Our Journey Begins
Hello reader, Ooo, interesting voice you have there… Well, I'm honoured to have you read my words regardless of how they sound. I’m Jacob Baggs, the lead game designer at Goodie Baggs Games (GBG). ‘Pleasure to meet you.
GBG is run by myself and my wonderful fiancé / lead art director Georgia Mantegazza. This is our very first plunge into board game development and publishing. With 5 months of developing our first board game under our belt and extensive research into the industry, we thought it was about time to start documenting our journey. Who knows what the future holds for GBG but you can watch it unfold step by step in this blog.
Although I’d love to dive right in and tell you everything we are working on (I’m excited), i think this would be a great chance for me to reflect on our journey so far and for you to get up to speed with what we’ve been up to. So let’s start from the very beginning.
Georgia, studying game design at uni, comes home one night with an assignment.
“Jacob, you spend half your life playing card games online,” (harsh but fair)
“Could you help me make a card game for uni?”
And thus our journey had begun.
As Georgia poignantly pointed out, I am a big fan of strategic online card games. I don’t want to know how many hours I've spent on Hearthstone and more recently Marvel Snap. The scariest thought being, as a lifelong Dota 2 player, how many hours I would have spent playing Artifact had it not been the most horribly marketed and monetised game of all time. (yes - I’m still bitter)
Alongside this, I am very fortunate to have a close group of friends who all love playing board games. Every month we’ll meet up, get a little tipsy and have a great laugh while playing a fun new game that one of us has come across in the interim.
These are the extent of my credentials when it comes to game design. I had - and definitely still have - a lot to learn.
Georgia decided upon a theme for her game shortly after it was tasked to her. 1 Ghost vs 1 Human. Georgia is an exceptionally talented and imaginative artist with an honours degree in illustration from Minerva Art Academy in Groningen, Netherlands.
On G’s arrival back to the UK after completing said degree, she was unsure how to utilise her talent, thus she decided to study games development at Ravensbourne University in London. This course gave Georgia the direction she was hoping for and after the end of her first term, she left uni to put all her energy into this company.
When I asked G:
“Is there anything else you want me to put here?”
her response was
“I’m not important”
While of course she’s important to me, in this context, I happen to agree that we can move on.
So, we have a theme of 1 ghost vs 1 human. We knew we wanted this game to feel like a form of battle, a back-and-forth between the human and the ghost. There was, however, one requirement of G’s uni assignment, her game must include a ‘magic system’. For full transparency, G had no idea what this meant. She had missed the class earlier in the week that explained it in detail and Google offered no useful answers.
So I had to guess what was meant by a ‘magic system’. I’ve played games like Magic the Gathering and Hearthstone, so I was wondering if their land cards and mana respectively could have been what was meant by a ‘magic system’. However, I decided this couldn’t be the case, because why wouldn’t they call it a ‘resource system’ or something similar? In the end, I settled for it meaning ‘a unique game mechanic’ and just hoped that, for G’s sake, I was on the right track. (note: G told me that in the end, they didn’t even ask to see the games, RIP)
At this stage my requirements for creating this game were:
Make the game for 2 players. 1 playing the human and 1 the ghost.
include fighting mechanics to create a sense of battle between the human and the ghost.
Include a unique game mechanic
Make it actually fun to play.
I knew there was no way for me to come up with a completely new game mechanic by myself, so I started thinking about other fighting/battle-style games that I've enjoyed in the past to find inspiration. G and I both love Dungeon Mayhem and Radlands, two incredibly different, but fun games. Dungeon Mayhem is a fast-paced party game where players typically make one action in a turn and has a lot of RNG (a more luck-based game). Radlands is a much slower-paced game that rewards strategy and forward-thinking.
I knew I wanted to create a game that contained both of these elements. And from here the early concepts of what would become GBG’s debut board game ‘Good Grief’ were born.
Thank you for reading our first blog post in full :) It means a lot to us that you want to learn about our journey and hopefully join us along the way.
Stay safe and take care,
from G+J
Goodie Baggs Games