As mentioned in the brief above, I am required to create a board or card game inspired by an existing franchise. For this, I didn't really have to mind-map different franchises, because I had it set in stone what game I wanted to create a board game for, which was Five Night's at Freddy's. Which is a series that is my current strong interest.
Five Night's at Freddy's, or FNAF for short, is a single-player video game series created by Scott Cawthon.
FNAF is based on a series of family pizzeria establishments, the first being Fredbear's Family Diner, created by the game's antagonist William Afton and his business partner Henry Emily. The lore itself is quite large to explain, so I included a video by CZ's world on Youtube that explains the origins.
Board game planning
Here, I created a quick plan as to what I had in mind for the board game. I had the idea of having it set out Monopoly style to begin with, and having good and bad cards, with some cards that have animatroncs on, representing jumpscares. I originally planned to have a shop, but went against it as there no shop in the games. The board game is about surviving the robots for 5 nights, so each time a player goes around the board, that represents 1 night, so a player would go 5 times around the board, and it'll be a race to survive.
Animatronic jumpscare cards
As mentioned above, I had planned to show cards with the robots on as jump scares. I plan to have 10 scare cards, with some being instant kill cards, some doing significant damage, and some just scaring the player. I looked at 19 animatronics, from the first FNAF game to the Security Breach RUIN DLC. In the end, I ended up choosing the following animatronic characters: Foxy, Nightmare Fredbear, Puppet, DJ Music Man, Springtrap, Cupcake, Moon, Golden Freddy, Balloon Boy and Ballora.
Paper prototype
Here, I started making the paper prototype. My idea for it was to have the board itself showing a select variety of worlds from the games, since the animatronics are all mixed together, I feel it made sense to do that. As I made the board prototype, I had my laptop open so I could do my research on the worlds. I had a safe area, which was the office, and sections on the board which will be where players can select a card. I also made some good and bad cards, with a couple of jump scare ones. I added items that would help the player, and some that would be useless.
Testing the prototype
Once I was fairly confident with my paper prototype, I decided to test the game out with my tutor Andrew. We used smarties as the moving markers for the time being as I didn't have my own as yet. I talked Andrew through the rules of the game as we tested my game, which was difficult to explain as I wasn't fully set on the rules of the game.
When it comes to the cards, I bought a pack of UNO cards from Amazon as I was going to repaint over then, but decided against it, considering my time frame that I had on this project. I, instead, drew around the shape of one of the cards in the pack onto some cartridge paper. As my board game is horror-themed, I thought it was fitting to have a horror-themed dice, so when I ordered the UNO cards, I ordered a pack of dice from the same site that are used for Dungeons and Dragons, but the design I bought was blood stained, and I felt that the blood design was perfect.
Game board design
So, for the board game design, I came up with the idea of the path being blood stains, with green sections representing the player picking up a card from the deck. Also with the design, I came up with the idea to showcase select worlds from the FNAF games: 1, 2, 3, 4, Sister Location, Pizzaria Simulator, Special Delivery and Security Breach.
The final board game
This is the final board game. I got it printed out, and had to get it printed onto two separate pieces of paper. I glued them to the monopoly board and painted a rough border around it.
For the cards, I wanted to try something: I bought stickers online and decided to use some to represent the animatronic jump scares as some of the characters I chose are hard to draw, and I don't have time to draw them. To name them, I colour-coded them to represent how they would act in the game: Green = Move back 1 space Blue = Move back 5 spaces Red = Lose a life Each player will be eqipped with one security card, one torch and one battery. The tokens are small red and green hats as I ran out of time to enlarge them.
For the box art, I designed it to be a tea-stained wanted poster, and I used four pre-existing animatronic renders (Springtrap, Foxy, Moon and Cupcake) and used the pre-existing 'Five Night's at Freddy's' log. For the sub title "Survive 5 Night's" I decided to design it to look like pixel blocks as within the games, there are pixellated mini games, so I thought it was a unique touch.
Overall, I feel this project was quite fun to do as I am passionate about Five Night's at Freddy's as a whole, so it was an honour to create a board game for it.