The Jackbox Party Pack Unboxed: How and Why We Make a Pack of 5 Games Every Year

[Music] hi everyone uh i'm really excited to be here today thanks for having me my name is evan jacover i'm the cto of jack box games and today we'll be talking about the jack box party pack uh the collection of five games we've made every year for the last seven going on eight years um and i'm really excited to talk to you about it so here we go um so i'll definitely get into uh the jack box party pack franchise but first i think it's good to start with a little history so if you'll indulge me we'll go back to the 90s and if you won't indulge me you can fast forward i guess because it's a video um so jack box games used to be called jelly vision um and jelly vision started out with a hit trivia game called you don't know jack which was released in 1995 as a side note i started out at

jellyvision as an intern after getting this game for hanukkah and writing a fancy fanboy letter to the company and then you know i guess the rest is history been there 20 some years um so you don't know jack was known as a trivia game where high culture and pop culture collided uh so it had questions like this one which of the following household tasks and superman not perform and the answer is erase a floppy disk with his magnetic force uh and as you can see this content becomes somewhat dated over time not a lot of floppy disks floating around these days um so after you don't know jack uh jellyvision released you don't know jax sports followed by you don't know jack volume 2 you don't know jack movies you don't know jack tv you don't know jack vol 3. you don't know jack vol 4 the rye you don't know jack headrush you don't know jack offline louder faster funnier

you don't know jack fit dementia you don't know jack mach 2 you don't know jack bots which is the third german edition you don't know jack vol 6 the lost gold which went off the rails a little bit i guess if i'm being honest a lot of you don't know jax it's not like we didn't try to make some other games um some even made it to market um who wants to be a millionaire the the pc cd-rom game uh jellyvision made that one too but it was a struggle to break away from being the you don't know jack company and then some new consoles came out and the cd-rom market kind of evaporated and it sounds like the beginning of a behind the music story where we all descend into drugs and bankruptcy and and all of that but it wasn't as dramatic as that uh the jelly vision did go dormant in 2002 and then uh around 2008 it was revived as jelly

vision games and after some experimentation and research jelly vision games released its first game which was you don't know jack 2011 um we couldn't quite escape it um we tried branching out into mobile and social games uh but we struggled to make the freemium model work and you know not as many people played live swatter or meta octopus the word puts mascot up there um as we would have liked uh the thing is like so-called social games aren't actually all that social you know you play them alone in the bathroom or uh you know on the couch not at a party with friends and that was kind of our thing we wanted games where you play at a party with friends and there's laughter and you yuck it up and stuff um so you know and the whole freemium model was was difficult for us you know

but then a new device came along and we thought okay maybe this will help us break back into people's living rooms and that was the ooyah for those of you who don't remember that uyo was a android uh console that uh was a big hit on kickstarter made several million dollars on there um and we thought oh this might be a good opportunity for us to to get a new game out uh you know back back into people's living rooms where people could play on their couches with their friends um and so we released you don't know jack on the ouya so we were kind of scrambling at this point uh money was tight um and uh you know uh we we had this this game but we had an issue um like how how many people are gonna buy four fifty dollar controllers for a 99 console um you know so we weren't

convinced that many people would be playing you don't know jack with their friends if they didn't each have their own controller um so we thought well if only there's some way like some device that everyone had in their pockets already that they could use to interact with our games and that led us to make a mobile controller app that we called jackpad jackpad was problematic for several reasons for one you had to install an app and uh that's an immediate roadblock for many users very frustrating also everyone needed to be on the same wi-fi network which is also a pain in the butt and then there's always a person with a weird phone at the time there was windows phones we're not going to make a windows phone app um and and so it was somewhat limiting in that way too well much to our chagrin ouya didn't pan out as we had hoped and so we tried to regroup and figure it out figure out what we could do next um

