What Is It?
Bad Baby Lich Lords is a card game made by Heart of the Deernicorn. I worked as their summer game design intern in 2023 while they were working on version 111-116 of this game. As their first remote intern, I met with Ross Cowman multiple times a week to playtest and offer outside opinions on Bad Baby Lich Lords and to learn skills in analog game design that I can't learn at Bradley.
What Is My Role?
As a Game Design Intern, I met with Ross Cowman and his team weekly to go over data from playtests I'd run and to test as a group. We'd discuss changes made, what they were looking for, and what to improve on moving forward.
My responsibilities include:
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Keeping a bullet journal
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Running weekly playtests of Bad Baby Lich Lords
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Attending design team meetings
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Presenting playtest data
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Playing through Songs from the Axe and Fiddle
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Running weekly sessions of City of Winter
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Creating a new "Song" for Songs from the Axe and Fiddle
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Taking a course on InDesign
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Reverse engineering Dungeon Mayhem
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Shadowing marketing
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Writing weekly reports
In addition to working on Bad Baby Lich Lords, Cowman taught me how to keep a bullet journal. I used that journal to keep notes of my playtests as well as what I learned during my time at Deernicorn. I wrote weekly reflections about what I'd learned and how I could use it.
Cowman asked me to play Fall of Magic and City of Winter and met with me after each session I ran. He walked me through how to make more interesting moments and how to improve my future sessions. Cowman challenged me to make an expansion of Fall and Magic following the style of Songs from the Axe and Fiddle.
He also had me take a course on using InDesign and taught me how he sets up his cards. I learned about the difference between Top Down and Ground Up design. I learned how to make a spreadsheet of cards data that can easily be imported into InDesign to speed up the iteration process. He then tasked me with reverse engineering a pre-existing game using that method. I've since used this method to make my own card games.
Cowman had me spend a week shadowing their marketing a team since I could offer a college student's perspective. I learned how they make promotional videos and took photos of the cards to make an ad in their style.