Behind The Scenes: Magic 21 Original Sketch

All games start with an idea… at Gamesville, the ideas can come from anywhere and anyone. Today, I thought I'd talk a little bit about the birth of our latest jackpot game, Magic 21, and give you a peek at the original pen sketch for the game.

Magic 21 was the answer to a question that we at Gamesville were wrestling with earlier in the year. The question was this: We know we want to make a new game; how do we make that game stand out in the crowd? What do we bring to the table that's different and worth playing?

We analyzed the competition, played a ton of games, listened to your feedback, used some good old-fashioned common sense, and eventually came to realize that the core values of Gamesville still rang true–and the new game, whatever it would be, had to adhere to them.

Gamesville.com was established back in 1996 with the founding belief that people didn't want to just watch game shows on TV; they wanted to be in those game shows and compete to win prizes. What we needed to do was "get back to basics" … let people play in realtime, against one another, to win free money and other prizes. Using that concept as the foundation, we generated a ton of game ideas: many were good, many were terrible, and a handful were great. The competition was fierce, but eventually Magic 21 rose up as the right game at the right time.

When developing ideas for new games, the Gamesville crew tends to favor quick sketches on whiteboards or in notebooks so everyone can get on the same page and start to develop a shared vision of the concept.

Here is the original pitch for Magic 21: 

"Magic 21 is a new 1st party game from Gamesville. It is massively multiplayer (e.g., one vs. everyone else playing in realtime) jackpot game. The play area has a certain number of columns where you can place cards. Every (5?) seconds, a new card is drawn for all players. You have (5?) seconds to discard the drawn card or place the drawn card in the column of your choice to get that column to total 21 without going over. Clear out a column to reveal either varying amounts of GV Rewards or the jackpot prize. After a column is cleared and the reward revealed, the column regenerates so it can be played again."

And here is one of the earliest sketches that helped flesh out the pitch:  

Some the early questions that needed to be answered about the game are on the sketch above… "Can players cycle through discarded cards?", "Do we total the card values for each column for the player?", "Do we show ads during the game?" The team that tackled Magic 21 had to answer those questions (and more) while taking Magic 21 from the conceptual stage all the way to the finish line. But that's a story for another day.

I hope you enjoyed this peek behind the curtain of game development at Gamesville.com. Next Wednesday, we'll continue this discussion, digging a little deeper into how Magic 21 went from a sketch in a notebook to an actual game that you can play on your computer.