Gogogo! is a competitive party game for 3 to 16 players, using just one phone! (So only one person needs a copy of the game!) In each round, there is a completely different challenge! One person sits out of each round, chooses the challenge for the other players, and is in charge of running the challenge and being a referee if necessary. The referee gets 3 random challenges to choose from, and once a player has won the point, someone else sits out of the round and chooses the next challenge.
I’m always surprised to find that when I look on the app store for party games, there are very few well known titles and apart from those there’s just a bunch drinking games. There isn’t really much that offers a long-form competitive experience in the same way that board games do. Another problem is the replay-ability, with the few titles I found, I had a ton of fun the first few times and then the novelty quickly starts to wear off. That’s why I developed Gogogo! There’s a new game every round and enough games that you probably won’t even get through a third of them in a single play-through. If a game that you’ve grown tired of appears in the list, you can simply not choose it, or you can turn it off completely in the menu. On top of that, I’m making sure that each of the 60 challenges are packed with as much content as possible, so that if you wanted (and you can) you can play any one of the individual challenges over and over without quickly getting bored or seeing the same things over and over. And a great benefit of developing a tabletop party game on mobile is that I will be able to keep adding new words, questions, clues, images, and more to keep the game new and exciting each time you come back to play. I don’t plan to charge extra for new content in challenges you already own.
Yes! It can be played anywhere but it’s best played like a board game: around a table, with your friends! I’m a big fan of board games and so the challenges are totally inspired by this genre! They are all challenges that bring us back to the basics, and recognize the appeal of simplicity in design. All the games are the most fun and engaging that I could make them while keeping them simple, casual, but also competitive!
The games test skills that people all train as a part of their daily life without thinking, like their eyesight, their reaction time, their speech, their balance, or their sense of humour. This means anyone can jump into the game and do well, there’s literally zero learning curve. I think there’s something uniquely satisfying about finding out you are really good at something without even practicing. And the sense of competition you feel when testing a wide range of natural abilities against someone else’s is quite unique!
It was so important to me that not only this game be accessible to anyone, but that it should be playable anywhere. All you need is one phone, and there’s no setting up involved. You don’t even need an internet connection. You could play in the park, in a pub, in a queue at a con, while camping, when your plane’s been delayed at the airport, in your lunch break at work, at the beach, at sea, on the international space station, in the ninth circle of hell, anywhere!
Some of the challenges require pen and paper, but you can easily turn off these challenges at the start of your game. Mostly pen and paper is used for writing down answers, which players can also do with their mobile devices.
Easy – For kids! Short words in the word challenges, simple clues and prompts in other challenges, and simplified versions of questions in quizzes. The simplified settings don’t mean that they will be too easy for adults, it just won’t use ALL of your brainpower like hard mode does.
Medium – Sometimes people can speak English well, but not be so familiar with certain obscure English words. Maybe you’re not a native English speaker, or maybe certain long words just escape you. Don’t worry I’ve got you!
Hard – The ultimate challenge! Fills all the games with complicated questions, words, clues and more.
Can you be silly? Flip this switch and it will turn off all of the more ‘boisterous’ challenges, so that you can still play without ruining the evening of those around you!
Disable games – you can choose to turn off specific challenges so that they don’t appear as suggestions in the 3 random challenge selection each round.
Game mode – you can select from “choose from list” if you want to have a choice of challenges each round or “random” if you want each round to be a complete surprise!
Accessibility – Each challenge will have “tags” that you can use to filter too! So for example, each game that uses sound will have the “sound” tag. One click and all these games will be disabled so you can play with your deaf/ hard of hearing friends!
Play games individually – Outside of the main competitive mode, you can individually play any of the games as much as you like, like the way that “Heads Up” is played. No scoring, just casual fun.
I’ve been working hard on the game for over a year and a half. At this point I’m roughly 60% done with development. I’ve created thousands of frames of animation and even more art within the challenges. About 50 of the 60 challenges are actually implemented already! I’ve invested a lot of my time and money into this project. I’ve tested the game with hundreds of people and each time I play test and improve the game I see how much more fun people are having with it. There’s still a lot I can improve on and I want to keep developing Gogogo! to help it reach its full potential and push the design, but I also don’t want development to last forever. I need funding in order to keep working on the game full time, and if possible hire some extra help in areas which I am not so capable, such as sound design. I really think that this project could be something special, but I need your help in order to achieve that vision!
I wish that were true! Because of the number of challenges, iterating upon the design of all the games is quite a lengthy process. There’s still a lot of work to do on each of the games to make sure that they are:
1) As fun as they can be
2) As easy to understand and play as possible so that no matter how young, drunk or… lacking in attention span you or your friends might be, the flow of the game is never interrupted!
3) As visually appealing as possible. Don’t underestimate the importance of eye candy! Despite having created over 150 animations so far, I still want to create way more, and I haven’t had a huge amount of time to dedicate to the visuals of the game, as work on the code and challenges is so time consuming.
4) Generally highly polished – How things sound, how elements react and appear and vibrate or bounce onto the screen. I love working on the UI stuff and it really makes a difference to the satisfaction of the challenges when interacting with the device.
Some of the 50 existing challenges will inevitably not make it into the final game either! I want to keep prototyping and replacing challenges in the main 60 to make sure that the game is as strong as possible on release! It’s important to me that players don’t feel that some of the games are there to just get the number of games up to 60. They should all be winners!
As a Kickstarter backer you would be getting the whole game so this is not relevant to you, but I still want to mention the unlock system, because it’s part of the player-friendly design philosophy that I want this game to have. Once released, the free version of the app will have 20 free games, and the other 40 will be available for a fixed price, but also, any of the locked challenges are made available for 7 days by watching a 30 second advert for each one. I was adamant that no adverts should appear in your play-through unless you choose to find them. Ad watch unlocks offer people an introduction to the full version, and they can keep unlocking games again and again if they don’t wish to pay the full price. Even a kid with no pocket money can have access to all the challenges.
Of the 10k in the initial goal, almost all of the money (about £7k after deductions) is going to go to keeping me alive while I work my little socks off getting the game ready for you guys! If we were to hit some of the stretch goals I can start to consider getting some help! I have plenty of talented animator friends who I would love to work on the game but don’t want to ask to work for free! I would also be able to sink money into sound design, which is one of the areas I am weakest! If I were to somehow receive loads more money than 10k I would pull in any help I could to help max out this game. Would be brilliant to have other creative minds thinking not only about the art with me, but the game design too!
I wanted to be as transparent as possible about rewards. I really appreciate every bit of help and I don’t want anyone to be uncertain about where their money is going! Click below if you want to find out more!
You can see a detailed breakdown of how I calculated all the reward costs here
Thanks all! And a special thank you to all of the wonderful strangers, friends and family members who have supported me this far! I couldn’t have got to this point without you!
Gogogo!
Rob
The delivery date is based on the lower stretch goals. As a solo developer if there is more to deliver, the delivery date will inevitably shift. Though a lot of work has gone into development already, so hopefully the deadlines won’t shift too much!