we had spent all this time writing content for games like liveswatter that didn't really take off so we thought well maybe we could use that for something else lyswater is a simple trivia game where you get statements like blondes have more fungus problems or hot pink is the most popular selling duct tape color uh and you need to decide if they're true or false it's really that simple and we thought well what about movie theaters yeah there's all that time before movies start and there's a giant screen and people have their phones out anyway you know plus movie theaters are this evergreen business that will always be popular right uh this was in 2013 when netflix still only had one original series um so we built a version of lye swatter for the big screen and took it to a midnight showing of christmas vacation at the music box theater in chicago and unlike jackpad we just had people go to a website togetherplay.tv

and they'd go there uh sign in and interact with the game no apps to install no controllers uh and guess what you know it worked people took out their phones and played along uh it was really cool i'll leave this as an exercise for the viewer but you can decide if this is a real kanye west tweet uh as soon as i'm off this jet i'm a rent we bought a zoo on redbox so every player would see see that statement they'd have to say if it's true or false uh there was a leaderboard lots of fun uh unfortunately it turns out movie theaters like using that time before movies start to sell ads and make money instead of paying game developers to entertain people um so this business never took off but there was something compelling going on look at all these people happily playing on their phones and so it felt like something we wanted to pursue even more

um what came next was a new game called vivid uh vivid is a bluffing game where you make up answers to obscure questions and try to tell the truth from the fiction so for example a swedish man who works as a dishwasher receives disability benefits due to his unusual addiction to a blank all of the players type in an answer that they think could plausibly be correct we show all of uh the player submitted answers along with the correct answer which in this case is heavy metal music um and then everyone tries to guess which one is the correct answer uh and fibbish did well when it was released uh it felt like we were onto something with this phones as controllers concept uh and party games and we wanted to build on that so enter the jack box party pack we often don't want to admit that things are about money but honestly the first jack box party pack was to some extent

about money and staying in business uh we were selling fibbage for about seven dollars and wanted to find a way to get a product at a higher price point into the market and a pack of five games for 25 seems like a pretty good value proposition five games five bucks each not bad we just needed five games and we kind of wanted to do this pretty quickly fibbage came out in the summer and we were going to try to release the party pack um by uh the holiday season by november um so we were in a rush and we had to figure out what we could do well we had fibbage already so that's one game so we we made a couple more questions called it fibbage xl uh we still had that ouya version of you don't know jack and so we repackaged that and called it you don't know jack 2015. uh so that's two games um lyswater we had all the content from the mobile

version and you know we had done some work to make it uh work in a movie theater on a big screen so that's game number three uh our editorial director arne kneecap mentioned that uh uh he thinks he figured to me uh figured out how to make the life host flow work with only five or six new lines of audio recording that's how uh bear budget we were at this point um drawful uh is essentially fibbage with drawings and we didn't have a lot of time to make drawful so we took advantage of the fibage structure as much as we could uh so much so that uh the sound effects and drawful one are mostly andy poland our audio designer using his voice to try to make the exact same sound effects that for each moment in vivid and then there's word spud which is kind of a long story uh but uh this is a game we had floating around uh

years and years ago we made it for the jelly vision website in early 2000 and uh we thought that maybe that would be a thing yeah it was a four player game and um there's this opening song that kind of explains how it works and i got a a flash swift from 2005 working to put this in here so uh let's see how it goes [Music] so that's andy's son uh uh their sound designer andy sun who recorded that singing when he was about

five and now he's in his twenties it's still a catchy tune though um so yeah word spud is uh a game where just a a word is passed to your name as as he says and uh you have to type in anything that goes with it and everyone votes and decides if it's acceptable or not if it is uh that new word that you typed in is passed to someone else and it just continues on forever uh it's a weird game if you even call it a game has become a bit of a punch line at jack box games but you know hey fifth game we need five games and there we are uh so we went on you know quite a journey here um but each of these steps or missteps or dead ends led us to making the the party pack and and so uh it ended up all going someplace useful you know we we realized we wanted to make party games that that was what we liked doing uh we were tired of making

