The Cycle

Graphic Design - Game Design

Project Overview

This a boardgame for a Game Jam made with the University of Bobigny where we had to create a boardgame in following this theme "The death is not an end". So we decided to use the cycle of life in the nature to respect this theme. We were a group of 3 and a party of our game shoudn't last longer than 20 minutes

My Contributions

I designed most of the cards design using Dall-E and MidJourney. We tried to have realistics graphism and we were also inspired by the game "Ori and The Blind Forest" for some design. I also designed some rules like the main mechanic or the effect of some most cards

The cycle is a board game based on the cycle of life and the 4 elements. Our theme was "Death is not the end". In The cycle, you are an incarnation of one of the 4 elements and your aim is to appease Mother Nature, who has been feeling neglected for some time. Gather as many elemental resources as you can and unleash the power of the elements to prevent other avatars from collecting Mother Nature's favours.

We created this game in groups of 3. The aim was to create a game that's easy to learn and that doesn't take more than 15 to 20 minutes to play. All in 3 and a half days. To do this, we brainstormed for a good part of the first day to come up with a theme and a gameplay idea and created a very quick prototype to get an idea of the core gameplay. We were inspired by games such as 'Service Compris' or 'Bang', with the idea of being able to play cards very quickly to meet the time constraint. As well as the different types of card (attack, defence, special, etc).

Here's an example of some of the cards in the deck. As mentioned above, I generated these images using AI. Of course, we checked whether this was allowed in the Jam, and it was confirmed that it was.

We first had 1 day to try out different board games. To find inspiration and direction. The games that mainly inspired us were "Service Compris" and "Bang". One of the reasons this game inspired us was that it's so easy for new players to understand the rules. The names of the attacks in Bang or the description of the cards in Service Compris

We made a first ultra-simple prototype with very simple attack, defense and resource cards with just colors, and it worked very well. We then began to establish different card mechanics to make the game a little more complex and allow for more strategy. We had to limit all the ideas we had, as the game had to stay fast and players shouldn't spend too much time trying to understand the effects of each card and discover how they worked as the game progressed. To try out the game, go to the Ludotheque at Villetaneuse University.