Yesterday, we reached the threshold of hundred (100) followers in Facebook! Hooray! In honor of that, we decided to publish the first character presentation. The first character to be presented is one of our favorites! We hope that you will enjoy it as much as we do! At the same time, we will describe the process of creating the characters.
The story of the Night Ogre – the birth of an abomination
The Night Ogre is one of my (Tuukka’s) favorite characters in Dungeon Poker. Here, I will briefly introduce how the character creation process goes, and why we think that the process of creating the Night Ogre has been so successful.
The first thing in creating the characters has always been a vision of some fantasy creature, or some other fascinating thing, we would like to introduce to the game. Of course, our game contains some more archetypal fantasy characters such as a wizard, a troll, and a witch. These characters also have their unique stories. The Night Ogre is more unique, as it is an entirely new horror new to the fantasy genre – or at least far less typical.
You might know the feeling of going to a dark forest as a child (or even as an adult), for example for cross-country skiing. You stand there all alone and you might feel that something is staring at you behind the trees, but you cannot see. Alternatively, you might have warned your own children against going to the forest at night – as you might get lost there, never to return.
This thought process led to the idea of the Night Ogre. We had an idea of what this creature haunting the night should look like and what it should do in the game – so we started implementing it. It should be noted that it is not at all certain that all of our ideas, even the better ones, would end up in the final product. Throughout the years, there have been several characters, which have not quite managed to materialize from our sketchbooks to the card format. If this has been the case, we have been forced to put the character aside, because we feel that it is important that all the characters are, both when it comes to their game mechanics and style, exactly as we envisioned them. Of course, these ideas might be still realized at a later stage, once we figure out how.
The special abilities and Soul Gems of the Night Ogre:
We felt that the Night Ogre should have an ability that makes others freeze in terror. As this ability, there is the “Spooky gaze”. With this ability, the Night Ogre may sacrifice one Soul Gem to prevent other players from using their activated special abilities. The ability has been tested to be efficient, balanced, and useful ability during hundreds of hours of playtesting.
The second ability of the Night Ogre is “Obliterating darkness”. This ability corresponds with the vision that if you go into the forest at night, you might vanish forever. With this potent ability, the Night Ogre sacrifices two of its Soul Gems to destroy any one card in the table apart from the hand cards held by the players. For example, if you hold a pair of kings and see an ace – you might make it vanish. Or you might make the last card in someone’s flush draw vanish. You can also use it to obliterate a monster, a treasure, or an artifact held by someone else. This ability has also proved to be efficient, balanced, and useful in our playtesting.
The Night Ogre starts with five Soul Gems. At one point in our playtesting there were four, but the character felt slightly too weak, and the amount was increased to five. Even with the added Soul Gem, it has won less games than the average. We nevertheless believe that in the right hands it a strong character Dungeon Poker and at least my (Tuukka’s) clear favorite.
Next we had to find a visual style for the Night Ogre. We felt that it should be huge, stand behind the trees in a forest in a dark and cold forest. It needed to have that something that is not too brutal or frightening in a wrong way, while at the same time being threatening in a majestic way. In a way that you can easily imagine it staring at you from somewhere where you cannot see it, but just know that it is there and it is huge. We also wanted the character to be clearly visible in the illustration, even in the dark.
So, enjoy – and fear – the Night Ogre!
Below, the playing card of the Night Ogre:
Please note that the pictures are not in the same high resolution as in the product. In the end product, the quality is higher (300 dpi) and the black is truly black. 