Tabletop game adaptation with Ludic Lemur

Our client, Ludic Lemur, is an indie game studio that wants to adapt the popular tabletop roleplaying game Monster Hearts 2 into a video game. The board game, which is narrative-heavy, multiplayer, and relies on dice for its core mechanics, is to be reimagined as a single-player card-based game instead. They have encountered many challenges in the process of this adaptation, and our team has been tasked with tackling some of these challenges. One of the major issues that Ludic Lemur is facing is the narrative complexity of the game. In the board game, players are encouraged to have and roleplay very diverse backgrounds, and improvise actions during the play of the game. The underlying dice mechanics are also very flexible to allow for this. However, pulling off that same level of freeform narrative complexity in the card-based video game has proven to place an immense workload on the designers on the team. One of our goals is to devise and prototype a way (and some pipelines) to reduce this workload while still presenting an experience that feels as diverse and free as the board game.

Our team’s approach to all the client’s issues is to use our creative and artistic talents to put together a playable prototype that solves them by showcasing our proposed solutions in their best light. To do this, we will utilize “watergile” methodologies, production apps such as Trello, Miro and Figma, and iterative techniques such as Bullseyes and Crazy 8s to develop this prototype in a way that satisfies the client’s demands.