Hunters & Cryptids: Final Project Dossier

INTRODUCTION 

Throughout the process of developing Hunters & Cryptids, I kept coming to the question of what I wanted to achieve from the outcome of this project. I realised that much of my inspiration and ideas behind Hunters & Cryptids comes from my own experiences playing trading card games as a child such as YuGiOh, Duel Masters and the odd dabbling in Magic: The Gathering. Through these years of experience I realised that all these games fall into the category of “Pay-to-win“. Pay-to-win refers to a game that is designed for a player to pay large amounts of money in order to gain an advantage over other players. These purchases are unlike the kind of micro-transactions you’d find in a game like Fortnite which allows players to pay for cosmetic or superficial changes without having any baring on the player gaining an advantageous edge. In trading card games, pay-to-win often occurs when a competitive meta game develops, resulting in certain deck builds developing actual monetary value due to rarity of the cards, demand and frequency of use among meta game players. As I got older, the pay-to-win structure ultimately deterred me from continuing to play trading card games when I realised that this pay-to-win structure was a cycle, rinse and repeat way to make money.

So, with Hunters & Cryptids, I wanted to capture the fun that was involved with playing these trading card games but remove the competitive aspect and the pay-to-win element. Instead, I decided to fuse the trading card elements with something more akin to Dungeons & Dragons use of releasing expansion packs. This way, players have the option of playing the game in its “vanilla” iteration (a base game without any expansion or additional DLCs), with the option of purchasing expansion packs to experience the game in a different and new way introducing new characters and new mechanics. This ensures that no matter how you choose play the game, you still experience the game in the way it’s intended.

SYNOPSIS, STRATEGIES AND THE BASICS 

Now, moving on to the game itself. In my pitch, I mentioned that I wanted this game to be as immersive as possible surrounding the lore behind the Cryptid characters drawing inspiration from real-life documented encounters with the various cryptids featured in the game. With this, I have managed to develop a synopsis for Hunters & Cryptids:

“Mothman. Big Foot. The Loch Ness Monster. The Wendigo. These are some of the creatures that have haunted and carved their way into folklore, terrifying those who hear these stories. Now the time has come for these Cryptids to emerge from the shadows and make their presence known. It’s your job as a Hunter to find and capture these Cryptids before they delve the world into chaos!”

The aim of the game is simple; use your Hunters to capture your opponents Cryptids and put them under your control until your opponent has run out of Cryptids. The game features two decks of 40 cards with the option of customisation to the player’s preferences. The standard builds are designed to introduce players to the game’s mechanics and later encourages the player to mix and match cards from both decks to accommodate for different strategies. Hunters & Cryptids features four card categories:

Hunters: These are the character cards used to capture Cryptid cards. Hunter cards have a counter which correspond to how many counters are required to capture Cryptids.

Cryptids: The bread and butter of the deck. Players must protect their Cryptids at all costs and use their various abilities to prevent capture or to help your Hunters capture your opponent’s Cryptids.

Believers: These are support cards for Cryptids. For those familiar with YuGiOh, these cards act as “spell cards” that are designed to protect or buff your Cryptid cards.

Skeptics: These are support cards for Hunters. Acting like “trap cards”, Skeptic cards are used to support Hunters in their captures and to weaken the powers of the Cryptid cards.

Each standard deck contains a set amount of each card. The standard builds are made up of 15 Cryptid cards, 15 Hunter cards, 5 Believer cards and 5 Skeptic cards. As mentioned previously, these builds are designed for a balanced strategy to introduce the player to the game. These are some examples of what kind of builds players can make:

High Risk, High Reward deck count: 30 Hunters, 5 Cryptids, 0 Believers and 5 Skeptics.
Defensive play style deck count: 10 Hunters, 20 Cryptids, 10 Believers, 0 Skeptics.
Aggressive play style deck count: 20 Hunters, 10 Cryptids, 3 Believers, 7 Skeptics.

