and can contribute to bonus objectives that yield additional points. Whichever player has the most points after configuring the layouts of their arks wins.
Roles
Game Designer
I was the one who came up with the initial gameplay concept of arranging cards in a space, as well as theming it around the story of Noah’s Ark. We struggled with how predators would attack in-game. We wanted to limit the sorting phase gameplay to a 3x2 space, so we couldn’t have them attack every animal card around them. I had the idea for predators to only attack in specific directions (i.e. some predators can only attack animals above and below them, while others attack to their left and right). The idea stuck, and would help form the competitive puzzle-like gameplay of ARK.
Challenges and Lessons Learned
The project had significant constraints we needed to work with. Our game needed to fit the format of a “Wallet game”, meaning that we were limited to 15 cards, a small instructional pamphlet, and nothing else. These limitations influenced our design, such as restricting the sorting phase to only a 3x2 space to prevent every card from being used each time and allow for some card variation throughout games. It was an important lesson in how project requirements can hamper ideas, one that I'll keep in mind to avoid through both better foresight and creative workarounds.