At WASD 2023 in London, I sat down with Andy Kniaz (Vice President of International Games) and Belia Portillo (International and Partnership Lead) of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Jackbox Games. We spoke about all things Jackbox, including the upcoming party pack, challenges that the pandemic posed to gam🌃e development, and what their personal favourites are across the long-running series.
Ten years since its inception, the scope involved with making a Jackbox game has gotten much wider. “The more we get into it, the more novel and innovative it gets,” Kniaz (favourite game: Trivia Murder Party 2) says. They even have a team working specifically on the controller - the interface you have to use, usually with mobile devices, as you play. “The ludology behind our studio is limited by the controller that we use,” says Portillo (favourite game: Tee K.O.), w💎ho explains that when revisiting games and borrowing aspects of each one’s moment-to-moment experience, the controller is a big part of the de✨sign process.
For example, the success of Patently Stupid (Party Pack 5) 𝔍led to more presentation-style games like Talking Points (Party Pack 7), with greater emphasis on the complex interactions made possible by Jackbox’s unique cont♉rol method. When a concept or a mechanic is identified as a winner, the dev team can push the controller to its limits to make a robust experience out of it.
We then dove deep into what goes into choosing the individual games that make up a Party Pack. The team at Jackbox Games seems highly attuned to what their audience wants - each Party Pack is finely balanced, not leaniꦛng too heavily toward certain archetypes, such as drawing or trivia games. This leads to packs that have a little something for everyone, and the hope is that even if someone buys a pack for one game, they’ll find something to enjoy in all of them. “The Party Pack, by its nature, is meant to be a diverse product,” Kniaz꧙ says.
Creating Jackbox games is not as simple as picking the best-sounding ideas. “We go through an interesting greenlight process over nine months,” Kniaz reveals, “a lot of games get greenlit, but not all of the🐓m make it into the pack.” Once a game gets greenlit, it goes through a long process of refinement and playtesting until it’s ready. Kniaz mentions a specific game called Poop Cake that, while (possibly thankfully) not turned into a fully-realised g🐬ame, eventually became Weapons Drawn from Party Pack 8.
Playtesting is the main way the team knows whether a game works or not. It’s invaluable for identif🅰ying where people may get lost, understanding where any friction comes from, and being able to refine an experience into something workable. When you get right down to it, though, laughter is the heart of every Jackbox game. “Our CEO basically walks around during playtests, and🉐 if he hears laughter, he knows we have something,” Kniaz says.
While there are core mechanics that the team can fall back on, such as drawing, competitive auctioneering, or simply allowing groups of friends to weaponize their in-jokes, there are deliberate attempts to switch things up. Roomerang is an example of this, with the team seeking to replicate situations faced by those on reality TV and encourage roleplaying amongst players. This vibed 🦄well with the core Jackbox audience, and is likely something that could be explored in the future - after all, providing an enjoyable experience that gets you laughing might as well be the Jackbox Games mission statement.
This is something that has only become more important in recent years, with the pandemic and subsequent lockdowns putting a halt to in-person game nights. The pandemic posed an interesting challenge when it came to playtesting and game development in the social distance age. As Portillo, who started at Jackbox Games at the beginning o🌳f the pandemic, explains, “We used the same types of tools that dungeon masters use, along with Jamboards and Google Sheets.” This creativity is exactly what allows the team to push out five games a year, ready to keep their audience engaged. Portillo herself specifically mentions Fakin’ It (Party Pack 3) as an early game that she’d like to attempt a sequel to - Fakin’ It works very well in person but doesn’t translate all that well to streaming, as the central mechanic requires players to point at each other, as I personally found out to my frustration over a Google Meet in 2021.
Luckily, with the Jackbox Party Packs adapting their games to entirely virtual environments thanks to the popularity of streaming, they were perfectly po🦹sitioned to help game night make the transition from physical to digital. The impact that this has made did not go unnoticed. “The further outs♔ide the US you go, we’re typically not as well known, but we went to PAX Australia and had people coming up to us saying we kept them sane, we kept their whole friendship group together,” Kniaz relates, beaming at the memory. “It’s a good deed, in a way.”
168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Jackbox Party Pack 10 will launch later this year and will include a sequel to Tee K.O.
