Fogged is a Fantasy / Horror TTRPG project that I had the privilege of working on as the lead writer, as well as developing concept art for the characters and creating final card artworks and flavour texts. I had to work to a tight deadline and produce a fully functional game prototype in 4 weeks.
As the writer for the game, it was my job to not only construct the worldbuilding and context for the setting and characters, but to also tie these story elements in with the gameplay mechanics and elements itself in fun and interesting ways. This was a new learning experience for me, and figuring out ways in which I could integrate my artwork and narratives for a player’s gameplay experience was a fun challenge.
I created the card artwork for three of the minor event cards, which were a randomly shuffled deck of cards that were drawn at specific times on the clock.
I was also responsible for creating the flavour text for all three cards, where I tied in each character to an event in the story world. I worked closely with our game designer to ensure the card effects worked effectively within our gameplay experience.
Along with this, I created the character card artwork for two of our playable characters ‘Fern’ and ‘Aldous’. I wrote up their flavour text as well, which gave the players some further context on who their character was and why they were drawn to this place.
As a further lore / character building touch, I added a number of items that the character has on-hand which adds a little extra personalised flair to the characters. Aldous, for example, holds a photograph of the comrades he lost to the Fog. Fern holds her spell book.
I also worked on the final card artworks for the player’s ‘goal / resolution’ cards, along with writing the flavour text. These cards were handed out randomly to each player at the start of the game, which give them information about their ultimate objective / win condition for the game and how they can achieve it (by collecting the required items on their card).
Because our team had such a short turnaround to make the game, we quickly jumped in with a rough physical prototype to playtest the game we had so far with stand-in elements. We were curious to see if our gameplay mechanics held up and if the gameplay itself was fun and rewarding.
On our first playtest, the game ran smoothly and we had a lot of fun! It was incredibly rewarding to playtest our mechanics in real-time and actually have a playable game going. Our main areas of fixing from here involved balance changes and re-writing flavour text.
After continued efforts and refining in the art, story and gameplay departments we were finally able to construct the physical version of our game. All elements were hand-made with cardboard to give the items a more solid feel.
We were able to have real-time playtests with guest industry visitors, where teams of 4 people sat down and played at a time. I’m super proud of how this project turned out being my first game development experience.