you don't know jack or maybe our audience was tired of us making you don't know jack or maybe both uh freemium just wasn't for us we we didn't have the skills or interest to find ways to monetize uh peop like uh players we just wanted to make a fun game and sell it you know uh and not have to worry about everything else that goes into making freemium games uh physical controllers are too expensive to expect a bunch of people to buy them for a casual game it's a pain in the butt to download apps uyo wasn't the answer the movie theater market wasn't interested consoles were starting to allow self-publishing by you know independent studios at this time which was an exciting idea for us we needed to get to a higher price point and you add all of this up and you have the jack box party pack

so making a pack of five games may have initially been about making our business sustainable but it also turned out to be one of the best things we could have done creatively as we learned with you don't know jack it's very easy to fall into the trap of just catering to your audience and making more of the same thing you know we we had something uh that had caught on with fibbage and we could have just gone down this road of vivid sports and vivid two and fivaged the lost gold whatever that would be and eventually that franchise probably would have just petered out [Music] now the jack box party pack 2 which came out the next year did include fibbage ii but it also included uh four brand new games uh including whiplash which ended up becoming probably uh our most popular franchise in the party pack era

and before party pack 2 came out we we actually did a kickstarter for quiplash and released it as a standalone game we had just seen exploding kittens make like eight million dollars on kickstarter and so we had moderately high hopes and it did yeah mediocre i guess uh we probably lost money on it all things considered but one takeaway of this is that it's really hard to get people to buy into an entirely new game idea um and you know people ask us all the time why don't you just release all these games individually and uh you know one of the reasons is it's just a lot of it's it's hard uh the party pack concept helps a lot with that um jack box party pack three included quiplash two which by then was a big draw and we thought okay that will be an anchor title that will draw people to buy party pack three um

but it also had four other games and all four of them would go on to become really big hits for us uh trivia murder party two for example went on to become the anchor title in the jack box party pack six so um you know we came up with a new anchor franchise uh through this party pack model and trivia murder party in both of the trivia murder party games are among our most played games um you know another way to think about is if you have to spend 6.99 on a game like tko in order to play it you need to be convinced that it's worth it um and we have to find a way to market that to people and explain what tko is which is uh a little complicated for those who don't know tko is a game where uh you draw pictures and make slogans and then combine those on a t-shirt and then the t-shirts battle each other until there's one ultimate winning t-shirt

um and yeah it's a weird game to say the least uh but if you've already bought the jack box party pack 3 for quiplash 2 um at least give tko a try you know to see if you like it it's just there in the menu waiting to be played you know you already have your friends over just well let's let's see what tko is like and tko has become a very popular game for us as a result you know without the leeway to push boundaries knowing there's still a lot of value in the pack we probably wouldn't have made these uh more nichey games uh some of which became big hits and some which didn't uh but games like monster seeking monster where uh monsters ask each other out on dates or a game like bom corp where office workers and a robot and a talking dog need to fix a photocopier so it doesn't blow up or push the button a spaceship where

spaceship crew uh has to identify aliens by playing little minigames or a game like devils in the details where a family of devils needs to work together to make dinner um you might think well these games i'm listing here are aren't that popular they're this you know the the um you know niche games of these party packs which might be true um but what we found is people's favorite games are all over the place there isn't really a consistent thread of like this game is the best game and if you look at just the party pack seven reviews we see all you know things like this talking points is my absolute favorite game in the bunch i found that blather round was probably my favorite devils in the details might have been the most fun game of the pack champed up is without a doubt the best game in party pack seven quid flash three leads the pack of new party games so you know it's hard to say

