Nutshotters
The Nutshotters app is the app version of a drinking game originally made by Pike Bloemen. Our group of friends is called Nutshotters and our logo is a yellow rubber duck. Pike Bloemen, with help of many other friends, developed a drinking game based on other popular drinking games that we’ve had good experiences with (E.g. Kings of Booze & Picolo). The game was originally played with cards, but this idea wasn't scalable, and it was a lot of work (and quite expensive) to actually make the cards. So, instead, Pike reached out to me and asked if I could make an app for it instead.
The idea behind the game was to make people do silly things, but nothing they didn’t want to do. Kings of Booze handled this very well. In this game you have to perform challenges, or drink. However, the amount you need to drink to bail yourself out increases over time. People will get more drunk and more likely to actually do these challenges, which makes for a fun night. Our game handles this mechanic in a similar fashion. For every challenge you refuse you collect a letter. Until it spells "POES" ("pussy"). So you can refuse a total of 4 challenges, but then you need to do a worse one; a 'Hellcard'. There is a small chance of a Hellcard giving you a free pass, but this is not worth the risk.
Of course, you could just collect 3 letters and stop there. But this is risky as well, as letter can appear quite randomly. There are other cards that say things like "Give another player a letter", "The player with the most letters can cross out one letter" or "Everybody wearing flip flops gets a letter". This was meant to keep the suspense in the game: You never know when you can get another level. Of course, the more letters you've already collected, the higher the risk is for you. These cards also make the gameplay a bit more interesting. Letters can go in any direction. They don't just add up untill the word is complete. Players can randomly get more letters, lose letters or even give letters to other players.
The cards are divided into 3 distinct categories: Group, Drinking & Personal. You throw a dice to pick a stack of cards. If you throw 1 or 2, it's a group card. 3 or 4 is a drinking card and 5 or 6 means a personal card. Group cards say things like "Everybody without a job drinks" or "All ladies drink". Drinking cards give tasks like "Hand out 3 sips" or "The person left of you drinks 2". Personal cards give challenges like "Drink 3 sips while jumping up and down" or "You are now a cat, miauw every time somebody talks to you".
Assigning names
The game can be played by 3 – 12 players. You can give yourself a name or leave it blank. If you do the latter, you'll be assigned a random, silly name. I had hardcoded an array of 40-something funny names that I had found online (From Reddit and blogposts about funny gamer names). This feature was not only fun to program, it also allowed for quick testing in Unity.
One more important feature that was added was the filtering of certain types of cards. This was done to keep the game accessible and fun for everybody, because, above all, games should be fun for everyone. For example, you can filter out all of the cards that require other items (E.g. the card that says: "You and another player both get an ice cube. Whoever melts it the quickest without putting it in their mouth wins. The loser drinks 4" requires ice cubes). Or filter out all cards that require eating nasty things. You could also add your own challenges.
Gameplay
Play the video above to see some gameplay footage. I apologize for the poor framerate (I recorded this with Powerpoint on my old laptop).
This game never made it to the app store, because I was quite inexperienced at the time. I could've uploaded it later, but I chose not to. This was just a fun little project for my group of friends, and we enjoyed it a lot. But I don't feel the need to invest a lot more time and effort getting it to the app store. Nevertheless, this was a very fun project to make and I'm still proud of the result. This project was also one of the first that I've used Unity for outside of my study, and it did feed my passion for Game & App development and Unity significantly.