Welcome to Candycreeps Development Diaries! This series of posts is like our transparency policy — it’s designed to paint a picture of the ideas and motivations that went into putting the game together. Keep an eye on this space for future updates.

Development Diaries 5: Roles

Development Diaries 4: Features

The Features mechanic bridges the gap between an intriguing sketch on the page and a playable Candycreeps character. The process is simple; you pick out the parts of the character doodle that you’re the most excited about and associate them with official Features that make up the stats and special abilities your character will use during play. Features are the flip side of Aesthetics; in addition to giving you kewl powerz, they build the Cute and Creepy pools that your character will leverage to recruit others into his or her mayhem.

The whole idea behind the Candycreeps chargen mechanic is to spur players’ imaginations into running wild. We knew that the flip side of that was that the game would need a solid yet flexible way to turn virtually anything player might draw on their characters into playable statistics. Accordingly, there’s an extensive list of Features in the Candycreeps book, including rules for some of the key features (like Dead) that the setting calls for, but it’s allowed and encouraged to invent new ones as well. In devising Features for the game list, we tried to make them both engaging and transparent, so you could see what made them cool and use them as a framework around which to build your own ideas for Features. That meant setting them up along certain guidelines:

- To maintain the connection between the character visualization process (i.e., doodling) and gameplay, we wanted each Feature to do something that made sense from its appearance. Basically, this means that we drew the kind of characters that we thought the game should have and then determined the core Features based on what would make them playable, rather than starting with a set of important stats and then inventing characters to use them.

- The Aesthetics mechanic relies on Features to supply it, so most Features do just that; they grant the character either a Cute point or a Creepy point based on appearance. Only a very few special Features, with effects that are difficult to compare to other Features, don’t do so. It’s possible to make a Candycreeps character with a full complement of Features and no Aesthetics points, but we wanted it to be very hard, so that players would be motivated to embrace the aesthetic focus of the game.

- Any particular base Feature either gives a character a +1 bonus for some kind of action or grants him or her a power or special ability that most people don’t have. There are some Features that stretch this rule, but that we felt the game wasn’t complete without. When those had natural connections to other Features, we built them into trees with prerequisites. When they didn’t, we added hindrances to balance out their power level. Normally, only the first Feature in a tree gives an Aesthetic point, to keep the pools manageable. There are a couple of exceptions in the book, based on common sense and our perception of the aesthetics involved (for example, having the Muscles feature doesn’t confer an Aesthetics point, but having Really Big Muscles gives you a point of Creepy).

More of these guidelines are described in the Candycreeps book, but hopefully these show the kind of ideas that led us in putting Features together.

As an example of how Features come into gameplay, I’ve put the sample character from the previous post, Paul “Puffycoat” Pirelli, here for your consideration. I drew Puffycoat up as one of my favorite mental images from the Candycreeps world — a little dead kid whose mom bundles him up tight for winter recess, even though he’s just a skinny little skeleton. The sketch is just my attempt at an image of that idea, this little skeleton kid with his skullcap (ha!) and his big, puffy coat and his enormous boots, with a snowman scribbled on there to get the winter idea across.

To me, the coat is the thing that sticks out of the image — even more than his grinning skull — so I marked that down to be made into a Feature. The skull is important too, showing that he’s undead, so I marked that as well, plus the boots, because they kind of stick out to me too. Then while I was just doodling the snowbanks and the snowman on there, I thought, “hey, since he’s in the snow all the time, what if he had some kind of snowball-throwing thing?” I kicked around drawing a catapult or something, but in the end I settled on the shoulder-mounted snowball thrower in the picture. When I make a Candycreeps character, that almost always happens — I start doodling an idea, messing around, and then I wind up adding something I wasn’t planning on, and then that turns into the most fun part of the idea.

So once I had those key points of the drawing picked out, I went to the Features list to look for some that line up. I happen to know there’s a Bundled Up Feature in there — inspired by this same mental image — so that’s the first thing I jot down on the sheet; it makes Paul immune to cold and gives him some protection versus close combat and falling damage. The skull is the next thing I went for, and that lines right up with the Dead Feature, as well as with a Feature that trees off of Dead called Dry Bones (i.e., you’re a skeleton), so I marked those down too. For the boots, I could have gone with either the Sweet Kicks or the Steel-Toed Boots Feature; I picked the latter, because I saw Puffycoat as more lumbering than fast (which Sweet Kicks would make him). Finally, I assigned the classic Ray Gun Feature to his snowball launcher, effectively buying it as a ranged weapon with an attack bonus. This one could have gone differently, though; if I didn’t want to go with a straight-up weapon, I could have bought it as a stun effect (maybe based on the Latest Thing feature) or devised some kind of a distractor function.

