Project Lead: Matthew Franklin

Bragging and Fighting is a multiplayer action/card game (like if Castle Crashers met Munchkin, and they had a giant, two-headed baby). In a heroic quest for free beer, you and your friends take turns playing story cards to impress the locals at the tavern. But as you create this story, it comes to life—and you have to fight (or bluff) your way to victory.

Hey—thanks for checking out the BRAGGING & FIGHTING thread! This thread’s for two things:

* Answering your questions about BRAGGING & FIGHTING
* Sharing awesome ideas for BRAGGING & FIGHTING

For example, if you haven’t seen the BRAGGING & FIGHTING design document PDF, you might not know about these new cards:

WHEEEE PLACEHOLDER POST!

I like the simplicity of this. The idea of telling an awesome story at bar and turning it into a game sounds like allot of fun. It will get a vote from me because I would absolutely love to play a prototype of it, to see how it works.

Thanks! I’m really excited to make it—it’s simple enough that it’s doable in two weeks, with plenty of room for expansion if we decide to move forward with it from there.

Now I just have to knock a couple pitches out of my way….

This sounds great
I love the card game mechanics and would love to see this expanded with co-operative and competitive online modes.

Even without expanding on that side of things, you’ve got my vote to see where this can go :D

You probably know this already, maybe you even had this in mind from the get go, but I have to say it: BRAGGING & FIGHTING feels exactly like a game Double Fine would produce. I had to say this because when I look at your project, I see room for Double Fine’s style of humor, art, storytelling and character. And yes, I can see too how two weeks of work could turn this into a very fun and original prototype. I hope your idea gets more love from the voters.

this sounds fun and unique, but I’m not much of a multiplayer guy. still, would be great if this gets picked!

This pitch is really appealing.  The devil is in the details, but it seems right up Double Fine’s alley.

I like that this can lead into all sorts of madness given the combinations. Like a good game of CAH.

Could one combination of cards yield differing results? So instead of a giant kitten that shoots lasers from its eyes you get a kitten commando squad, or something.

Voted as soon as I viewed the pitch. It sounds really funny and reminded me of the insults fights of Monkey Island. The game mechanic is very interesting (and could completely work as a real life card game too). Got my vote!

Bragging & Fighting needs a huge push, i really want to play this!! I’m off down the Pub to do a bit of real Bragging & Fighting to get the word about!

This really got some great potential and is open for letting the players have even more choices. Like for example choosing their objective for killing the “boss”, the environment in which it takes place, how they got to the “boss”, what they encountered during their journey getting there, what kind of reward they got after completing everything (with each player choosing what the other got) and so on.

I’m guessing you will have to get different set of cards every time you start a new game. Alternatively have some kind of theme for each “card bundle” that the players can choose in the beginning. This in order for everything to be balanced out and making the whole thing doable.

Seeing as the whole point is to make up a story, then it would make sense to open up extra choices as you get better at the bragging. If you were fighting random monsters down the same park every week, the same park that Dave takes his kids to but never sees any dragons or laser cats, people might start to see through the brags!

Agreed, the whole aspect of the game being able to grade the players bragging and how they pulled it off, alternatively how they failed, also have some really good potential. Of course the fact that this will be judged and rewarded in a well considered amount of beers makes it even better.

Yeah, if you had to make multiple brags in a single visit to the bar would the amount of beer affect your ability to brag or fight? Possibly by opening up even more outrageous options, as everyone knows beer = exaggeration!

Another interesting idea would be having to top other stories, everyone has a friend who always has to go one better when you tell a story. Say an AI/Player sets a “Brag” and the player must use a better enemy card, or a worse weapon card to make your story better than theirs!

I really liked that pitch, but i have one small problem wih it : it’s very similar to an actual card game by a well known designer that was recently kickstarted. I’m sure this is a coincidence, but i hope you don’t get into trouble if you go ahead with that idea.

If you wanna check this out, look up Gauntlet of Fools on Kickstarter

Hey! Sorry I’ve been slow to respond—we’re trying to close out a game and I still have a couple bugs to fix. Hopefully I’ll get around to more tomorrow night, and if not, I’ll free up tomorrow.

