Lots of kids love games – and I was no different! I somehow managed to save a few of the design material from games that I made growing up, for the really curious. I’ve added a few notes by way of explanation when I could remember what they were about, but some of these are pretty old.
Blooms (c. 1998)
Blooms was a game that I would have described as “like Rayman” and for the life of me I cannot tell you why, because it really is nothing like Rayman at all. It was an action-adventure side-scroller where you play as a blue t-rex/godzilla thing with a sword named Blooms. His “famous quote” was “I am on my way!”
This is concept art for the character of Blooms and some of his animations, designs for a few enemies, and a map of the first level (which likely would be a whole world, looking at it today). I kind of want to go back and make this game.
Harry Potter TCG (c. 1999-2000)
Harry Potter was huge and so was the Pokémon Trading Card Game, so I decided to make my own card game. I drew all the cards and designed the backs very carefully. Today, “Snitch” is the only surviving card I could find. I don’t think the game had really coherent rules or balance.
Lord of the Rings Board Game (c. 2001?)
Lord of the Rings was the hottest movie franchise of the early 2000s and I was into both the books and the films. These photos look extremely grody, but it’s because the rubber cement has browned with age. These are actual boards, drawn on paper and then pasted to cardboard backs to make them durable for play. The boards are also double-sided, so you reach the end of one and flip it over to progress to the next zone. I have no idea what the rules are, or were, but I clearly had at this point actually begun thinking about things like play flow and mechanics and interaction.
Map for “Unlimited RPG 2” (c. 2004)
“Unlimited RPG 2” was a play-by-post forum-based fantasy role-playing game that ran on the BZPower forums for several years. The thread is now deleted and seems never to have been archived, but to my recollection it was several hundred pages long. Rules were loose and the game had no real systems – players posted what they wanted their characters to do, and then other players responded. The only guideline that I remember was that you couldn’t be flagrantly overpowered or act like a god. It was a lot of fun. I drew this map to help the players (of which there were many) keep track of the world geography, most of which I invented so the map wasn’t weirdly empty and never actually appeared in-game.
“Battle for Egypt” Design Document (c. 2012)
In Junior Year of college I took a class on Ancient Egyptian art as part of my Classical Civilization major, and kind of randomly the professor asked me to design a game for the final project. I have to imagine the game is long trashed (I never got it back, as far as I remember) but the premise was a two-player military clash between upper and lower Egypt to unite the kingdom, with divine forces at play. It was definitely inspired by games like Age of Mythology and Ankhet, but a turn-based board game, and only the Egyptian faction.
Justin Bortnick 