Creature College Update 13 – Fighting the Hamster of Chaos

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Welcome to Creature college Update 13

In homage to the late great Terry Pratchett, “If complete and utter chaos was an escaped rabid hamster with little pointy teeth then I’d be the sort standing next to a hamster wheel dressed as a carrot trying to tempt the hamster into a tiny box muttering “Here Squeaky, here boy””. We’ve definitely been in overdrive this month. Three cons, updating the website, finishing stretch goals, filming play through videos, running competitions and working with our artist, designer and media studio to get ready for our Kickstarter. My wife has hardly seen me, the children have formed their own self-ruling proto-civilization on the top floor of our family home and given my bleary eyed state at work my colleagues have adopted the mistaken belief that I spend my evening crawling bars sampling the heady Cheltenham nightlife as an elderly Lothario.

So what has actually been happening? Well with less than two months to our Kickstarter now it’s been all hands to the rigging to try and get everything ready.

Website

Well for those who haven’t already noticed we’ve completely revamped an updated the website. Partly so we could add new features but mostly because the old website looked like it had been created by a five year old with a bunch of multi-coloured crayons. The new website is a big improvement, it has play-through videos, our rule book, details of other projects and even a shop where you can buy some of our natty Creature related merchandise. We only have t-shirts available in the shop so far but that will change over the next few weeks as we get closer in to the Kickstarter. You can take a look at the new website at http://www.happyottergames.com/.

Reviews

We’ve now sent sample games out to all of our reviewers and there are some really well known names on the list. Keep an eye on the website for details of the reviews as they become available.

Stretch Goals

All our stretch goal art work is finished and we’re currently working on our extra stretch goal items with our fabby printer Wingo Games. We’ll publish more details on these as they become available but take a look at these cute little suckers!

Most of these guys have already been named by our friends over at The Boardgame Group but there’s still one naming competition left so keep an eye out and join in!

Play-through Video

We know that you’ve been dying to find out more about how Creature College plays so we’ve filmed this neat little video to take you through the game. It’s hard to see the cards so at some point we may film a top down view as well. You can take a look at the video on the front of our website http://www.happyottergames.com/.

We’ve arrived on Board Game Geek!

So we now have our own Board Game Geek page!

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/179433/creature-college

We’d love for you to go take a look at our page, vote on our page and become a fan! We’d love you, and hug you and call you George ( unless you’re a girl in which case we’ll call you George).

Ninja Snails

We’re currently working on a game to be released after Creature College. We don’t plan on being a one-game-wonder! It will be a few months yet but we can give you a sneak peak at our concept art! Here is our Hashimoto Clan Leader. Ninja Snails is a card game that we think will have two decks of just over 100 cards in total. The aim of the game will be to defeat other ninja houses to collect koku. The person at the end of the game with the most koku will win.

Well that about wraps it up for this addition of the Newsletter. We’ll be running more fabby competitions and all sorts of other good stuff will be happening in the run up to the Kickstarter so keep an eye out and thank you for all the support you’ve given us as our community. We couldn’t do this without you!

All the best,

Orhan.

The Happy Otter Games Review – Trench by Rui Alípio Monteiro

So I first saw Trench a couple of months ago on one of the Facebook board game groups and initially although slightly intrigued by the geometry and elegant Modernist design, I didn’t really give it a second thought. Over the next few weeks I’ve seen a steady stream of good reports about the game culminating with Larry Cruz and Josh Tolpa from The Boardgame Group both ordering a copy from Rui. Well as I knew that both Josh and Larry wouldn’t be interested in the game if there wasn’t something to it, I contacted Rui who was kind enough to send me a copy. Rui is an Indy games developer living out in Portugal and the postal services being what they are between here and Portugal, the game took a little while to arrive. It was definitely worth the wait though!

