Escape from Tag World Devlog 1: Initial Idea & First Prototype

In 2024, I created a board game called Nay Saga. I had originally thought I needed a break from making board games and would go back to video games... but then I saw the results of my game when my family played Nay Saga.

It inspired me to make another physical game. Something smaller scaled because Nay Saga ended up getting bigger and bigger. One of my original goals for 2025 was to really scope down and make something smaller so I could recover from some burnout.

So this brings me to 2025's project and what's currently called Operation Linkship (by the time you're reading this, it will have a final name, but this post was written in December 2024 when I first started this project).

I really wanted to focus on making a small game. One that fits in a small box and is a small amount of cards (~150-200 at most). And probably not any extra pieces outside of cards, or if there are, they'll be pretty limited.

This idea started because I had so much fun playing Party House in UFO 50. Originally, my brother and I were talking about making our own version of Party House with our characters just for fun and it wasn't going to go beyond that. Then we played Flip City, which was a game with very similar mechanics, but different enough to be its own game, and it was a physical card game version.

So I immediately started to come up with ideas about how I could make my own version that's inspired by these types of games but is my own experience with my characters. I was inspired by Party House in UFO 50, Flip City, Tea Dragon Society, To the Moon: Bestest Memories, and Parks. All of those have a deck building mechanics or "buying" of cards to slowly build a deck and collect points. I played all of these games very close to each other over Christmas break and it was a really fun mechanic that I wanted to create a game around.

I started by brainstorming a bunch of ideas for games about The Nays, based on Eventures and story moments. Then I limited it down to just ones that fell into this category. The first idea I came up with really stuck with me. When Cipo is first interacting with The Nays, he's helping them earn money to buy a linkship.

To tie this in, I thought about how there could be a mechanic where you're earning money to essentially recruit characters or pay them to join your team (which is your deck). Each character could have some kind of ability or action along with the following: a cost to recruit them, some kind of "points" towards winning, money that you gain when they're on your team, and a variable that adds to whether or not they'll contribute to you stopping your turn. All of the games I got inspiration from had some combination of those, so that's where I ended up on deciding the basics for what I wanted on the card.

From there, I started to sketch out lots of card concepts in my sketchbook. Because I already spent months designing the Nay Saga cards, I really wanted to keep this design simple and not make any of the same mistakes. I drew a few pages worth of sketches, using various games as inspiration and remembering the notes and feedback on the Nay Saga cards. I was still having a lot of trouble coming up with a design where the shapes were harmonious and were speaking the same language (as that's a piece of feedback that really stuck with me when I was struggling to come up with the Nay Saga cards).

Eventually, I decided to take a break from the thumbnails and try to make something in Photoshop to see if I could get any closer. I threw a few shapes together and mock-up text and colors. The rough colors and icons were really throwing off my ability to look at just the layout as a whole because of how rough they were and because they were clashing, but considering I did all of this in a day, I decided to settle on it for the time being until I came up with more concrete rules and details so I could have something to start with in terms of testing and quick prototyping.

I made a Notion page and a database of tasks to start to plan out the project. I'm mainly planning to have most of the preliminary concepting done during the first few months on the side of doing other projects (like getting back into The Nays), then completing the bulk of it during June and July. These dates are tentative, but a way for me to really scope it down and make sure I'm staying within what I have time to do so I can give myself a break this year.

Then I started on the spreadsheet where I laid out all of the characters and started to come up with numbers for their different stats. I largely based the layout and tabs on the one I made for Nay Saga, but revised it to fit with this game instead. I also ended up coming up with some abilities for them, which led to potentially adding more symbols to the card. So I'll definitely be changing the initial card designs I concepted earlier in the day to fit more with the specifics that I started to expand upon. I'm mostly keeping ideas in a Notion doc and my Discord channel so it's pretty loose and everything in this post is likely to change once I start fleshing things out more.

I spent a lot of time working on the spreadsheet for the database. While working on it, I expanded it even more and started to come up with more rules and fleshed out the game when I came up with all of the abilities. I was starting to figure out which cards the players would start with, so I added a few more cards as well that would be similar or the same abilities, just to have a few more at the start.

I decided that each character will have a "group" that they're part of and there will be 12 special cards that you're basically trying to collect so you can win the game. The first person to collect 3 of them face up in their deck while they're playing wins. So I made each of these cards have abilities and conditions to earn points from certain groups to buy them. And then you can use them if you have half the amount of points you spent (you'll just have to spend those points on your turn). I ended up making the special cards on their own tab and added commented-out areas in nanDECK to make automating them easier, so I can just do 2 exports to line everything up correctly.

