What does planning an Adult Card Game like It’s Over! take?
Welcome to the second installment of our blog series where we take you behind the scenes of creating our newest product, It’s Over! – a unique adult card game designed to push boundaries and either bring your relationships closer or tear them apart. In this installment, we’ll give you a look at what our planning process looks like (hint, it’s chaotic) and show you some images of some of planning tools we use. Hopefully you like it, and if you do, subscribe below and we will notify you when the next installment is out! If you haven’t read the first installment, go here and read it first
Planning a party game:
Planning for the creation of a party game like It’s Over! requires a lot more attention than for something like a shovel. Each card requires thought and finesse or it will feel fake, or worse… AI generated.
Our planning began with a detailed timeline, setting clear milestones for each stage of development. This helped us stay on track and ensured every aspect of the project was given the attention it needed.
Naturally, we blew through those dates and immediately got behind. Things just took much more time than we had anticipated and thus with only two people, it was daunting. Lets take the trademark for example. As you can see from the image on the right, I filed it February 5th of 2024. This is good right? Should be done soon? Nope. I, the dumbass writing this post, swapped the name and description. I could make an excuse like they didn’t teach us to read in the military however that wouldn’t solve it. This was a big problem because we couldn’t plan for most other things like the box or Amazon listing without the correct trademark filing. I resubmitted it, which added another 6 or so months to the timeline, and there we have it, a correctly filed trademark allowing us to move on with both the product and this meandering paragraph.
Sadly, we aren’t project managers so as I mentioned before, it was a bit chaotic.
When you plan an adult card game, a party game, drinking game, really any kind of game, if you want a good one, you need to create all of the sentences and words yourself. I could totally ask ChatGPT to generate like 100 cards for me but they’d probably be stupid as hell or they’d definitely be stupid as hell and we want to create something with quality. I sat and wracked my brain for days, trying to create cards with the perfect balance of humor, sarcasm, shock value, and above all, enjoyability.
Tracking an adult card game with 160 different cards is no joke.
We couldn’t have any unintentional repeats, we had to know if we both agreed on the content, and we needed to be able to track changes. The “Adult” in “Adult Card Game” at this stage meant which of us was going to walk the other back from the edge of including something heinous.
Looking at that image to the left, it looks a little psychotic
This was necessary for us without an actual planning system, to be able to do all of the things above. It still burns my eyes to look at, sadly. I did blur the actual card content so you can’t just pirate our cards but you can see that we have every single card text in that list along with the penalty text. Again, can’t just ask our AI overlords to do it.
We also needed to analyze our competition to see what we could improve based on some of the features we shared.
We bought 10 party games from our competitors.
Sadly, half of them either used strange language, unpolished printing, weird photoshopped images, or a combination. The other half were pretty good. Drunk/10.
One particularly egregious example used product images of like, a diverse friend group from google, and then just photoshopped the cards into their hand. We knew we absolutely couldn’t do something like that for It’s Over! so we hired photographers who took professional photos with a crew of people actually playing the game, not modeling laughter and joy (trust us, every round isn’t going to be joyful).
We also had to plan how many of each type of card we wanted.
Given we have an all new style of party game, it was up to us to decide how wild the rounds should be. Technically, we could have made half the cards upset cards but we knew that wouldn’t be fun, nor would it keep people entertained.