Gerbil Power
Gerbil Power is a card game that was created by my teammates and I during the 2022 Vesalius Trust-a-Thon. We had a 2-week timeline to fully realize a product within the theme of New Energy. With that in mind, we decided to create a game that would educate people about renewable energy technologies.
Client
2022 Vesalius Trust-A-Thon
Tools
Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign
Format
Card Game
Audience
Teens and Adults
Collaborators
Amy Jiao, Joshua Koentjoro, Stephen Nachtsteim, Avila Sanchez, Emily Tjan
Date
September 2022
Ideation
We started pitching ideas around the theme of New Energy and we ended up choosing to make a card game. This was a fun idea that would be doable in a short timeframe.
Card design iterations and reviews
Our 2-week timeline didn’t allow us to produce the cards in a pipeline fashion where each person would be responsible for one stage of the design. Instead, we were each assigned to a specific set of cards that we would produce from start to finish. Thus, one of our biggest challenge was unifying the design throughout the entire card set. Our strategy was to use a simple vector style as opposed to a hand-drawn style to simplify the shapes. It also made it easier to go back and fix an illustration as time was also a big challenge. We met regularly at multiple stages of the design to review our cards and give each other feedback.
User testing
Once we neared the ending of the game design, it was time to playtest to see if there was any final adjustments to make. We used a software called Vassal that allowed to quickly prototype the game and play online.
Final assets
Defining the game design
One of the first steps was to define the different cards that would be part of the set in order to start designing them as soon as possible. The team started thinking about different energy resources and what were the existing and new technologies built to collect them. Once those had been defined, the team split into a card design team and a game design team in order to maximize our short time frame. The game design team continued to build on the initial gameplay idea by adding more cards to the set, calculating the correct proportion for each type of card and working on the game text.
