Game Seeds

Game Seeds is a card game designed to spice up your brainstorm sessions on character and game design.

Theme: Game Design

Goal of the Game: Design a Hero, a Sidekick and a Game

Preparation:
Split the players in 2 groups (maximum of 6 players per group)
Distribute the 7 rule cards to each group
Game Seeds card distribution:
1) Shuffle the cards and give 6 per team.
2) Each group selects one of its given cards to keep
3) Each group then passes the remaining cards to the other group.
Repeat steps 2 and 3 till the cards are over.

Gameplay:
The game is composed by 3 phases:

Phase 1: Design a Hero
Step 1: Define your main Character Attributes (based on the team´s cards)
Step 2: Develop his Personality
Step 3: Pitch your Hero
Step 4: Swap the characters between the 2 teams

Phase 2: Design a Sidekick
Step 1: Create the Sidekick of your opponent Hero
Step 2: Pitch the created character
Step 3: Teams vote for the best character pair

Phase 3: Design a Game
Step 1: Choose one of the team cards and design a game based on your pair of characters
Step 2: Pitch your Game
Step 3: Teams vote for the Best Game Idea

The game was made as a Research & Development project for the Design for Playful Impact research program at the Utrecht School of the Arts.

Game Seeds are wild free-spirited tiny creatures that you can play with, combine, hack and get inspired by to bring new characters and game ideas to life. The goal of the game is to embed the gameplay and the future players actions in the behaviour of the designed characters. Throughout the phases of the game you design a hero, a sidekick and finally… a game!

Improving your skills on character design is all about practicing. The more you play, the better you will eventually become. Using improvisation to foster your creativity.

Game Seeds has been designed for designers, students and creative professionals by the Utrecht School of the Arts, Monobanda and Metagama.The game offers a playful experience and a real playcentric approach to character design and creating innovative games, it can also be used as a workshop-tool.