The Unpack

The first thing you notice about Trench is that the game’s production is really slick. The board and pieces are plastic but don’t suffer from it. There’s a nice feel to the playing pieces and because of some careful choice of materials they move with just enough resistance on the board to give a sense of gravitas to your move. The white and black playing pieces both come in their own draw string bag so the contents of the box look very tidy, which if you’re border line OCD like me you’ll probably find very pleasing. The rules are in several languages but they’re well laid out and bar the odd error in the English, are easy to follow allowing you to start playing within about 15 minutes.

The Trope

The theme behind Trench is perhaps a little unlikely given the games’ very aesthetic design. It’s an abstract simulation of trench warfare in the first world war. The pieces represent a general, colonels, captains, sergeants and soldiers that are setup in a formation reminiscent of classical Roman diamond shaped army deployments. The line down the centre of the board represents a trench and the board has mainly black or mainly white squares representing the two sides in the conflict. When I first saw the board I was a little distracted by the fact that the colouring of the pieces did mean that they merged into the board a little. Reading further in the rules I learned that this was exactly what Rui had intended! The board and pieces are designed that way to make it harder for your opponent to distinguish what you’re doing…camouflage!

The Game Play

Like chess the board is eight squares by eight squares with the “trench” running horizontally across the board from corner to corner. The squares on one side are mostly black and on the other are mostly white. Your pieces are laid out in a diamond shape in one corner starting with one general, two colonels, three captains, four sergeants and six soldiers. Each has a pictogram on the bottom showing the directions it can move in but as you might expect the larger pieces can move in increasingly more ways than the smaller ones. No piece in Trench can “jump” other pieces. The pieces also increase in the range that they can move and hence the range that they can attack from with the general moving five squares and the soldiers moving one square. This rather nicely simulates range in warfare. Pieces take each other by moving onto an occupied square.

Now we come to the game mechanic that really makes Trench.The trench itself. Pieces that end their move in the trench are said to be occupying it and this gives them several interesting powers. Pieces occupying the trench cannot be attacked by the opposing player from their side of the board. The opposing player either needs to get pieces into the trench or outflank their opponent attacking the trench from behind. Pieces in the trench don’t need to stop their movement once they’ve taken the first piece they encounter on moving out of the trench, but can carry on to take more pieces if they have the movement to do so…in other words they can “break out” of the trench. Just like in chess where the battle is for the centre of the board in trench it’s all about holding and exploiting the trench.

The game ends when one or other player has eliminated all his/her opponent’s pieces or after 50 moves (25 by each player). The pieces are then counted each one having a points value and the winner is the player who after two complete games has the most points. If it’s a draw then a third game is played in sudden death mode where the first player to 40 points wins.

Summary

Trench has the feel of being a game that is simple to learn but takes a lifetime to master. I think it could have general consumer market appeal beyond the gaming community but it’s still a mind bender of a game for a keen gamer. The simple rules belie a depth of game play and strategy, whilst the skilled aesthetic design make this game a joy to play. If i have any criticisms they would be that the English rules, although easily decipherable, could do with one or two corrections and it would be good to have some way of keeping track of how many game turns you’d played given the 50 turns restriction on the length of the game. However, these are small concerns given the overall playability of the game. I honestly hope that Rui manages to find a good international distributor for this great game.

Rating:  4.5 Otters

Creature College Weekly Update Week 10 – Competitions, Posters and Goats

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Welcome to our Week 10 News Round Up!

So it’s been quite a week this week. Mostly it’s consisted of preparing files for our printer Wingo in China. This basically entails writing lots of instructions, checking through all the files and ensuring that we haven’t made any of those silly little mistakes that you notice later and think to yourself “Why didn’t I check everything through more carefully?” The last piece to this particular puzzle has been integrating all the feedback on the rules which was finished this morning. Now we’re in full publicity mode of UK Games Expo which happens at the end of this month. Mike Legan, our brilliant artist has been working on poster art which we’ll share later in the Newsletter and we’ve been working on some freebies to give away at the show. The other exciting piece of news is that it looks like we’re going to launch a little earlier than we originally thought. You’ve probably seen the odd piece where we’ve mentioned November but it now looks like we’ll be launching over the Essen Games Show in October!

