Slyville

This is probably a perfect case of how, in game development, you plan one thing, but end up with something completely different. Yes, Slyville actually started as a mobile game.

I used to work on many Unity 3D side projects, but I lost interest in most of them. I also had no problem showing my prototypes to others, and sometimes I even had someone help me. I'm not sure how it happened, but a small team of three came together for The Merchants (codename for my mobile game), and we started meeting regularly to work on it. It wasn't an exceptionally promising project, so I think we treated making the game as more of an excuse to hang out.

If you checked the authors, you will notice four names. The last member joined later, but had the greatest influence on the current form of the game. It was his suggestion that pushed us to create paper prototypes of the game mechanics. One day he came and said: "I don't think you will agree, but I have to show you something." We saw cards instead of a huge board with hexes, tokens and complicated mathematical formulas. We immediately liked it.

It hit us that this version was much better suited for a board game. We started taking production more seriously, even attending board game development meetups at the Warsaw University of Technology, where we tested our ideas with strangers. We also held our own playtests in local bars. By the time we found a publisher, the mechanics were already polished. That didn't mean the work was over. Hexy Studio came up with a new name, refined the setting, and added a visual "overlay" to the bare mechanics. They launched a successful crowdfunding campaign and released our game to the world.

Slyville is a fun party game, and I'm not just saying that because I co-created it. It has simple rules, is well-balanced, and generates a lot of laughs during gameplay. It's not how I originally imagined the project, but it exceeded my expectations in the end. If I had stuck to my first idea, I wouldn't have met so many interesting people, and the game itself probably would've ended up scrapped. But now I can proudly add it to my portfolio, even though I never planned to make it in the first place.