Hall of Lame!
DESCRIPTION
A highly social party game experience inspired by the Jackbox Party Pack series. Players nominate each other for outlandish superlative titles and vote to decide who is awarded each.
Developed using the Hackbox web service and Hackbox Unity package.
MY ROLES
Game Design
Programming
WORK TYPE
Personal/Hobbyist
ENGINE
Unity (originally Node.js)
GENRES
Party
Comedy
Background
After discovering the Jackbox Party Pack series, I became interested in designing my own games which borrow the Jackbox format, and so I documented a variety of possible party game experiences.
Eventually, I went on to create prototypes for my ideas by coding in Node.js and Socket.IO and hosting them on a local server. After teaching myself how to use this framework effectively, I first developed clones of several Jackbox classics before finally creating a few of my own games. These prototypes were lacking in presentation and the local server was unreliable, but at the very least they managed to demonstrate that my ideas could translate into enjoyable party games.
For some time, I searched for a way to remake these party experiences using an actual game engine. Eventually, I found the Hackbox Unity package: a stack designed to allow developers to build Jackbox-like party game experiences in the Unity engine, hosted on a web server which imitates the functionality of that used by Jackbox Games. It was a perfect fit for my developer needs.
Gameplay Design
I borrowed many common surface-level elements of gameplay from the Jackbox series: such as a round-based gameplay loop, a voting system, and an audience feature (audience members can join the game after it has already started - they generally don't compete to win but can collectively influence the outcome in some way). I also followed Jackbox conventions with regard to the scoring, as points are doubled for Round 2 and tripled for Round 3.
Each player chooses nominees for two different titles per round, out of all other players. The nominee for the second title is chosen to contest against a previously chosen nominee by another player. Once everyone has chosen both of their nominees, the titles are iterated through in random order, with all players and audience members voting for which of each pair of nominees should be awarded their respective title. Both nominees and the players who nominated them also vote.
To incentivise players to be honest in their voting, I added a 'conformant voter' score bonus for each player who voted with the majority. This also encourages the player who chose each nominee to think about which nominee may be the more popular choice rather than just voting for their own, as voting for the opposite nominee will earn them more points if that nominee wins.
When designing this new feature, I also remembered that audience members can also vote, and given they are not competing to win, this bonus is impertinent to them. Because of this, I chose to downplay the audience's control over the outcome by restricting the collective weight of their vote to a single player vote: a feature even used by some Jackbox games such as Survive the Internet. In other words, the significance of each individual audience member's vote becomes less powerful the larger the audience. In a game with a sufficiently large audience, they will generally have little impact on the outcome other than breaking ties.
There are a few other features I wanted to add to the game, such as fill-in-the-blank prompts which would allow for more creativity. However, I figured players would be able to use this to cheese the game by entering each other's names into a blank which would make them the obvious choice to nominate for that title, so I chose not to implement it.
Final Round
The first two rounds function the same, with only the possible titles differing. However, the final round is where things change.
There are many games in the Jackbox series which change up the formula in the final round. I aimed to reuse that idea in this project, designing a final round which works reasonably differently to what had been already established while still feeling like the same game.
In the final round, players no longer nominate another player for a given title but instead nominate themselves for a title of their choice. Everyone else is later given the chance to contest the title by nominating themselves right before the vote. I also had to implement limitations on how many titles a player could contest per game, as well as how many players could contest each title, in order to incentivise players to contest more sparingly.
Post-Mortem
During development, I had to teach myself how to use the Hackbox package. Fortunately there was a helpful guide on the GitHub page describing the package contents and how to use them, but this guide was incomplete which forced me to figure out certain parts for myself.
Overall, I am highly satisfied with the outcome of this project. While the gameplay is simplistic and less creative than some Jackbox party games, I still consider this to be a solidly designed experience which delivers on everything I like in a party game: engaging with a straightforward and concise gameplay loop, well-paced, and with a good replay value. The social nature of the game also means it provides a completely different experience depending on who is playing.
Not only did I develop an enjoyable party game, but in the process I provided myself with a template to build more Jackbox-inspired party games in the future. Moreover, I provided a project template on GitHub to make life easier for anyone else looking to use the server and package like I did.