Regarding Gauntlet of Fools, I just read about it yesterday when someone tweeted it at me. It looks quite enjoyable, and it’s too bad I missed the Kickstarter. If it goes on sale to the larger public, I’m sure I or a friend will pick up a copy to play together! That said, I think the games will play very differently, and will both be quite fun. Big differences right off the bat:

* Bragging and Fighting is about creating the whole adventure through bragging. You’re not just talking about your own hero—you’re playing cards to create enemies, traps, environments, and more. If you can imagine the longer version (assuming we took the game and built on it after Amnesia Fortnight), you might even play cards to determine where your adventure takes you, or to create plot twists (”... and then Player 3 turned on us and we had to kill him!”)

* Bragging and Fighting is a video game! For example, Dragon Age is obviously similar to pen and paper Dungeons and Dragons in many ways, but they play very differently. Bragging and Fighting uses cards to create a fun, improvised story, and then throws you into something more like Golden Axe or Castle Crashers. Then you alternate back and forth between the Bragging and Fighting phases, creating a dynamic that hasn’t been done before in either a card game or an action game.

I originally wasn’t gonna vote for this one. Then I read the design doc and something just clicked. Maybe it was the idea of fighting a giant flaming laser-eyed cat with a burning rat, I dunno. I feel like I’m already voting for too many things, but I think this project’s earned my vote.

Liked the concept, but not sure about the multiplayer part. Shouldn’t it be completely playable in single player?

So, the inspiration was multiplayer, because of two things:

1. The hilarious interactions that come up when you play a game like Apples to Apples with your friends.
2. Memories of griefing my friends whenever we’d play Golden Axe.
3. Bullet points. Holy crap, I’m really into my lists in this thread.

But then, yes—I hate not being able to play a game because my friends are all playing another game, or offline, or have abandoned me because I asked them one too many times to vote for BRAGGING & FIGHTING.

So I’d love to make it support single player. At the most basic level, it’s easy—an AI plays cards as well, and you alternate with it, responding to its partly random / partly intelligent plays. Maybe it plays too big a beast, and you try to nerf it; or it over-equips you and you try to hobble yourself. In practice, the AI’s a bit tricky to write, and the design would need some iteration. I’m confident there’s a strong single player design in there. My goal for AF is to make it playable and fun single player; my goal for the “full game” (were such a thing to happen) would be to make it completely awesome in single player.

My first thought was: this is too simple for me to enjoy.

My second thought was: this would be cool for kids. It’s like Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple but it’s simpler because it’s less open ended and not purely done in the players’ imaginations, so kids 6-9 could probably enjoy it (and older ones, too).

My third thought was that the tavern boasting scenario might not be the best for kids that age.

To sum up: aim it at smaller kids (possibly with enough options to appeal to adolescents and adults), sell it on XBLA for $10 and I’ll buy it. Maybe add Kinect controls for extra coolness.

This is my favorite game of the bunch. The idea of cards coming to life in this way is really really appealing to me.

From the instant I saw the pitch, I got excited. It sounds a bit like the Dominion card game only with the child-like imagination of things coming to life in an awesome way, which made Costume Quest so great.

I have a question about the way the single player is going to be. Will it have a “Story Mode” kind of thing, where you travel the country from bar to bar, collecting new things to spin stories with? Which might actually be great if done right. I guess some kind of epic storyline could emerge from it, maybe something like the Congladiators (Liar Gladiators) of Walter Moers’s “The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear”, if someone is familiar with the book.

Or would the single player be just a series of short tales for beer, with some kind of small meta game goals built around it?

Any way it goes, this is just such a beautiful thing. I have a hard time putting into words how stoked and happy I am about it. Now if it only would climb four more steps in the voting.

I limited my votes to four games that I would want to see the most and this was the first one I clicked. The mechanics seem solid, in other words it would be fun to play, but the thing that sold me was the potential for humor (inadvertent or otherwise).

Depending on the direction you go with this it seems like would be feasible on mobile devices too. Even an asynchronous multiplayer mode would make sense depending on how you decide to implement the actual game play.

The whole Apples to Apples/Cards Against Humanity comparison makes me excited too. That WTF moment when you see what you friend decided to tack on to your part is always a bit of a rush especially when you have to deal with the fallout.

this idea intrigues me alot!

I love this original idea! Unlike some of the other pitches, I can really imagine what it would be like to play this. With the double fine humor this could be hilarious!

edit: my very first post to support this game :-p ( long time lurker and DFA slackers backer)