We also have a winner for our April competition. Frank Auge won our $150(£40) prize and chose Cthulu Wars as his prize which is currently winging it’s way towards him! We’ll post pics of Frank with his prize as soon as we’re able to. We also published our first game review of Greenbrier Games’ Ninja Dice. You can read the review here.

Finally our friends Arthur and Veronica Critchfield launched their game Gruff on Kickstarter yesterday. We were able to drop in on their Skype launch event and have a chat with Brent whilst Veronica drew the most amazing Mutated Monster Goat mural in the background. We just want to say one thing:

BACK GRUFF NOW

Mutated Monster Goats….come on people! Joking aside this is a great game with fantastic artwork and a strong well play tested design. At only $25 for the bottom tier it’s one of the cheaper Kickstarters to back. It’s almost funded already. This will be a Kickstarter that you’re very pleased you’ve backed.

UK Games Expo, 29th – 31st May

So we will have stand 7 in the Library at UK Games Expo this year. We’re going to be playing the first sample version of Creature College, running competitions, collecting for charity (hopefully) and generally having a great time. We’ve started an event on Facebook and if you’re on this side of the pond (i.e. In the UK) we’d love to meet you and have a game!

Just look for our poster…you won’t be able to miss us!

Ninja Dice Review

We love Ninja Dice as a great little filler game for the end of an evening or to take with you on holiday. You can get Ninja Dice from Green Brier games. Read the review here.

Back Gruff on Kickstarter!

This is a game that needs to get backed and then some. Not only does it have Mutated Monster Goats in it, reason enough to back it in our books, but it has fabulous artwork, a great design and compelling game-play. But don’t take our word for it, take a look at the Kickstarter video and the review video below.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/31839895/gruff-the-tactical-card-game-of-mutated-monster-go/widget/video.html

Well that about wraps it up for this week folks. Have a great week and we’ll have more exciting news next week!

All the best,

Orhan.

Creature College Weekly Update Week 8 – A Blast From The Past

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Welcome to our Week 8 News Round Up!

Well, here we are…only six weeks to go until UK Games Expo and getting perilously close to beginning our sample printing. Just the back of the box to polish, two and a half more battle cards to produce and our rules booklet to design and we’re there! To celebrate we’re offering double our monthly prize so in April you can win £80($120) of games of your choice…ever wanted to have that really big game? Well now’s your chance! If you’re not subscribed to our news letter go ahead and do so and you’ll automatically be entered into this draw and every draw until we launch in the Autumn. We’d also like to give a shout out for Midnight Zombie Marathon, a game currently on Kickstarter. This looks like a great little card game to use as a 30 minute filler and at $15 for US pledgers, well worth a try! We’ve backed it and Aaron will be creating some pledges for those outside of the US that want to pledge – they only need $1500 so help us get them over their funding target! The rest of this week’s update is really a bit of a blast from the past…looking at Creature College from it’s inception to where we are today. We’ll be releasing some of our embarrassing early prototypes and game scribbles and also the first picture of what the game looks like in play.

Win £80($120) of games in April!

Tell your friends, call out the majorettes and the tumbling clowns (even the scary ones that look a little like the ebil clown from the horror movies) and shout it from the parapets (if you happen to have a parapet, otherwise your front porch will do). We’re giving away £80 ($120) worth of games of your choice in April. Some lucky person in some far flung corner of the globe will be getting a mitt full of goodies and all they have to do is subscribe to our newsletter here.

Midnight Zombie Marathon – Help us get these guys over their target

We’d really like this game to succeed. It looks like fun and it’s very nicely produced. I guess it’s their first game and Aaron and guys at Arche Nemesis Games LLC have obviously put a lot of work into getting the look and feel right. So head over to Kickstarter and give these guys some love. Let’s get them over their funding target!

