Desolation Gridlock
Desolation Gridlock is a deck-building strategy card game. There are two teams of two where the goal is to knock the opposing team's health to zero. The game is played on a grid system and players can play either unit or equipment cards in their lanes to battle with the other team's units.
Narrative Designer
Game Concept
For our game design class, our job was to create a deck-building card game. There were parameters we had to meet for this project. Our game had to be two players against a team of two opponents, it had to be set in a post-apocalyptic world, and gameplay had to be easy to understand and only take around twenty to thirty minutes to complete. For a lot of us that meant we needed to research playing deck-building card games to better learn the mechanics. I played multiple different card games to help me understand the genre as well as read books that were set in post-apocalyptic settings.
Role as Designer
I was on the narrative team for the game. My main task for this was to help flesh out the worldbuilding for the setting, create card names and flavor text, and come up with the title of the game's name. These tasks required me to work with the card design team to learn the cards' abilities and how that would affect their names and flavor text. I also worked with graphic design by keeping all my cards under the character limit that was required for the final design.
Card Names and Flavor Text
While waiting for card design to finish the cards' abilities, I began to write possible names for the cards. We had four different factions with their own backgrounds and lore history that I took into account when designing the naming convention. Not all of them made it into the final game, but it gave me a good starting point to work with once I knew more about the cards.
Naming the cards and writing their flavor text meant a lot of communication with the card design and core game mechanic teams. It was important that all the elements in the game came together for a cohesive experience for the player.
Our class set our own deadlines, which meant that I needed to make sure that card design gave us an outline of each card's ability. As part of the narrative team, I had to take into consideration how long our part would take so we could hand our document over to the graphic design and manufacture teams.
