Semester in Review: Deal with the Devil — Making a Game from Scratch

This semester I took on a formal Game Design class at my university. Now obviously I've had plenty of experience creating games already. I've been studying game design as a hobby since high school, DMing for almost 5 years, and have more than one game prototyped already. So I came into this class ahead of the curve in terms of experience and basic game theory knowledge, but what I didn't have was the experience this class gave me in playtesting and feedback. Most of my games have been very crunchy and required hard refinement of the systems before I even showed them to my playgroup, who are all accustomed to these sorts of systems anyways, but for this class I needed simple and easy mechanics that were going to be quick enough for even the most game-agnostic in the class to grasp.

Enter: Deal with the Devil

Deal with the Devil is a party game, the first one I've ever made. Its mechanics are simple: just drawing and discarding cards with the occasional swap or peek thrown in. It wants you to match 5 cards together like you're gathering items to put inside a pentagram to summon a demon and make a wish, and all of the cards not flavored as the actual items you're gathering are geared to either accelerating your game plan or screwing over your opponents.

This game started off as a ponderance: What would "Exodia" look like in a non-Trading Card Game context? For those unaware, Exodia is a set of 5 cards in the Yu-Gi-Oh TCG that when in your hand all at once immediately win you the game.

This is and has always been one of the splashiest and most "Holy Crap!" alternate win conditions in any game out there, and to this day it is exciting to see pulled off. I wanted to capture that feeling.

So I started thinking about what I could do as a game designer to make this a game that's fun and Interactive. In Yu-Gi-Oh a deck built around Exodia is often kind of just stalling until it can draw all 5 pieces by chaining together a bunch of draw effects, it's not very interactive. But what if it was? I made some cards that let you disrupt your opponents hands by forcing a random discard, forcing them to draw new hands all together, swapping hands even. Some of the feedback I got from my playtesters indicated they wanted more of that vs just drawing an additional card or whatever, so of the 12 action cards in the deck, 6 are disruptive in some way.

I also wanted this game to have some depth to it. Those who have played poker or other competitive card games know that it's important to remember what information is given to you at any time. The discard piles are public, and during the draw phase of the turn a player may instead choose to draw from the Item discard instead, giving you opportunity to know what it is they're going for. This helped add a layer of complexity to the game that I feel it may have otherwise been lacking.

But what about the flavor? Well, originally the cards just looked like this.

Literally just sharpie on some basic lands

Just symbols drawn on Magic the Gathering cards. There were 5 symbols and 5 colors, 2 of each per color. So when I was thinking on how to flavor this game my mind wandered back to this meme.

And I was like "Oh! Yeah that super works!" So I decided to flavor the game as a race to summon a demon and make a wish. But if that's the goal, then it wouldn't be nearly as fun to end it right when you summon the demon. I wanted the winner to actually get to make their wish. But we all know making a wish to a demon is a bad idea. how could I incorporate that into the game? Well... what if the other players got to be the demon. They would think of different ways to monkey's paw your wish and add caveats that could otherwise screw you over when the wish was made. It added a fun little way for your friends to get back at you for winning. I've actually had a couple people tell me they don't mind losing because getting to screw someone over is just as fun, so I think that makes this second phase a success.

When it came time to make the assets I decided on some vaguely occult themed Items, A candle, coin, eye, gemstone, and tome.

I also added in the colors, deciding to throw in a 6th color to make the total deck size a clean 75. The deck now breaks down into 60 items, 12 actions, and 3 wild cards that can take the place of an item for a winning hand.

When designing the colored backgrounds for the cards I wanted to make them each a different shape in order to help players with color blindness

After I finalized the main assets for the game I got to work on the rules which you can read Here.

After that was the final playtest, which ended up being a blast! Getting to see so many games I got to help playtest and troubleshoot come to fruition in a "finished" state was exciting! Obviously not everyone's games had as much artistic flare, but the rules were very polished and overall were successful in what they were doing. I'm so glad I got to take part in this class as it really inspired me and helped me learn some useful skills on how to be a playtester and how to use the playtest feedback well.

Huge thanks to my professor for being an amazing guide on this journey and for being a mentor to everyone in the class no matter what style of game they may be familiar with or enjoy.