Games In Development
Currently, all our projects are works-in-progress. Some are more complete than others, and what projects, descriptions, or other content is listed here is subject to change.
Come Out Of Your Shell (COOYS) Print-and-Play
Come Out Of Your Shell (COOYS) Feedback Form
01
Come Out Of Your Shell
(COOYS)
Originally designed for a GenCon contest COOYS is a game where two players of ages 8 and up are shy turtles who are trying to emerge from their shells, and make friends. Each round, players draw and resolve cards which affect their Fear and Bravery stats. If you end a round with more Bravery than Fear, you get to make a Courage Check with a d6 or spinner to determine if you complete one of the three goals for your turtle. The player who finishes their third goal first wins, and if both players finish their third goal in the same round, they both win!
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Development Stage (As of April 27 2022): Playtesting, Age-Appropriate Consideration, Adding Cards, Saving up for Art
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Please download the print-and-play version, and complete the feedback form after playing. You can complete the form for each time you play if you like. Any and all feedback is welcome! You can also join the RHG Discord to let me know what you think there.
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Proposed Change #1: Simplifying the language to be more appropriate for younger players. Intended to be beneficial for social anxiety, shyness, and introversion, the language may need to be made simpler to make sense for a younger audience. Turtle theme may get lost on older youth (tweenagers and above), so the game may benefit from focusing it's target audience.
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Proposed Change #2: While the game is intended to be simple, the size of the player decks decreases replay-ability and player choices. Original decks were due to constraints per the contest the game was designed for, there's no real reason to not add a few more cards.
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Proposed Change #3: Adding art. Not a change but a development goal. Most donations, subscriptions, and income that RHG earns is going to a "turtle-bank" to help push this game along. If you read this and can draw emotive turtles for cheap, please reach out!
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02
Untitled
This asymmetric card came features a Human player and a Mental Health Diagnosis player representing the interactions between the day-to-day struggles and skills of someone with that diagnosis. The Human player makes use of Coping Skill, Protective Factor, and Ally cards to increase their Resilience in the face of their adversary. The current playtest deck features Depression, the player of which making use of Struggle, and Risk Factor cards to increase the Intensity of the Depression. The game is played over five rounds, each representative of a day in the life of the Human player. Whichever side is able to win three out of five days, win the game.
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This game would be suitable for ages 12+, and would feature such "opponent" decks as for Depression, Anxiety, and other common mental health struggles. The cards selected each round allow the players to tell a narrative about the struggles and skills someone may need in order to triumph over the intensity of their burdens, as well as taking a gamified approach to talking about the ways that those struggles negatively impact us.
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By combining a game-based medium with sometimes challenging topics, this game seeks to create a bridge to allow young people (and adults) to gain awareness of skills and strategies used in mental health care, and be able to participate in a fun way in discussions about those skills.
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Development Stage (As of April 27 2022): Mid-Development
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Early playtests have established strong core gameplay and theme. Current work on this project is expanding card lists, testing and monitoring card interactions, and continuing to develop base rule-set.
03
Dream Defender
Inspired by the card game Boss Monster, and the movies Home Alone, and Small Soldiers, Dream Defender is intended to be a 2-4 player card defense game. Players take on the role of the animated toys of their chosen child character, which come alive at night to defend their child from the monsters and nightmares that emerge from the dreaded closet. The Toys (as cards) you select are used to build a gauntlet through which the monsters and nightmares must break through in order to reach into our dreams.
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Development Stage (As of April 27 2022): Early-Development, Still Prototyping Core Mechanics
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This game has a working prototype, but requires core mechanic exploration and refinement to allow for consistent iterations and playtesting.
04
The Worlds Within
This is a rules-light, highly-adaptable, tabletop role-playing game system that has just started development at the end of April 2022.
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Inspired by The Secrets of Droon, The Chronicles of Narnia, Stranger Things, and others, player characters in this system are school aged children who find portals to fantastical worlds in unlikely (yet imaginative) places such as the closet, treehouse, or even a large cardboard box. As the only limit is the shared imagination of the players, characters may find themselves in worlds of fantasy, sci-fi/space, western, historical, horror, or anything else!
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Development Stage (As of April 27 2022): Early-Development, Still Prototyping Core Mechanics
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I am still testing core mechanical systems for this project.