And that’s how it goes! The elements of the character sketch I drew provided the foundation for picking out some cool Features to make up my character’s stats and special powers. If the Features in the book weren’t enough, I would have followed the guidelines and devised one or two of my own.

We’re proud of the range of Features included in the book; I think they support the creation of a very wide range of cute-creepy characters. Sometimes, though, a Feature isn’t quite enough to encompass the full scope of your character’s elite skills. If you find yourself wanting a clearer-cut niche in the Pembrigan social hierarchy, Roles may be just what you’re looking for. The next post will tackle them. ‘Til then,

Keep Creepy,
the Candyman (Nick)

Welcome to Candycreeps Development Diaries! This series of posts is like our transparency policy — it’s designed to paint a picture of the ideas and motivations that went into putting the game together. Keep an eye on this space for future updates.

Aesthetics are one of the key mechanical concepts behind Candycreeps; they link the style of the game setting to the mechanics of character interaction. The essence of the Aesthetics mechanic is that:

1) each character has certain qualities that make her more or less Cute and Creepy;
2) each character can draw on her Cuteness and Creepiness to sway other characters during social interactions; and
3) each character has defined opinions on Cute things and Creepy things that can affect her interactions with others.

The inspiration for Aesthetics came in two separate chunks, as the game setting and the game system fused together into a delicious custard of gaming sweetness.

Early on, we took a look at the market, thought about styles of creative product that we liked, and decided there was room for a game that fell right at that stylistic sweet spot between comedy and horror. We loved the works of Edward Gorey, Charles Addams, Tim Burton, Ted Naifeh, and the like (as the “Inspirations” page of Candycreeps points out), and we wanted to tailor a game to let players pay homage to that creepy-cute aesthetic and explore it with their own characters. So we knew early on that the continuum of “cute” and “creepy” would play a key role in the game, and we started thinking about how to make that visual style a key part of the game system.

That eventually led us to the idea of Features, which made the appearance of characters a key part of their stats. (For more on the Features mechanic, see the next post in this series.) We wanted characters’ Features to make them cuter, creepier, or both, so we started keeping track of which Features would do that, accruing the values in “cuteness” and “creepiness” pools for the characters that took them. But we didn’t know exactly what would happen with those pools until we hit on the Pembrigan Academy setting.

While talking about setting the game at a school, we realized that it was more than just a way to have all ages and sizes of characters. We intentionally wanted the game to take place in an environment where characters would judge other characters by appearance, to strengthen that tie between the visual style of the game and the actual gameplay. A school seemed like the right environment to enable that type of story ideas, so we ran with it.

Once that was decided, it was a short jump to figuring out what to do with the “”Cute” and “Creepy” pools; they would be incorporated into social interactions as a way to enshrine that school vibe of superficial interaction mechanically. It was very important to us not to make the Aesthetics into exclusive categories, though. We wanted to encourage players to take a mixture of Cute and Creepy features, though, to promote that style of combined cute-creepiness rather than just one or the other. That meant players would have both types of points, and each character would need to be set up to deal with both kinds of points. From there, it was logical to separate the mechanic that determined the *effect* of the points from the actual points themselves, so that GMs and characters could determine how Cute and Creepy points would come into play for each character.

That was the birth of Aesthetics as they stand, where every character has an “up” or “down” stance on both Cute and Creepy as concepts and reacts differently (from a mechanical standpoint) to other characters that play up those traits in themselves. The extra tad of complexity added by the “up” and “down” (or “plus” and “minus”) made the mechanical representations of character personalities more flexible. What we really liked about this model was that it was easy to represent the sense of angst, insecurity, and exclusion that’s so key to the school setting by making a character whose Aesthetic stance is geared toward the style element that’s weak for him or her (a really Cute character who dislikes Cute stuff and likes Creepy things, for example).