you know what's what every game was declared the best and the worst uh by different reviewers um and and so you know you get a a pack of games and it has two or three games that you love and you know two or three that you don't uh it's still a good value and everyone everyone is getting different games that they love in different games that they don't so without this game model i don't think we ever would have built up such a vast portfolio of games or like the creative engine to keep generating new ideas uh and that's been such a boon to our company and we've come a long way since since this um also i just want to throw it out there you don't know jack is great and i love it um we brought it back in the jack box party pack 5 as you don't know jack full stream and it's probably my favorite version of the game uh it's just nice when you don't have all your eggs in one basket for one game

like that one of the most difficult design challenges if you don't know jack full stream was reinventing question types like the jack attack or the dis or dat to be played with eight players um in previous jack attacks the first player to pick the matching answer correctly got the points for that question and everyone else was locked out and didn't even get to answer or didn't even had no opportunity to get it right and in this new version it keeps really the spirit of that alive but everyone can answer everyone can get uh get the right answer uh and it still has that tension which i think was a really uh impressive amount of impressive coup by the design team also uh you don't know jack was meant to be the tentpole game in party pack five um but we actually found that some new games like mad versus city and

patently stupid were played more uh and that's a good thing i think you know we're always happy to have uh new franchises uh take up the mantle um and keep things new all right now i'd like to go a little bit into uh our process for developing new games and getting them into production um and for starters let's take a look at our timetable uh we release games a pack of games every year which really condense them condenses the amount of time we have to work on these games in the fall that's when we release our latest game usually in october or pack of games i should say we develop marketing assets we do a postmortem uh we go on convention conference tours and promote the games and we also begin forming some small teams and play testing new ideas

in the winter that's when we're really focused on play testing ideating play testing some more identifying an anchor title for the pack of games uh did i mention play testing we're still doing that and we start the green light process in the spring uh we lock in games for the pack hopefully and we get into pre-production and production and then summer we're in full-on production and development uh sweating a lot get into submission by the end of the summer so uh it's a year but really um you know when we're in production it's maybe six months of production time for each game depending uh how quickly uh we we come up with ideas for the games a big part of our company culture is that anyone at jack box games can pitch games um

we've had games pitched by writers artists producers engineers qa you name it good ideas can come from everywhere and anywhere uh so if there are games uh game designing rats in our office with a game idea um and i'll be honest there might be it's an old loft building um yeah let's hear them uh so it took us a few years to come up with a process that made sense and we've kind of been honing it since then but here are the basics to our green light process which is what we call the process to get games uh into production um we have a rotating green light committee it used to be the same four people always you know on the committee that would hear pitches for games and last year was the first year we started rotating different people onto that which is great because we're getting some different perspectives and uh we'll probably get some different types of games greenlit they have some

you know different thoughts and ideas into what makes a good jack box party pack game uh before pitching a game it's expected that whoever is going to do the pitch has run several internal play test sessions we want to get um other people at the company to see the games play them we also send out a survey to the whole company uh asking um what everyone's thoughts are on a game and that gets incorporated into uh the green light committee's assessment um games don't need to be digital to be pitched and i'll go into this more in a little bit uh but we need to be able to play something uh so it could be a bunch of index cards or post-its or you know drawing on a piece of paper we do that sort of thing all the time and we just want to try to get a sense of of the game and at this point we have a we're pretty good at seeing uh the course from a you know a bunch of post-its to

uh you know a fully produced jack box party pack game uh pitch results for all the games are posted for the whole company we try to make this process as transparent as possible um and i think that's something we've gotten better at every year so uh all of the explanations for why a game is going into production or not um is is shared uh and the whole company can see all that stuff a lot of people ask what makes a good jack box games uh even internally you know people who are pitching games want to know like well what should i be doing to you know get my game um you know give it the best chance to get picked and there's not really a specific recipe um and and we kind of go out of our way to say like there's no criteria but we did put some criteria together uh to help guide people and and it's very possible that a game could meet none of these or all of