With the basics out of the way, I’ll explain how the game will actually play out. At the beginning of the game, each player draws five cards and either decide amongst themselves who will go first or put the decision up to a simple coin toss. The field is comprised of four different areas: Hunter zone (limited to 5 spaces), Cryptid zone (limited to 3 spaces), Believer/Skeptic zone (limited to 1 space), and the Graveyard zone (placement for Hunters/Cryptids removed from play). At the start of each turn the players will draw a card and, if possible, players are required to place down one Cryptid into the corresponding zone until all 3 places are filled. Once that is done, a player has the option of placing down a Hunter card (one per turn) and the option of playing a Believer or Skeptic card (like trap cards in YuGiOh, Believer/Skeptics can be placed face down for later use). Then come the battle stage, capture stage then the end of the turn.

MECHANICS

The majority of the mechanics have been covered both in the pitch and BETA for Hunters & Cryptids, so I will only briefly summarise those mechanics previously mentioned as well as some additional mechanics that I have added for this finalised version of the game.

Circumstances of Capture: This is the main factor of how to win the game. Each Hunter card has a counter associated with them ranging from 1, 2 or 3 counters. These numbers must match the corresponding counter number of Cryptid cards. For example, if the Mothman card has a capture counter of 6, the player is required to have Hunter cards on the field adding up to 6, meaning if the player has two Hunter cards on the field with a 3 counter, they can perform a capture of the Mothman card.

Only one capture can occur per turn under normal circumstances (this can be altered via Cryptid abilities or Skeptic cards).

Elemental Abilities: These apply to the different Cryptid cards. Those elements are Earth, Water, Air, or Paranormal. These elemental abilities work in a cycle for players to gain an advantage over their opponent. The cycle goes like this: Air > Paranormal > Earth > Water > Air. Depending on the individual card ability, these elemental abilities can be used to remove capture counters from other Cryptids, cancel out the ability of an opponent’s Cryptids, or temporarily put the Cryptid out of play.

Believer and Skeptic abilities:  These are the support cards for your deck.
Believer cards are designed to help Cryptid cards either avoid capture, gain strength against other Cryptids, or buff the abilities of the Cryptids. Skeptic cards are designed to assist the Hunter cards. These cards can increase the counters of Hunters, prevent them from being removed from play by Cryptids, or reduced the capture counters of Cryptids. Only one Believer or Skeptic card can be used per turn, so choose wisely.

Battle Stage: This stage gives the player the opportunity to weaken their opponent’s Cryptid cards to make them susceptible to capture. The player also has the option of removing one of their opponent’s Hunter cards from play, potentially keeping their Cryptids safe from capture during the opponent’s next turn. Each Cryptid has a Strength counter and each Hunter has a Resistance counter, for example, Big Foot has a Strength counter of 5, meaning they can reduce the capture counters needed for another Cryptid OR they can remove a Hunter from play if the Resistance counter is below 5.

DEMOGRAPHICS AND MARKETING

Having done some further background research on the demographic, my previous intention of marketing Hunters & Cryptids to a 16 and over demographic has been solidified. According to this research paper conducted in 2010, the average age of the trading card game player is 22 years old made up of 84.1% of male and 15.9% of female players. Additionally, the average age of YuGiOh and Magic: The Gathering players sits around the mid-20’s, at 23 and 25 respectively. However, unlike YuGiOh, this game will not be mass marketed (not sold at common retail stores such as Target or Big W), since there will be no additional market backing to this game e.g. a cartoon series intended for children between the ages of 6-14.

Instead this game will primarily fall into the “hobby game” category, being sold at independent hobby stores since this game will be intended for an older demographic. Hunters & Cryptids is intended for the player to experience the game through the game itself and no other additional medium (a cartoon series). With this in mind, the pricing for this game will stand at $35, with the expansion packs being available for $10-$15 depending on the amount of extra features in the packs.

