We got to chat with Asmadi Games founder Chris Cieslik about the company’s upcoming card game Good Puppers.
Dog O’Day – What inspired the idea for Good Puppers, and how would you describe the game in a nutshell?
Chris Cieslik – Cari and Amanda wanted to draw cute animals for a game, and I said sure! So I designed a silly but clever game about the goodest puppers you can find, and asked them to paint some pups to go along with it.
In the game, you collect cards with dogs on them, and each card has a special power. These powers let your pups bury bones (face-down cards) in their yards. Bones are worth points, so you want to get your pups burying as many bones as possible! It’s easy to learn, but with a good amount of strategy.
Do you have any dogs of your own, and if so, what are their personalities like?
I don’t, but my parents have a good pup named Chloe, and my sister has the adventurous Vincent and the mischievous Mable. They’re all a handful in their own individual ways. We’re in an apartment, so we have a cat named Ivy. Ivy is indifferent to pups, but does watch them very closely from the window when they walk by.
Did the coronavirus pandemic mean development for this game was different? What is the process usually like when developing a game, generally speaking?
Good Puppers was actually complete just before the pandemic began, so it didn’t impact things too significantly. We’re small enough to not have a big office – we all work from home – so general operations haven’t changed too much.
Developing a game’s always an adventure – it starts out with a raw idea, and then a lot of thinking about that idea. Then it’s prototyping time, and we test it out with friends. Was it good? Was it bad? Lots of revisions happen, and then we test again, and repeat until it’s either not a workable concept anymore, or it’s done! Then art comes in, and we get everything polished and ready for a Kickstarter campaign or for direct sale to stores.
On the website most games are labeled as either “strategy” or “light.” Are these industry-wide labels or company-specific, and how does that labeled get determined? Where does Good Puppers fall?
It’s about as hard to classify games as it is to classify movies or TV shows. Everyone has their own labels and ideas. For us, “strategy” implies that you need a solid reading + understanding of the rulebook before playing, and “light” means you can learn as you go easily. Puppers is in the latter category because its rules are quite simple – but it does have some strategy and opportunity for cleverness!