Cancelled

During my time at UCSC, learning how to make an effective gameplay loop was often taught through rapidly produced tabletop or card games. This allowed for projects to be focused purely on gameplay mechanics and fundamentals; not needing to worry about coding. While developing these games, I began recognizing how strongly my favorite pieces of these forms focus on simple, strong loops.

These principles guided my thought process in developing my own card game, Cancelled. Cancelled is centered around different celebrities navigating today’s world, trying not to get “cancelled” by society. I wanted to highlight the feelings behind being cancelled in today’s society through core gameplay: justice, randomness, and manipulation.

One of my favorite mechanics of tabletop gaming is the dice roll. From playing a decent amount of Dungeons and Dragons among other games that play various types of die, it can create the perfect amount of chaos to enhance a simple system. To me, this dice chaos resembled the nature of randomness in who is canceled in reality. Thus, die rolls and decisions among said die rolls drive the “popularity” point system in Cancelled. I also opted to make all the playable characters celebrities who had been cancelled in real-life, basing their special ability around each of said cancellation circumstances.

By the end, I was proud to see I molded a societal phenomenon into an easy-to-play card game with mechanics that took pieces from its real-life counterpart. Further, developing Cancelled showed me the best way to build a fun, expansive gameplay system, is to start small with a simple loop before expanding and adding more mechanics. This may seem obvious but as a perfectionist who would try to go all out on the first prototype, this was a vital lesson to learn.