Hyperlink list and References

u/CherryDashZero, 2019, “What is your definition of ‘pay to win’?”, Reddit, accessed 12/06/2020, https://www.reddit.com/r/truegaming/comments/8w417u/what_is_your_definition_for_pay_to_win/

‘Expansion pack’ (2020), Wikipedia, accessed 12/06/2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_pack

David-Marshall, B., Dreunen, J.V., Wang, M. 2010, “Trading Card Game Industry”, SuperData Research Inc., accessed 12/06/2020, http://docshare01.docshare.tips/files/20620/206206901.pdf

Goethe, T.S., 2017, “Pay To Win: Monetization in Gaming”, Reporter, accessed 12/06/2020, https://reporter.rit.edu/tech/pay-win-monetization-gaming

PROJECT SPOOK BOOK: Final DA

The original digital artefact that I proposed in my pitch was to be a series of episodes for a podcast I’d develop entitled “PROJECT SPOOK BOOK”. The plan was to release a three episode run ranging from topics such as UFO encounters, true crime cases and a conspiracy theory case. The reason I chose to go with doing a podcast talking about topics concerning the supernatural/paranormal and true crime was a simple one; I’m a huge fan of the genre and I wanted to try my hand at replicating my favourite podcast series’ for this project. On top of that, the true crime/supernatural genre has been growing through recent years and I wanted to attempt to capitalise on that growth.

This is based off the growing popularity of the podcast series The Last Podcast on the Left (which was my main inspiration for this project) who in recent years have been able to make a living purely off podcasting and touring. I thought a digital artefact like this would be useful for me in terms of introducing myself to a platform and format that I’m not personally familiar with and would give me an opportunity to learn how to present a story or a case in podcast form.

The process was straight forward. I did my background research on the case I decided to cover, watched whatever documentaries or interviews were available on said subject, planned out a rough script of what I wanted to talk about specifically and when and then developed a final script ready to record. The recorded was done simply with my phone’s built in voice memo recorder and that file was then uploaded to Soundcloud.

In the end I decided to focus on just doing one episode on the Westall UFO case of 1966. The reason behind that was partly due to an underestimation on the amount of time I would take to properly develop these podcast episodes, so instead of just giving a brief outline on three separate cases, I could delve a little deeper in the details of just one case. The Westall UFO case in particular is interesting because of the sheer amount of publicity it received when the event happened, with newspapers documenting the eye witness testimonies without bias, only to later shift into ridiculing the witnesses and giving way to the skeptical explanations of what actually happened.

This tied in with the topics we covered during the semester with how the media can frame a certain story at the time, as well as how emergent media has brought the attention back to the witnesses over five decades later in the form of documentaries and television specials/segments. I would’ve liked to talk more in depth of the finer details of the case, however I had to be conscious of the time constraints I put on myself. Since this was my first time recording a podcast, I wasn’t sure how the episode would pan out had I extended it past the 15 minute mark I designated as the maximum time.

Hyperlink list

Hunters & Cryptids: BETA

In the pitch for this game, I stated that I intended on making Hunters & Cryptids a real-life physical card game with fleshed out mechanics and play styles. Unfortunately, due to my over-estimation the amount of time and the amount of work actually required for me to do so while still completing other work I have for other subjects, I’m afraid I’m going to have to abandon the idea behind making a physical game and settle for doing a digital artefact for this instead.

So, instead I will be creating a conceptual ground work for how I imagine the game would work out. I’ve outlined some of the mechanics in my pitch already, but since this game will not be physically made and tested, I’ve been able to give myself some leeway and more room for experimentation with the mechanics in a theoretical sense. The idea behind the lore I wanted to incorporate into the game will be kept the same, as well as the core mechanics of what the actual goal of the game is, that being players must capture the opposing player’s Crytpids to win. However, I have added more variables into the game to make things a little more interested and less straight forward than I previously intended as outlined in my pitch.

Here are some of the additions that I have made to Hunters & Cryptids:

– Elemental abilities
> Cryptids now have certain elemental abilities which will determine how they interact with other cards. The elemental abilities are based on the terrains, areas or circumstances in which the cryptid stories take place based on documented real-life encounters. These elemental abilities will fall into Earth, Water, Air, or Paranormal categories. For example, the Bigfoot card will fall under the Earth elemental category, since most of the sightings have been seen in rocky forest areas. Similarly, the Loch Ness Monster will be considered a Water elemental card. However, some cards will be a hybrid of both elements, such as the Mothman will be considered an Air/Paranormal elemental card. These elements act as checks and balances to the game to ensure no single card is overpowered.