There was some question about how pervasive the effect of Aesthetics should be; should Creepy characters be totally unable to interact with characters who disliked Creepy things, for example? To keep from limiting character interactions — and especially interactions between PCs — too heavily, we settled on the bidding pool system, with a per-session refresh rate. That had the twin virtues of putting more control over the effects of their Aesthetics into the player’s hands and making less ongoing math, as the GM didn’t constantly have to keep track of exactly how Cute and Creepy all the PCs and NPCs were. With the point-bidding system, each player could decide exactly how much role their character’s Aesthetic qualities should play in a given interaction. (We thought some of the other options kicked around for the use of Aesthetics were worth thinking about, so we put them in the book; you’ll find them listed as Optional Rules under Aesthetics.)

And that was it! We’re pretty proud of how Aesthetics encourage constant awareness of the Cute plus Creepy style that drives the Candycreeps setting. The mechanic is versatile enough to retooled for other styles of gameplay, though. In a future series of posts, we’ll talk about how to change up Aesthetics to support different styles of game.

All the best,
the Candyman (Nick)

Dev Diaries 1: Why Candycreeps?

Once upon a time, when we saw how much fun our buddy Justin of Green Fairy Games had with Fae Noir, Liz and I started kicking around the idea of putting together a small-press game. The kernel of an idea that grew into Candycreeps came from some of our earliest ideas for what we wanted to do:

1: Rules-light. We wanted the game to be short and sweet, with just one or two easily explained core mechanics, and to work off of a single die. The goal was for the whole game to fit into forty or fifty pages at the most. Once we got to writing, we found that there was a lot to say, and the document itself grew to more than twice that size. But the core mechanic stayed short and sweet — simple addition and subtractions, with an element of bidding to keep the players thinking.

2: Easy to picture. We wanted the game to have a defined sense of visual style, so that you could picture just what a character would look like. This led directly to the core mechanic of Aesthetics, which ties together the style and stats of your character.

3: Fun to read. Over the years, I’ve probably read at least five games for every one we actually played; and even for the games that led to long, satisfying campaigns, I’ve read way more supplements than ever made it to the gaming table. There’s nothing wrong with that! Some of my best memories from college are of late nights sitting around with Justin, poring over the Rifts Worldbooks, and laughing about all the crazy stuff you could make up with them. When I decided to write a game, I wanted to make it fun like that — something that you’d laugh while reading, even if you never played a single session of it.

4: Good to look at. Filling the game with cool-looking art to pull the reader into the game world was a priority from the start. When the plan was to have a forty-page game, this was a way less daunting prospect! But we stuck to our guns as the manuscript grew, and I believe that the result is one of the best-looking small-press games out there. That’s all thanks to our fantastic artists, Jorge Munoz and Ben Powis, who really captured the style we were going for.

5. Engaging chargen. For me, making up characters is half the fun of gaming. I’ve got whole notebooks full of all the guys I made up but never had the chance to play. We wanted our game to have a chargen process that lent itself to that kind of obsessive fun, encouraging you to make up a whole bunch of really distinctive characters to populate your headspace.

These ideas melted together into the smooth, cheesy fondue of a gaming experience that is Candycreeps. In the next few posts, we’ll take a closer look at the role each of these aspects fills in making Candycreeps play like it does.

In the adorably dystopian burg of Crowley City, the dead don’t just walk; they wash cars, write checks, teach classes, and run companies. Living cartoon mascots called Pops aren’t just entertainment anymore; they might be your boss, your accountant, your classmate, or your drinking buddy. Bogeymen rent beds to sleep under, vampires open butcher shops, and folks down on their luck dabble in the dark arts to make ends meet.

The Pembrigan Academy for Gentlemen, Ladies, and Creatures of Good Breeding is the fiery crucible in which all these folks’ kids melt together to form a new, creepy-cute society. Living or dead, human or monster, every student can count on a world-class education to go with all the other, lethal drama that happens from K to 12. With a Pembrigan diploma, you can write your own ticket – if you can survive until graduation!

The Candycreeps role-playing game core book gives you everything you need to explore the delightfully uncanny world of the Pembrigan Academy. The versatile, doodle-based character creation system lets players’ imaginations run wild, and the quick, easy core mechanic keeps gameplay quick and lively.