Ludo – Putting my time where my mouth is

A bit of background may be in order.

I grew up in Ghana, where ludo was an active part of my childhood. There are specific rules of the game I’ve found only among other Ghanaians so the question I asked myself was: Why not make the game myself?

Before any game, a set of questions must be posed when building the game design document:

1. What is the game? How does it play
2. What is the target demographic?
3. What are your potential rivals in the demographic space.
4. How much time (in work hours) will it take?
5. Who will be part of the development team/ what resources are required to complete the game?
6. If Capital is required, how much capital and where will it be sourced?
7. if Capital is sourced from an investor, what changes to the time-line would there be?
8. What design and implementation methodologies will be in place?
9. How will the game be supported in post-production?
10. What potential problems could we face in development? How will we deal with them if they arise?

There are more questions, but I picked these for a specific reason: research. Knowing is half the battle after all

With any game, there is a lot of work to be done in pre-production to ensure one knows what they are doing. Jumping in with both feet often proves to slow down development in the long run if one doesn’t have an idea of what the game will look like in the end

I will comment on some of the questions here, the rest at a later date and add more to this list where applicable

First, though, What game is it going to be? Well it is going to be a digitised board game. To be precise, the game is a computerised version of the board game Ludo with a “unique” rule-set. If I were to describe it using Gameplay as Narrative, it would be

A simulated war game race between up to 4 factions where victory is determined by how quickly one group of troop tokens arrive at their home base, baring random occurrences, before the other faction does the same.

James Agbotta — Being an absolute ponce about Ludo

Again, I’ll provide more information as time progresses (I need to keep these posts concise after all)

Now on to demographics

I would assume the only people interested in this would be people who have

• Played Ludo before.
• Are familiar with at least some of the rule-sets.
• Curious enough to try something new.

This potentially is a niche market, meaning competition will be few, but steep. Looking at other games on the market, the most popular platform for this type of game is mobile