Then I started to sketch some icons to use for the different groups. Some of them I might just mostly reuse what I made from Nay Saga if they make sense, but I might change up the style of them and not use the exact drawings (just the same symbol). There were a few I wasn't super sure about, but I did some sketches to try and figure some of those out.

Then I started to come up with the overall story more in-depth and goals so I could name the values/points/etc. I know the "money" or currency you use to purchase one of them (probably the regular character cards) will be called Birdians, to fit with the Tag World theme. I'm still trying to think of a more creative name for the special cards and the points you use to purchase them. I'm thinking maybe Linkship pilots are the cards and then I'll have to think more about the points/credits you use to purchase them. And then finally, the negative points going towards ending the round are probably going to be called Alerts or something of that nature, since the idea here is that the characters are messing up and alerting the Higher-Up Birds accidentally, so they have to be sent back to their Shelters and not escape Tag World if there are too many. So I started sketching some of those symbol ideas.

I brainstormed a few ideas for logos and titles. I'm still not really sure what it's going to be called, but the more I started to think about the whole Tag World theming and involving the Higher Up Birds/Bird-in-Trainings, I'm kind of leaning more towards "Escape from Tag World". I just don't know if it has the right ring to it or if it's too long. But some of these logos came out okay for the first drafts.

I decided to come up with ways to integrate the symbols into the overall design more for the digital version. I made a very rough idea to turn the symbol for the cost into the Birdian or Points symbol so it's more clear what you're using it for. I also played around with putting the group name at the top since that's more important, and then the character's name at the bottom near their ability to show that's the unique ability that they're bringing (along with the symbol for their group). This example (below) is using the longest group and longest character name to ensure they fit. I also spent a bit of time looking for fonts, so I'm thinking about using Cabin. Because this card game will require more text on the cards, I was looking for a font that isn't entirely capital letters and is Sans Serif so it'd be easier to read more of the text.

I saved all of the card files out from my rough concept so I could start to quickly iterate on this prototype. I threw it all together in nanDECK and saved out all of my image files. Luckily I had a lot of experience doing this with Nay Saga, so it was pretty straightforward. This one had a few more moving parts because it has more text and variables that change between cards, but it wasn't bad. I also had all of the character drawings from Nay Saga that I could reuse for this. I might even reuse them (and just reposition them) for the final version even since it'll save me a lot of time and make this a much smaller scaled project.

Then I saved them out to be usable in Tabletop Simulator. I imported them in and was able to start testing out the game already! It's amazing how quickly this can go with these tools. I was able to come up with the idea and then, about 2 days later (of working on it), already have a playable version in TTS!

So I did some testing in Tabletop Simulator and I took a lot of notes on areas to update with the rules and cards. It ended up being pretty fun, but I definitely have a lot of updates to make based on those tests.

I made a few updates to the cards based on my first playtest to balance some of the cards a bit better. I added another card to the starting group and modified some of those so it's easier to gain Birdians in the beginning. I decided to change up how you play the special cards as well to see if that would make it go a bit faster. Once I made the updates, I loaded them into Tabletop Simulator to further test and see how it worked.

After some more playtesting, I updated the balance of some of the cards further to add more points to cards you'd get later in the game, because I noticed it was taking a long time to get even the first special card. I added some new formulas in Google Sheets and nanDECK to further automate the cards. I wanted it to be more clear when cards were subtracting points vs. adding them, so I made some formulas to change the image and text color depending on if it's subtracting.

 

I also made some updates to the card visuals so the values on the right side are shaped uniquely so it's easier to tell what values they're contributing to. I also reflected that at the top depending on what type of cost they are to recruit them (Birdians vs Points).

Then I figured out how to add icons to the text in the ability section so I could more clearly indicate what the cards were talking about without the player needing to memorize a bunch of specific terms. This includes replacing the Points, Birdians, and Alerts with their symbols and then also adding the symbols before the group names when they're referenced. In addition, I added some mock-up colors for the cards. I'm still trying to decide if I want the name or the group at the top (leaning towards name so the group can be next to the icon it's associated with).

Next, I'm going to continue to playtest so I can iterate on the layout of cards! I'm hoping to nail these down before I make any final assets so I can just focus on the gameplay without having to worry about how the cards look (since they're still pretty rough right now).