Neon Hope and Tabletop Creator
We love to support passionate game designers on their journey to bring innovative and exciting projects to life. When Dominik and the Hopeful Games team approached us with their unique vision for NEON HOPE, we were immediately thrilled to work with them!
As they prepare to launch NEON HOPE on Kickstarter, we are incredibly excited to see their hard work and dedication culminate in a project that we believe will resonate with gamers everywhere. Join us in celebrating the remarkable journey of Dominik and Hopeful Games as they share their story and the incredible adventure of bringing NEON HOPE to life.
You can check the pre-registration here! From the game mechanics to the amazing design, we are sure you’ll enjoy their hard work and insights from their journey.
The NEON HOPE creator’s journey to bring their game to Kickstarter
Cheers fellow designers!
4 years ago I picked up the phone, calling my friend Francesco excitedly: “I finally know what game we are making”, I said. For years we had been discussing and theorizing about how we would change our favorite games if we could. We had even once or twice tried our hand at designing a game ourselves. Though we never got very far. We were missing a spark of inspiration.
Every game needs a vision, and that day I had found mine. I had read about hopepunk, a rather new genre that challenged cyberpunk’s grim vision of the future, offering a more hopeful outlook. Suggesting that dystopia is not inevitable, at least, if people fight back against it. This felt perfect for the type of stories I wanted to tell. And it was perfect for a near-future setting, which was grounded in reality, but also left space for exciting places to discover.
Now all I needed was a great gameplay mechanism to make this fun. This is where Francesco came in. As someone who had played card games like Magic, Netrunner, and Game of Thrones on the highest tournament level, he was the perfect mind to help me make a game that does not only create a story, but also offers strategic gameplay similar to the trading and living card games we adored. I just needed to convince him that this was a good idea — not sure, if I had succeeded, if I had already known it would take us 4 years.
How to design your boardgame prototype?
Next we had to figure out how to quickly make a prototype. After the crazy attempt to build (and play!🤪) an early prototype in a Miro board, we started building our game with Card Creator – the precursor software to Tabletop Creator. What really drew us to Card Creator was that it had this simple way to export cards to Tabletop Simulator. Which was exactly what we needed. Francesco lived in Berlin, I lived in Hamburg, and we needed to be able to test our game digitally. And as any veteran board game designer will tell you: you need to iterate fast. So we needed software that enabled us to change prototypes quickly. We needed to try out new ideas fast.
To start out we met in person, and made a paper prototype. This helped us to figure out some basics. And then we took our best ideas to Card Creator. Later, when the game became stable and did not change as quickly anymore, we transferred it to Tabletop Creator. We had learned that it offered many new features which made it even easier for us to iterate quickly. And all the additional visual features made the prototype look so much nicer, too. 😊
Today we are taking the next step in our journey:
We are announcing that our game is coming to Kickstarter early next year!
You can check-out our pre-registration page here!
Tabletop Creator was an incredible resource that enabled us to get this far – and will take us even further. We originally thought that we would use it only for prototyping. But the more we accustomed ourselves with the tool, the more we realized that it was also great for a small team like us to create our professional print files – especially as Tabletop Creator supports exporting in different color profiles, which is essential for that. And currently we are working on our final card templates that we hope to share publicly soon.
If you have been thinking about making your own board game, I can only encourage you. While it is an often long process that can involve many setbacks, when your ideas do not work out as well as you thought, it also can be very rewarding. Even if your intended audience is just your friends and family.
When we started out, we were not sure how far we would get. But it did not matter to us. We just wanted to make the game as a creative outlet, so we can share it with people. And we are glad that Tabletop Creator helped us to start this journey.
Keep designing, and stay hopeful!
Dominik (Designer of NEON HOPE)