these or some combination and and still be um greenlit so uh we love games that appeal to a wide audience the jack box party packs are bought by all ages uh all different types of people we love hearing stories of people playing with their grandparents over thanksgiving um so you know we we want to cater to as many people as possible this is very vague but fits the brand of jack box games in the jack box party pack kind of let people interpret that as they will you know we're probably not going to make a gritty serious uh you know war game who knows i guess uh has a lot of excitement and passion within the studio and would be fun to work on we're big believers that if you like what you're making you'll make a better product so um you know there might be a game that seems like it would be a good fit but if

no one's really excited about it we're probably not gonna make it um is funny and makes people laugh uh our ceo nor notoriously has an office right next to the conference room and uh you know if he hears a lot of boisterous laughter coming out of a play test that will definitely um you know make him curious about what what game that was you know funny games and laughter says that people are having fun uh and that's been our bread and butter for a while encourages social interaction and gets people talking even if a game works on your phone as a controller if you're spending the whole time just looking at your phone and not interacting with anyone in the room that's less ideal has a low barrier to entry easy to understand pick up and play uh i think that's pretty self-explanatory um we don't want our games to have a 20-page rule book or you know explanatory video we want you to

you know maybe stumble through one one play session but after you've played the game once you should get it uh does something new within the party pack format uh we're always looking for ways to um try something different it was really excited exciting for mad versus city to push some boundaries and do text-to-speech for example drawing whatever a phone can do taking pictures we're always looking for ways to to push the medium further doesn't work better as a card game or board game or mobile game we want a game that really fits our format with having a big screen shared screen and then a small screen in your hand isn't too similar to another game we have made or are making especially a game in this pack uh we don't want to have a pack of five drawing games or five trivia games we like to have you know a a broad range of different game types

and finally engages the audience in a new and or meaningful way um so uh when people pitch a game uh there's a couple different pitch results you could have a green light which means the game is good to go on to the next stage and at that point we'll staff a team on it and it will go into pre-production evaluate and assess production risks identify the game core and define a creative brief that's all part of the pre-production process some games some pitches have a yellow light which means it's a neat idea but we need to revisit some assumptions sometimes the game mechanics aren't quite there sometimes uh it we're worried about certain risks and we want to make sure we can resolve those risks in the time frame before we put a game into production and usually at that point we'll assign some additional people to uh to to the pitch team and they'll be expected to work on it for a while and

then re-pitch the game and then there's red light which isn't like uh what a bad game it's more like we're probably not gonna we're not gonna do this game right now so um let's put it away for now and we'll revisit again maybe next year uh if if there's still interest um and a lot of time there is interest and a lot of these red lights do get revisited uh there are about five or six games pitched for every game that makes it into production and often uh those games that don't make it into production are revisited and refined year over year i do hope someday we get to make poop cake one can dream trivia murder party is a good example of a game that took a few years to get a green light and how it benefited from having a bunch of other games pitched as well that you know didn't make it into production uh trivia murder party for those of you

who don't know is the classic you've been kidnapped by a serial killer who asks you trivia questions to determine who lives and dies uh trivia game you know what a trope uh i mean it kind of is i guess um so everyone who gets the trivia questions wrong um uh goes to the killing floor and has to play a mini-game to determine if they live or die so here's an example of a trivia question um and that's kind of what took a long while to figure out like the trivia's fun the mini games are fun but being dead or a ghost you turn into a ghost it and out of the game is not fun um here's an example of a mini game uh you know different people put poison into different cups and you have to guess which cup doesn't have poison if you drink poison you die and turn into a ghost if you don't you get to continue on uh and and stay alive

uh and the game continues until there's only one person alive and then you go on to the final round um so originally the idea was that you just want to be the last one to survive um but then it's no fun being out of the game and feeling like well i can't win then there was an idea where the last survivor faced off against the ghost with the highest score at the end of the game but that still left a lot of players uninvolved if only one ghost was able to uh win the game or compete to win the game so this is from a game designer on the game mark turowitz he said making everyone feel dead but still involved was the missing ingredient i think the final round content came from a play test for a different pitch called 66 and we combined that with this dumb horse racing prototype so he's saying here is we the final round for the game basically took aspects from two other games that were pitched that we also didn't make

