Adventuring Letty

Letty’s Instagram account, @AdventuringLetty, is intended to chronicle the adorableness of Letty and her Mom, Melissa, throughout Letty’s life. What may have started as a trendy way to nudge a dog towards becoming an influencer and maybe even getting some paid promotional goods, has now become more of a lifestyle account focused on all of Letty’s antics.

If we’re being honest, though, the majority of the photos are Letty being adorable. Which is pretty much all the time, anyway.

The genesis for this idea came from a random fall Thursday in 2020, where the three of us were hanging out at Melissa & Letty’s place. Letty was looking for some attention, and Melissa decided to get on the floor and start trying to engage Letty with toys. What followed was the realization that depending on the type of toy or activity Melissa was trying to engage Letty around, Letty’s attention – and thereby affection – was focused on Melissa, in proximity to Melissa, or it was focused on not-Melissa.

This quickly turned into a realization that an activity to earn attention and affection from Letty could be shaped into a game mechanic. On this particular Thursday, Melissa was throwing toys from Letty’s bed, down the hallway, in an effort to encourage Letty to chase after the toys and bring them back to Melissa. Sometimes Letty would chase after the toys and bring them back, sometimes she would take the toys and go off on her own munching on and squeaking the toys until she lost interest. This bore the core mechanic for the game.

Within a few days, some studying went into casual family-friendly games – and with an element of goofy or quirkiness. The more we dove into the mechanic around “have Letty in front of you when someone runs out of cards,” the more it seemed like we were combining the common game of “Hot Potato” (but with an inverse goal of wanting to have the potato at the right time) and “Old Maid” which was a simple shedding game where you wanted to avoid having a particular card at game’s end.

One of the disappointment aspects of other, (unrelated) 2-player card games was this potential for zero strategy or interaction to happen between players by just playing cards. The goal for this game would be to avoid the idea that players are just playing cards and they’re both engaging with one another in an effort to engage Letty.

This provided a means to introduce additional mechanics or game parameters around qualifying when cards can be played. Letty, represented by a token or card, would have two states: When she’s awake and when she’s asleep. Cards can be played depending on if she’s one of these states, or even be played with no regard for those states.

Because there were other gaming projects were largely abandoned or trashed before they became mature enough to remain on the backlog, there was a light process already established around prototyping. Specifically, taking a set of blank playing cards, and being able to write in dry-erase markers (well, anything) to setup the cards. Prototyping continued into the world of Tabletop Simulator. This afforded a level of flexibility with card frequency and mechanics changes – not to mention the ability to test things remotely in the middle of a pandemic that prevented in-person playtesting and collaboration.

With pandemic woes behind us, and winter starting to melt, more time and energy was focused on the types of engagements Letty enjoyed, in an effort to shape up a larger variety of possible cards. At this point, with the Tabletop Simulator mod, there was between 1-5 hours of playtesting happening each week. These playtests were conducted with different friendly people each week, virtually, and with mechanics or card frequency changed each time. The goal of this testing was to figure out if the larger variety of possible cards would be interesting for players while also testing out to see if there were ways to “break” the game by players leveraging mechanics in their favour.

Escaping or avoiding the ‘just play cards’ mentality was still a goal, but not an active driver (too negative of a thought). “How do we keep players engaged with one another?” became our core focus.

Sure, sure, the intent wasn’t to turn this into a fully fledge product or even to build out any kind of crowdfunded audience or goals. But the closer we got towards that final product, the harder it was to pretend like this was a product while going through all the motions of making it a product.

So, yeah. We made it a product.

Final proofs for the Adventuring Letty game have come in and we’ve made over 20 unique illustrations of Letty and her day-to-day activities, setting the stage for her ‘everyday adventures.’ We are currently marching down the path of building out expansions as well, with 6 new adventures targeted as add-ons to the core game and featuring over 50 new illustrations. There are some other surprises along the way that we’ll introduce at a later time, too.

For now, having the tangible game-in-hand is something of a relief and point of pride. Even if it turns out all the mechanics are awful, unbalanced, and the game just feels broken or one sided, it’s been quite a ride getting this far. As for next steps: the current plan is to build out a product-supporting website, continue with playtesting (in-person if possible), and maintain momentum through the expansion-pack trajectories.

The product itself was meant to be a gift, a one of one, but now that it’s a fully fledged product, we’ll need a release date, production timelines, and of course, a means to learn about and order the game. While we debate and discuss if this Adventuring Letty game should have a short run for friends, self-published through help from a Kickstarter, or pitched to a publisher, we’ve setup a version of the game available for sale through the game’s website: AdventuringLetty.com. All of those decisions should be coming in the late Summer of ‘22, and then execution to make this really real to happen in Q423 or Q124.

There are few things that bring the same kind of joy that Letty does, building out a Letty-themed game is pretty close to making that list.