Someone’s SKETCHY
A game of silly drawings, sleuthing, and sabotage.
Designed by Cynthia Jia, Xiaohai Liu, and Autumn Warren
ARTIST’S STATEMENT
Someone’s SKETCHY is a hilarious game of silly drawings, sabotage, and sleuthing that is designed for strangers or friends. It’s perfect for virtual or physical situations, and doesn’t take too long — it’s meant to be an easy way to connect to others and have a little fun. Everyone will be drawing a hint towards a larger word and trying to guess what that word is, except for one Sketchy One who secretly knows the word and is trying to derail everyone else! Can everyone put their brains (and varying levels of artistic skill) together to find out what the word is, or who’s being SKETCHY? Or will the Sketchy One manage to mislead everyone and get away with it, too? Find out in Someone’s SKETCHY!
CONCEPT MAP / INITIAL BRAINSTORMING
INITIAL DECISIONS
Since this was supposed to be a social game, we knew we needed multiple players — but how would they interact? What would they do? From previous play sessions with games of Werewolf, we were intrigued by lies and deception between players, so we knew we wanted an element of that. In our initial brainstorm, we also drifted towards drawing games, since these cultivate Expression as a type of fun, which we (the designers) all enjoy a lot.
Players
We decided on 4 players + 1 moderator to begin with because it is an easy number of people to gather, but we also wanted to make it scalable in case people want to play with a larger group of friends.
Objectives
We like the idea of outwitting others and putting pieces of information together, so we wanted the players to compete on two sides, using the information that they can find to do so. One side tries to combine their knowledge to figure out a larger word or find the SKETCHY one, while the other side tries to misdirect everyone else.
Procedures
We want the game to fast and bite-size so the actions should be easy and fast. For more information on the rules, see our prototype below.
Resources
We didn’t want to overcomplicate a game with money, points, special items, or resources like that; the only resource in our game would be “knowledge.” Each player starts off with their own snippet of knowledge towards the larger word, and must combine that with information from other players to win.
Conflicts
We liked the idea of people competing using deception so we make two groups of players with competing interests and objectives.
TESTING AND ITERATION HISTORY
PLAYTEST 1
Done in CS247G section with peers. We only had three playtesters instead of the four that we needed, so we kept that in mind during play. We tried two rounds with “Horse” and then “Banana” as words.
What went well
- the players had fun and were laughing the whole time (that’s a good sign, right?)
- the discussion was lively and the Sketchy One managed to deflect suspicion a little bit
What didn’t go so hot
- With only three players, the sketchy one had a really hard time hiding themselves, and they lost both times.
- The moderator didn’t explain the rules clearly enough, so the sketchy one was confused about their own role
Findings/changes
This confirmed our thoughts that having at least four players is important to balance the difficulty of different roles. It’s also important to clearly distinguish the two “sides” that exist in the game, so everyone clearly understands their objectives.
PLAYTEST 2
We had four playtesters this time! hooray. This time we tried to enforce having players draw deliberately separate pictures instead of all adding to the same picture. We did the word “Pizza.”
What went well
- the sketchy one really enjoyed themselves this time!
What didn’t go so hot
- allowing players to confirm their hint made the drawings feel pointless
- players didn’t come to a conclusion in the time limit, so they kept talking back and forth
- abstract hints were confusing to some players
Findings/changes
We changed the rules so that nobody can ever verbally confirm their hint — thus players will continue to consult the drawings, and it adds another layer of guessing. Also, since the players agreed 5 minutes is enough time for discussion, we added a hard cutoff and an automatic win for the sketchy one with no decision reached — that would raise the stakes and keep the game short. The separate pictures didn’t seem to make a difference, so we decided it wasn’t important to enforce how different players drew their hints.
PLAYTEST 3
We had 5 players this time, the most yet! It was fun trying a larger range of hints — we did the word “spaghetti” and included some more difficult hints like “slippery”
You can watch our playtest here!
What went well
- with more people, a larger range of hints added interest
- players had fun with the whiteboard and making doodles before the game began
What didn’t go so hot
- the Sketchy One forgot their objective, so they ended up just helping the others discover the word
- with many people, moderating and sending individual roles took longer, so there was a long waiting time in the beginning
Findings/changes
We need to explain the differing objectives of each side (regular players vs. Sketchy One) very clearly— otherwise it seems it’s easy for the Sketchy One to forget that they’re trying to be deceptive. We want to ensure differing objectives so that conflict and fun can build out of it. Additionally, the time it takes to send everyone their roles feels a little long, but it also gives time for the players to chat and scribble together beforehand, so we didn’t think it was a huge deal.
FINAL PROTOTYPE
Check out our rules document here and the words&hints document here, or find them below!
DESIGN MOCKUPS
Although our final prototype is designed for simple play on zoom whiteboard or a physical whiteboard, here are some mockups of what our game would look like if it was a desktop application!
Figma Interactive link here.