and and some aspects of the of trivia murder party that already existed um if you want to know what the dumb horse racing game is uh if you've ever you know been in a carnival and seen this game you get the idea um although i guess this is camel racing i don't know where this picture came from oh wikipedia anyway um so we built a prototype for a game where you answer trivia questions and your horse moves forward based on how well you do on the trivia questions um and we never made that game um so the final round ended up looking like this and taking elements from all those sources so the last surviving player the one at the top gets a head start and everyone else is a ghost and based on your score uh some of the ghosts get more of a head start as well and you need to identify which items fit in a category correctly to move forward so in this case which of these three

choices are african nations zimbabwe guam somalia um and uh it ended up being a really like fun exciting final round uh if a ghost overtakes the survivor they steal the body and they become a corporal character again and um they're in first place uh and then the first player to exit escapes and wins the game and it it really like fits the theme really well um and i think this final round ultimately uh is is one of the main reasons this game uh works so well um so now i i want to kind of finish up by just talking about where ideas come from and and how they coalesce into a game at jackbox games so as i mentioned with our timetable once we wrap up a party pack we immediately jump into coming up with ideas for the next pack um

some games uh spring fully formed from the head of zeus or in the case of joke boat uh they spring fully formed from writer and director brook bright uh this game she conceived uh she conceived like of this game almost in its uh final form uh right down to the name and the cruise theme some games take months to name but joke boat was immediately and forever joke boat um here's uh part of the pitch dock all aboard two toot you and your friends are passengers on a cruise ship where you're also the entertainment put up your best or worst jokes as players try to get the approval of their peers and if you play joke boat that's pretty much what the game is other games take longer and mad versus city is a good example of that um mad versus city started out as an

experiment to see if there was anything we could do with text to speech and also technically if we could do text-to-speech in a game so i'm going to take you on a little journey here through play tests um from 2017. uh so the first one uh this game was called telefun back then telefun test or in september 27th 19 or 2017. um so players listened to an obscure vo voiceover file um and then wrote down what they thought was being said so there's an audio file that was distorted so you could barely hear it um and you had to you know take a guess at what it was the results guessing the correct answer which no one ever did not a good sign or hearing it revealed wasn't the fun the fun was hearing the guesses so about a week later richard did another test

brian charred one of our audio designers was the one who started this whole process telephone test number two similar to fibbage this time where one player's response to a prompt is distorted and others guess what it said all the responses are read via text to speech it was fun to hear the computer say what people wrote biggest laughs were the word chode and a few comments about ryan and mark um so we're learning that text-to-speech could be funny here uh especially when it says thing that says uh what people wrote later that week uh each player was given a list of two to five parts of speech to provide adjective etc those words fill in the blanks of the first line of four poems so now now it's poetry uh the results of this test uh figuring out a way to gamify it would help i like the idea of it being competitive instead of collaborative i'm interested in trying some sort of

rap battle uh about a week and a half later couplets now the game is called um players write parts of an entire couplet it's played back using a singing version of text-to-speech with musical accompaniment the singing robot was hard slash impossible to understand let's try this with the entire first line filled in except for the last word now if you've played mad vs city you know that that's how it ends up working now we're finally calling it rap battle beat poetry so we're getting closer tested a beat poetry version and a rap battle version though both produce laughs the rap battle felt more like a game and finally uh halloween looks like um i told them up front that the mad libs words would need to be rhymed too so they should take care not to set themselves up for a tough writing task

and the results this time we're starting to get into kind of the more nitty gritty wonky game mechanic uh um honing in now of of the game design scoring should maybe be a combo of voting by spectators mid-rap but also by voting post-rap and uh that's pretty close to what the game ended up looking like uh in mad versus city um you have two uh two couplets uh you're given the first line except for the last word of it and then you write the second line of each one uh players can vote during uh the reading of the wrap which is text to speech and then they also vote at the end on who did better so it gives you a good sense of how our games take form over the course of several play tests and tweaks uh push the button also took several years to find its footing um