A Blast from the past!

So…how did Creature College start out? The morning after a drunken dinner party and feeling rather hung over but having foolishly agreed to create a game for my mates…this happened:

Yes…these inane scribbles were the first thoughts that made their way onto paper and roughly described the first version of the game. It took about a day to produce Creature College v 0.1 and at that point (before we’d encountered the sweaty armpitted monster of copyright) it was called “Mad Scientist”. I remember having my wife and friends sat around a table cutting out hastily produced cards and tokens. The result of the first version looked something like this (actually this is something like the third or fourth version but the 1st version was too embarrassing to photograph!):

It’s interesting that many of the elements of the game actually did make it through the process of play testing, but a lot of mechanics and items didn’t as well. Money went, we had a points track at one stage and that went too…in fact most of our play testing involved removing things! The first game was a real stinker…it took about two hours to play and was about as exciting as searching your bogeys for little brown bits (I’ve never done this….honest). However through countless play tests and many iterations we’ve dragged the game kicking and screaming into a sleek starship of a game that’s fast paced (45 minutes) and fun with plenty of “oh you didn’t just do that!” moments. This is what it looks like now just prior to our first sample print run:

If anyone is interested in game design and has some questions regarding how we’ve got to where we are then by all means drop me an email at orhan@happyottergames.com. You can read more about our story in the event magazine for UK Games Expo when it comes out and we may reprint the article on or website depending on permissions. Have a fabby week everyone! Orhan.

Creature College Weekly Update 6 – Dellcon, Competition Winners and Box Art Sneak Preview

Don’t forget to subscribe to our news letter if you haven’t done so already and you’ll be entered into our monthly “Win a board game of your choice” competition. Just click here.

Welcome to our Week 5 News Round Up!

We’re late this week! I know, I know….the weekly round up normally goes out on a Saturday so what have we been doing with our time? Well as always it’s been a mad busy week, we were fortunate enough to go to Dellcon at the Dellhouse in Malvern, UK over the weekend which meant that instead of writing newsletters we were out enjoying ourselves playing a lot of cool games including Creature College. Our hosts, Kevin and Elizabeth, were fabulous and I can recommend the Dellhouse if you ever want to organise a gaming weekend with friends! We’ve also been working on an article for the UK Games Expo show magazine. It’s all about being a virgin games designer in a cruel world! You’ll like it! Actually our world really isn’t cruel at all, it’s pink and fluffy and filled mostly with cuddly things albeit some of them having huge pointy teeth.

We’ve finished our box art as well and we’ll be giving our wonderful WordPress followers and Newsletter subscribers a sneak preview below! We also have another competition winner! Scott Randel won our March competition and will shortly be the proud owner of a copy of Invasion from Outer Space by Flying Frog Productions. Way to go Scott! We’ll be giving away a game every month until we launch in the Autumn so tell your friends to subscribe to our Newsletter and let’s share the love!

Box Art from Our Fabulous Artist

As an exclusive treat for our News Letter subscribers we’re giving you the first peek at our cover art. We haven’t built all the design pieces around the cover art yet so you’re seeing it pre-production! Drop us a line and let us know what you think!

It’s just possible you may spot one or two of our other characters and creatures that we haven’t yet released any information about!

Dellcon

We’d like to give a shout out for our friends Kevin and Elizabeth at the Dell House in Malvern. They hosted Dell Con 2015 last weekend. We met some cool people, nearly got blown off the top of the Malvern hills (I had to actually hold my hat on), played more games than I can remember including Terra Mystica (my favourite), Suburbia, Alea Iacta Est and Ticket to Ride Europe, and play tested Creature College. I can recommend the Dell House to anyone who is organising a weekend away with their games group.

Competition Winners February and March

Kris won our February competition and sent us a picture of her holding her winnings! Scott Randel took the prize for our March competition and we’re looking forward to seeing a picture of him playing it with his friends!