– Circumstances of Capture
> After re-examining my pitch, I realised there wasn’t much elaboration on how to actually win the game, so this is how the capturing process would theoretically work. Each Hunter card comes with a counter ranging from 1 to 3 with a maximum of 5 Hunters allowed on the field. The player is required to have at least 3 counters on the field in order to complete ONE successful capture. To complete multiple captures in a single turn, the player is required to have at least 6 or 9 counters on the field. To give an example of how this would work, for a player to capture 3 Cryptids at once, they would need to have at least 3 Hunters on the field with a counter of 3, 3 X 3 = 9. The counters can be accumulated through any combination of numbers, e.g. 3 Hunters with 1 counter (adding up to a counter of 3), can capture 1 Cryptid, 2 Hunters with 2 counters, and 2 Hunters with 1 counter (adding up to a counter of 6) can capture 2 Cryptids, etc.

With these new additions to the game’s mechanics, I’ve decided to extend the demographic for this game to range from teenagers to adults ranging from the ages of 16-35. I believe that the added complexity to the game will make it more appealing to older audiences as it requires a lot more strategy than the previous iteration of this game that I had in mind.

I aim to have a full explanation of the game’s mechanics for the final submission of this DA and hopefully I can provide a simulated round of the game to further show how it works.

Thank you for reading!

“On April 19th, I made bread”

The title of this blog is almost 2000 years old. This was graffiti written in the gladiator barracks in Pompeii, preserved in time after the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. Kinda sounds like a status or a tweet, right? This shows that we as a species have been communicating our every thought, no matter how anecdotal or trivial, in public for everyone to see. It wasn’t until the creation of social media that we’ve been able to actual store this kind of data, a window into the every day trivialities of our lives. From a literal wall, to a Facebook wall.

Our almost compulsive need to communicate the most inane thoughts and activities has been with us for centuries upon centuries, but we never realised how valuable this information was until we developed the ability to store it. Now we can see the incomprehensible amounts of data that we leave behind down to single minute, millions upon millions of videos watched, money spent, people matched with, photos shared, texts sent. We’re all connected and we’re all leaving behind our digital footprint for the whole world to see.

So, think twice before you decide to post something dumb.

Hardware Platforms

I really struggled with getting my head around this week’s topic of hardware platforms. After a few re-listens and re-reads, I think I finally have a semblance of an understanding on the topic. One thing that I did understand was the on-going feud between Apple and Android (Google). So for this week’s blog, I wanna share my views on the two and give some experiences.

I’ve never been someone who’s cared all that much about having the latest tech or the best phone. For me if I can make calls, text, access the internet and social media, I’m happy. I couldn’t care less about how many pixels the camera has, or what kind of processing power it holds or why one is better than the other. I’ve gone most of my life getting hand-me-down phones from my mum (perks of having a parent that works for a tech company). The only time I ever bought a new phone off the shelf was when the iPhone 5 first came out. It was a big upgrade for me as I was still using a Nokia brick-type phone until then. I had a lot of fun discovering apps and catching up with the rest of the world. But after a while, my iPhone stopped working. It became slow and getting it to charge was a daily struggle.

This is when I learnt about forced obsolescence. Essentially, to make sure that consumers stay up-to-date with the latest Apple product, they program the products to eventually stop working properly, essentially forcing the consumer to buy the next gen Apple product. This, coupled with the exclusivity of Apple products, meant that every 2 years, you’d have to line up and buy the next upgrade just so all your devices can still work as they should.

Since then, I’ve stood firmly with Android products. Yes they have forced obsolescence as well, but they’re easily replaced and they can integrate with almost any other device in your home so long as it’s not an Apple product.

Intellectual Property and Content Control

Moving on from the internet paradigm, this week’s topic introduced us to the concept of copyright and content control. Copyright covers all mediums that might be considered as intellectual property such as music, literary works, artworks, videos, etc. and allows them exclusive rights to make copies and distribute those works for a period of time.