we wanted to do a mafia werewolf style game for a long time um for over three years we probably produced over 10 prototypes and pitches and variations and just looking through our docks there are designs for all different variations on this so we could go through some of those warren arnold who's a game designer at jackbox games was particularly interested in this game he started it off um and originally there was a pitch called push the button this is another example of the the name of the game making it all the way through to the end the first pitch was all a drawing game and then there's push the button with guns where a leader sends players on missions to fix a ship and if people searching a ship find bullets the leader can shoot a crew member uh push the button oxygen version where you're on a ship running out of oxygen and you need to complete a gauntlet of mini-games before you suffocate push the button experts edition each player has a hidden expertise and needs

to convince others that they are the expert saboteurs lie about their expertise and this goes on push the button word edition push the button escape pods and finally we're back to just calling it push the button again there's a rotating captain who can pick from a set of activities to challenge the others and deduce who the aliens are so some things that helped uh we're letting a captain choose a task and also choosing who will complete the task so not everyone does every task and there's some strategy in the choice of who's going to complete the task if you played push the button you know that a lot of these choices that you see here didn't make it into the game you can't interlock a player or lose three minutes you know for no reason or skip a captain um there's obviously a lot of hidden identity games out there if you'll remember one of the criteria that we look for is ideas that wouldn't work better as a tabletop game

and that's one of the things that made push the button compelling uh was that there was this constantly ticking clock this timer and it puts pressure on players and that's something that would be really hard to do elegantly in a tabletop game uh in pre-pandemic times uh almost all of our games start out as paper and pencil tests uh it's common in november to just see scraps of paper and post-its with weird stuff written and drawn on them strewn about conference rooms this is an early prototype of champed up here mr pinch and harold handy um this is another game that never got made uh not really sure what's going on with that baby's arms uh here's another paper prototype of a game spiders yeah okay one more i just like showing these because they're funny bag of lint head and torso old fishing net um this year however uh we had to rely on a bunch of different tools

for example uh complicated spreadsheets and google sheets uh was was a tool we used to test games remotely over video conference since we were all working from home so this spreadsheet here is a test of what would ultimately become thrip lash the final round for quiplash 3. we also use tabletop simulator uh roll20 is a tool um that's used to run tabletop role-playing games like d d so here's a play test we did using that uh you can make what you will with this here we are using jamboard which is google's whiteboarding tool um this is a test of a game that will actually be in party pack 8 that we haven't announced yet so feel free to study it and try to figure out what's going on here with the mr fingers and randy blandy

here's another test of the same game in this game weirdly uses a mechanic that was first used in in poop cake remember proof cake from before arne kneecamp who pitched poopcake actually demoed the paper and pencil version on a charity twitch stream because uh we figured normally we don't show games like that that we haven't released in case we want to release them later but we figured it's not like we're ever going to make poop cake right and well did we know a core mechanic of poop cake would end up in a game in party pack 8. uh i can't believe how many times i just said poop cake um anyway after the paper and pencil testing or jamboard or google sheets or whatever um we often make a digital prototype and uh this is a digital prototype of that same mystery game i've been showing

more spiders in in this version um and here's another example of a digital version of a game this is job job uh which we announced will be in the jack box party pack eight and this is what it looked like maybe a month ago uh and uh the team is hard at work making it look not like this anymore um so we're really excited to get more games out in the world um we love this process it's been very fun for us and this is what we're working on now uh we're we have five games in production for the jack box party pack eight uh and i know the whole team at jack box games can't wait for everyone to play them so thank you so much uh and um i'm evan jacover from jackbox games uh i hope this recorded and uh i hope you have a great game developers conference thank you again [Music]