Who am I?! How much time did this take?!
Howdy! My name is June DeBaun and I did the design, music, and some art for Devilish Double Down. On the Kanban (planning) board I have roughly 25 hours in total. Overall, with the addition of team communication it totaled around 30-35 hours.

Why BlackjackI?!
From the beginning we planned on creating a game using blackjack mechanics. Originally it was the base game of blackjack strapped onto a Metroidvania style platformer; however, I was very hesitant in that idea given the small team size and 3 week time period. So, the team pivoted and it was up to me to figure out how to make blackjack more interesting. 

How to Make Blackjack More Interesting
Before any coding started on Devilish Double Down, I sat down with a deck of cards and one question: “How do I make Blackjack a turn-based-battler?” With the base gameplay decided I first started by figuring out how enemies would work in combat. I knew I wanted the enemies to have health that went down when you hit a blackjack; testing this I found 3 things. One, face cards make it incredibly easy to hit 20 and very hard to hit other numbers; two, without other players, it was up to the luck of the draw more often than it was to skill; three, I didn’t have any reason to not hit every time because the outcome was the same regardless if I bust or play it safe. To fix the first issue I removed face cards from the deck and made blackjack a random range; this made it much easier to hit the desired outcome. To solve the second issue I originally created a “discard” pile where the player would “pass” on the next card if they didn’t think it would get them to blackjack. The third issue was much harder to fix; however, I came up with the core battle system to combat this. The enemy's attack was no longer guaranteed to hit and, “pass” button was changed to “hazard.” The “hazard” became a second second pile for the player to use to block incoming attacks. This gave the player the ability for DOUBLE GAMBLING ACTION as well as a more skill based approach that focused on counting cards. While this was a good base I was still failing to make the player pick any option besides “hit” or “hazard.” This play pattern was fixed by the safety and double down mechanics. Whenever a player was below on both hit and hazard the ability to choose whether to attack or block helped rid the player of just wanting to hit. However, this created a new problem where the player didn’t want to hit blackjack. Thus, the double down mechanic was made where if the player hits blackjack for their “hit” and “hazard” hand.

Music and Art! In addition to being the designer for the game I also did the music and most of the sprite work. For music I went with a house/club inspired track for the battle as casinos and clubs give me the same vibe of too many people and too loud music; this also worked well into the battle theme being chaos. As for the art I went with a style that was silly and jovial with creatures that are puns on common game tropes such as “Card Sharks,” “Dice Goblins,” and “Poker Chips.”

What was the most difficult part?
MOTIVATION! I have always struggled to stay motivated on projects for I have “bees in my head syndrome” (aka ADHD). While being the designer meant a lot of work upfront, after that I felt useless and didn’t really work on my other roles I was assigned. During week 2 of the project practically nothing came from me. Seeing team members' constant output of work made me feel like I had let them down and needed to get to their level. Personally, I am still disappointed with my overall output and wish to put in a more consistent effort next time.

What did I learn??
I knew there would be hang ups when working on any project; however, most of ours came up due to miscommunication of ideas. This is in no small part my fault. In the beginning of the project there was a large disconnect between the departments. This disconnect was mostly between the designer (me) and the coders. After half a week of trial and error we developed a form of communication where I would send a video prototyping the project, either with my own deck of cards or with a tabletop game software. This was very beneficial to me because I didn’t have to explain things in written words. It was also very beneficial to the coding team because they could refer back to the video as needed. However, if a team member did need me to explain I would always be willing. 

I also learned what it means to keep a team moving. Progress generates progress was the name of the game with our team. It felt like each time someone would put out a piece of work someone on the team would one up them. Encouraging that behavior was definitely something I was not super familiar with, but as the project continued so did the amazing output of work.

What am I proud of??? MY TEAM!
Holy guacamole this team was pretty fantastic! You’re telling me we made this in 3 weeks?! I’m thoroughly impressed and so proud of my teammates! Massive shout out to the coders who put in a ton of overtime!! As for myself I am proud of the mechanics. It took a LOT of hours sitting down with a deck of cards, a pen, and some paper to figure out the mechanics and get them to feel good. If you made it to the end, thank you so much! I hope you have a fantastic time with devilish double down.

THE MUSIC:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyAeghRjYwI
https://youtube.com/watch?v=5K01Vw072TY
https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZcWK3DvNARE

THE ART REFERENCES:
https://www.pinterest.com/rosejuneart/gambling-baybe/