Have a great week and a safe and happy Easter everyone and we look forward to updating you again after Easter!

All the best,

Orhan.

Creature College Weekly Update Week 5 – DellCon and Vesper Bunnysnatcher

Don’t forget to subscribe to our news letter if you haven’t done so already and you’ll be entered into our monthly “Win a board game of your choice” competition. Just click here.

Welcome to our Week 5 News Round Up!

Another busy week here at Happy Otter Games as we work to having an updated play test version of our game ready for DellCon next weekend. We’ve also made good progress on the box art and Will, our designer is primed to work on the design component of the box as soon as the artwork is finished. He has also been busy working on the design for the battle cards which are coming along nicely and should be finished by early next week. We’re very close now to having all our artwork and design completed.

The rules need to be updated with examples and just have a little bit more humour injected into them now that we have the base text complete. We’ve also been running a competition during the week to name one of our creatures, more on that later. This coming week we’re going to start to write a couple of articles for publications on the experiences of a first time indy game publisher so watch out for them in the coming weeks.

Vesper Bunnysnatcher!

Earlier this week we asked our wonderful community to come up with a name for one of our creatures to be included in the game. We’re pleased to announce that the winning entry was from Nikki Boom and Ian Loxam. Who came up with the name “Vesper Bunnysnatcher” for the character in question. As a special preview for our newsletter subscribers here is Vesper Bunnysnatcher in all his OtterColour glory complete with “Pissed Off Bunny” :).

We hope you like your colour version of the creature Nikki and Ian and thank you again for your great entry.

DellCon

So this week see’s our first convention of the year. A small collection of gamers in Malvern sitting in the heart of the English countryside at the Dell House. I think Kevin and Elizabeth still have some space so if you’re interested then give them a call and come along. It will be a very pleasant weekend of gaming. We’ll also have a beta version of Creature College there for anyone who would like a game.

Ninja Dice Kage Masters

We really got into Ninja Dice this week. Our own copy turned up from our friends at Green Brier games across the pond and we decided to give it a whirl at Monday games night. It was a lot of fun with some real “Nooooo!” moments. Definitely a good way to Kill half an hour. The Ninja Dice Kage Masters Kickstarter is into it’s final week so get yourself a copy of Ninja Dice and back their Kickstarter for many happy ours of Ninja’ing (is that even a word??)

Well that about wraps it up for this week! See you again next week with more news and updates.

Indy Board Game Art

As you probably know if you’re here, Happy Otter Games is embarking on publishing it’s first game, Creature College, this Autumn via Kickstarter. So I’m going to preface all of these articles with the predicate that I’m learning as I go along and we’ll have to see whether my efforts are more or less successful than others.

I’m also going to predicate these articles by saying “I love games”, it’s my passion, I’ve been playing board games, RPGs, card games, video games and pretty much any other sort of game I can get my hands on for over 35 years. Building a board game and publishing it, if you’re doing it right, is a phenomenal amount of work. On top of my normal job I probably spend at least 20 hours a week working on Creature College. Don’t even begin down this path unless you have a passion for games because you’re going to need that passion to sustain you when you’re looking at a piece of design work that you just can’t get right at 2:00 AM in the morning!

Our game has been in development for just over a year now and I thought it might help others who are about to start down this path if I wrote about some of my experiences along the way. You might think that starting this series with an article about art is a little eccentric, what about the design of the game? What about the mechanics? What about play testing? I agree with you, all these things are important, very important but….

Now I know that different people tick in different ways however the first thing many people probably judge a game on is whether or not it looks engaging. I’m fairly certain that the majority of us will have been in a games shop or on Amazon browsing games. Sometimes we’ll have been on Board Game Geek and found a top rated game were interested in but often as not I’ll just browse for something that looks interesting and the first thing that normally catches me is the artwork.

