I’ve also updated and published a new 3rd edition of my first design Mad Scientist! which is also available for purchase on the Game Crafter today!
Today I started working toward my next game design challenge. The Bad Comet Cozy Game Design Challenge. I’ve started working on a game I’m calling Co-Op Coffee shop that has ended up being a sort of co-op worker placement and tower defense type of game where you manage a coffee shop together.
Elephant in the room is also available on Tabletop Simulator for free to try out. It’s been a busy month at Do You Punch the Guy Studios!
I have to admit, I’ve been a little distracted from Do You Punch the Guy lately. See, in addition to video games, I REALLY like making board games, and recently I ran across THIS:
The Game Crafter (A cool site I used over a decade ago to publish games like Mad Scientist! and I currently use to publish Igloo Battles) is putting on a game design contest that is animal themed. Now I just so happen to have an animal themed game sitting around halfway ready to be published that I have been wanting to work on called Elephant in the Room (hence the title of the article).
Elephant in the room is a reverse Worker Placement game (something I’ve never seen before) for 2-4 players where you take turns placing elephants in a board of a China shop and then you take turns trying to gather resources and purchase fine China without pissing off the elephants and causing them to wreak havoc and break all the nice dishware.
The game is filled with bad half-puns (male elephants are called bulls, so “bull in a China shop, you have to dig deep to find that one), silly themes and is surprisingly strategic despite having a rather small amount of mechanics. I’m hopeful that I stand a chance at winning the contest. The hardest part has been meeting the art needs without breaking the bank. The theme of elephants in a China shop is….obviously….unique, and finding a top-down map of a China shop has proven….damn near impossible.
I’m currently in the process of trying to weasel my way into something affordable with dungeon map creation software licenses and a little hope and a prayer.
I don’t have renders of all the cards yet, but here are the rules if you want to have a sneak peek. Anyway, back to work. the game design contest ends in April and I still have a lot of graphic design to do (yuck!).
So after taking a long break, and with the world being what it is, I decided 2026 was the year to pick back up game dev/design. Nothing brings me joy quite like trying to bring others joy through mechanics, and gameplay.
Do You Punch the Guy is the brainchild of myself and my third child who is now 16, but at the time of its inception was probably….13 or 14 if I had to guess. I’m not even sure what we were talking about. Or how we decided it would be hilarious if there was a game just called “Do You Punch the Guy” where you just decide if you punch a guy a whole bunch of times in different scenarios. Flash forward to today, a few years later, I wanted to get back in to game dev/design and started learning Godot.
First thing I did was immediately bite off more than I can chew and try to start a huge project of a cool design I had been brewing for a long time that is WAY more complex than it originally seemed.
“OK”, I thought to myself, “need to scale back a bit”. And Do You Punch the Guy came back to mind. The game was simple, funny, and would be a good entry point to teach myself the ropes before I jumped into a larger project that took a more complete understanding of game dev and Godot.
The final thing, and this one was luck, was art and budget. Basically I had none, of either. I have no art skills, no budget, and no one who I can mooch free art assets off of. So because Do You Punch the Guy is a comedy game I hoped that I could pull on the nostalgic heartstrings of early 2000s comedy gold like “The End of The World” and “The Impossible Quiz” with silly trash art that was part of the joke.
At some point this led me to draw “The Guy” and immediately I wanted to punch his stupid face. And at this point I had hope for this game yet. At this point I’m going to call the art “stylized” and pretend I don’t just suck at drawing. (Or at least that is what I am telling myself)
Judging by the traffic this site is getting having only been around for a couple weeks, I’m hopeful that people are going to enjoy the silly romp that Do You Punch the Guy promises to be. I know even as I develop the game, sometimes my level ideas make ME laugh when I look at what’s next for me to work on.