Immediately when thinking about this subject, my mind goes to the lawsuit filed against popular YouTubers Ethan and Hila Klein (h3h3) by another YouTuber Matt Hoss. The lawsuit stated that h3h3 had illegally used content from Hoss’s video when creating a reaction video criticising Hoss’s content. However, the result of this lawsuit went in favour of h3h3, stating that the video they posted was a transformative version of Hoss’s original work, with the intention behind it to be critique, and they had not breached any copyright laws.

This was considered to be a landmark case in the commentary/reaction channel YouTube community because it set specific guidelines that are now protected by law which allows content creators to parody, criticise or react to other content made on the website.

Simulations

“Change your perception, change your reality”

This weeks topic looked at the concept of hyperreality, simulation and spectacle. Focusing on Debord’s text The Society of the Spectacle, this topic looks at how we can change our reality depending on how we choose to view things around us. Actions such as dismantling the messages consumerism or propaganda, appropriating it and modifying it in our own way brings forward the idea that reality is whatever we decide it to be.

One thing brought up in the lecture really stuck with me; “it’s not about having the experience, it’s about being SEEN to be there”. This coupled with the photos of people trying to emulate or simulate the original photo used in the lecture of a girl on a beach shows that our reality is what we make of it or how we portray it. It isn’t about having these experiences or wanting these experiences, it’s about portraying that you ARE having these experiences, despite what your actual reality may suggest. But what’s to say that any reality is more real than the other?

Framing our Perceptions

Continuing on from the previous weeks topics concerning collective intelligence and meme warfare, this week we looked at how the media can frame certain situations in order to create and influence differing perceptions. To put it simply, one particular image can be used and appropriated multiple times to produce a variety of different connotations, or stories.

On top of this, I believe that social attitudes towards an individual can also contribute to framing our perceptions. For example, there was a running trend on social media around glorifying infamous 1970’s serial killer Ted Bundy when Netflix released a documentary and biopic in 2019. Instead of focusing on the brutal crimes that Bundy had committed, people focused more on his physical appearance, referring to him as “hot”.

This falls into the concept of schema. Schema refers to the preconceived notions that we create for ourselves as a catch-all guide to navigating our world. In the case of Bundy, the schema behind his glorification could fall into the assumption that someone who is traditionally good-looking, intelligent, charismatic and well-spoken is considered to be a good or desirable person. This, however, is not only perpetrated by the general audience. The media often uses the “handsome”, “good bloke”, “loving father driven to insanity” cliche when it comes to men committing horrific crimes because it doesn’t fit the framing of the “strong male protector” schema.

Here are some examples of these instances:

“Early photos show a strikingly handsome man”
https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/the-image-accused-killer-henry-hammond-presented-to-the-world-20190527-p51rm5.html

https://www.marieclaire.com.au/hannah-clarke-murder-domestic-violence

Meme Warfare

You’d think that an image of a green frog going viral with thousands of different iterations would seem harmless in the grand scheme of things, just a bunch of people sharing a meme and creating an inside joke that stacks on the layers upon layers of irony. However, Pepe the Frog has become infamous in his portrayal by the Alt-Right, essentially creating an innocent cartoon into a dog-whistle and a tool for propaganda.

This is an example of meme warfare. Websites and forums such as Reddit, 4Chan, Tumblr, and other social media platforms have been converted into battlegrounds of weaponised memes designed to push an agenda or enact some kind of social/political reform almost completely independent of mainstream media. This builds on from the previous week’s topic of diaologic networking. You have many independent sources collaborating with each other for an overall agenda.

Meme warfare is essentially another form of disinformation. Speaking in terms of politics, this disinformation is often used to sway people more often to the right, usually targeting centrists as a form of recruitment.

Collective Intelligence and Networking

My understanding of this week’s topic explores the further dismantling of traditional legacy media and how we as the audience are becoming more and more active in our participation in the way information is presented to us. We are no longer the recipients of media that comes from a centralised source (one source that presents to many, or “one to many”), and passively engaging in the information that is being fed through a gatekeeper (sole source). Instead we are now engaged in a decentralised network where we are both the audience and active participants in the flow of media.

In other terms, this is seen as a shift from monologic media, where the source of information presents it to the isolated audiences without the participation of the audience, to dialogic media, which creates a feedback loop with many different participants sharing and communicating information (a network of participants) without a singular source.