Just recently I was both interested and touched by an individual who was brave enough to post a synopsis of why they felt their game had missed it’s funding target on Kickstarter. They’d done many of the right things, play tested for hours, built a small community, sent the game for reviews, advertised…In many ways they deserved their Kickstarter to be a success. Their game had a farming theme and many of the cards were obviously rural in nature, animals, places, that sort of thing.

The artwork was shockingly dreadful. Essentially it consisted of photos with a Photoshop artistic filter smeared over the top. It’s a testament to the quality of the other work that this individual did that he managed to make any funding at all on Kickstarter and here’s the point, had the artwork looked and felt engaging…had he thought about the artwork and design he might well be delivering his games to people right now.

I’m going to major on artwork in this article *not* graphic design. Aren’t they the same thing I hear you cry! No…absolutely not…we’ll come to this in a later article but one thing I’ve learnt in my journey is that you can’t assume that your artist can also provide your graphic design, they are different skills.

There are several obstacles the budding game designer has to overcome when looking for the artwork:

•  Art Style – what art style should your game have, cartoony, epic myth, grunge, Steam Punk. Whatever you choose should be in keeping with the theme of the game. For instance a Steam Punk style probably won’t work terribly well in a game about cute cuddly animals but will probably be fine in a game of battling Victorian airships. Choose an art style that matches your theme well.

• Reference Material – Whether you happen to be a talented artist or you’re hoping to find or hire someone, reference material will help a lot. Find images, styles and fonts that match the artistic style that you want for the game. You won’t be able to use any of these materials directly unless they’re royalty free but they’ll provide a great resource for developing your own artwork.

• Finding an Artist – You may be an artistic genius yourself (and be honest with yourself here) but likely as not you’ll need to find an artist. There are lots of good internet locations where artists hang out but a couple are the Board Game Geek forums and CG Society. Make sure that you take a good look at other work the artist has completed and that they can create artwork in the style you’re looking for. Also remember to do the legal work…agree a price then sign a contract that specifies that the copyright to the artwork transfers to you. You can find standard art contracts at various places on the Internet

• Payment – unless you happen to have an extremely talented an altruistic friend who you’re working with, you’re going to have to pay for artwork. Remember here that good artwork takes time, hours of time, be realistic in what you’re expecting to pay. $100 per picture is way too much $10 is an incredibly good deal. $20-$30 per picture is probably about right. Ensure you have enough budget to cover the artwork for your whole project.

• Time – Don’t expect to have all your artwork completed within a week. If the artwork is great artwork expect it to take months and plan accordingly. At the same time however, make sure you set a schedule with your artist and encourage them to meet that schedule. Ensure that you agree a payment schedule up front and stick to it making your payments regularly. Losing an artist due to a disagreement could set you back months and be very costly.

So now you have your artist and your starting on the artwork, what next? Think about the artwork for your game and have a cohesive view of how it all fits together. The way I achieved this (and I know I can be a bit of a sad puppy this way) is that I put all my artwork requirements and descriptions into two or three excel spreadsheets so that the art work I wanted had a set of descriptions and resources ready to send to my artist. Then brief your artist with a detailed description (no more than a paragraph of text) and reference images.

If groups of characters or other actors (ships, monsters, killer 50ft high robots, etc.) have a specific theme then give the artist very strong guidance on theme. Numerous games do this well but taking a leaf from a massively multi-player game the race themes in EVE Online are worth taking a look at as an example of how to do this well.

Agree up front with your artist how you want to work. I’ve found that the artist producing a couple of concepts for each piece of artwork really helps you visualise the end piece of art work. Also be very positive about your artist’s work, even when it doesn’t go quite the way you want. Always remember that brilliant art is hard and every piece from a good artist is probably praise worthy even if it doesn’t fulfill your vision for the piece of artwork. Gentle guidance is almost always better than a harsh word.

I hope this short guide has been useful for people, if it has I will probably do the next episode on Graphic Design. I’d love people to add their own experiences and please do critique.

Orhan.