Exclusive Interview With Roberta Taylor - Game Designer For 'Hello Kitty: Day At The Park'
Image Source: Maestro Media
CultureSlate had the privilege of chatting with Roberta Taylor who is the Game Designer for the new game: Hello Kitty: Day at the Park which is releasing on Kickstarter on September 26. She gave us some great insights into what goes on in the day of the life of a game designer and what fans of all ages of Hello Kitty can expect from this highly anticipated game.
CS: How did you get your start in designing games?
RT: This is not my first game by quite a big stretch. But this is my first time working with any kind of major IP. I started making games years ago when I had a really stressful job and a long commute on an empty highway. If I had games to think about, I wasn’t stressing about work. They were an escape. I was fortunate to run into a group of Canadians trying to make games together and we formed an informal group. One of my first designs was Octopus’s Garden which I entered at a Fall Con Gaming Convention in Calgary - they run a big Canadian game design of the year award - and I won, which got me my first publishing contract in 2010. Sadly, the company dissolved shortly after and most of the copies went into liquidation. It was really heartbreaking but it was reprinted last year and people really love it, so that’s fun.
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I’ve played around with all sorts of things in the game world. It all restarted in the winter of 2020 with a game called Creature Comforts, which is a cozy game about animals getting their dens ready for winter. That Kickstarter went bananas. It was the first December of the pandemic and the idea of cozy home and hearth and being a family game really resonated with folks. Its success is what caught the attention of Maestro Media, and they reached out to me about working on the Hello Kitty game. They wanted to make a proposal to Sanrio, and they needed a game designer.
CS: I’m guessing based on the end of that answer that you didn’t pick Hello Kitty as the idea for the game you were just brought on to help develop that.
RT: Yeah because Hello Kitty is one of those IPs that’s just really sweet and gentle and soft. I’ve done other types of games and I have a proven track record with the cozy feel games It was a lot of fun to take that Hello Kitty experience and put those pieces together and think about what we can do in this world and of course, you have other constraints but designing a game to fit that is like solving a puzzle.
CS: For sure and right now Hello Kitty is so big. I mean it always has been, but now it seems like it’s blossomed so hopefully that means it will do well.
RT: Yes I hope so!
Image Source: Maestro Media
CS: Can you walk me through the stages of how you design a board game?
RT: With a project like this we start with a couple of basics. This is the subject, this is the age, this is the size of the box. We’re not looking for a bunch of sculpted minis or a giant board. We’re looking for something a little more compact. Those are the practical constraints and then we start looking at different stories we might tell. Because we’re working with Sanrio, it actually started with three high-level concepts. I picked my favorite, we took the idea to Sanrio, and they liked it but requested a couple of minor changes.
For any game I work on, I poke at different ideas. I’ll make a really rough prototype and put it out to physically play with. Because as amazing as something sounds in your head, until you put it on the table you’re never sure if it actually is any good. In this case, I knew I wanted to have this sense of moving around this growing map and the resource collection but that had multiple iterations to make that play well and to play in a way that would suit the target audience. So for me, it’s always coming back, making a little change, trying it again. With some games that initial finding where to dig in can take a lot longer.
Then we have to see if the mechanics work in the way we’re telling the story so that it’s not just Hello Kitty on the box, but is also in the game. I did the bulk of that work and got it to a place where I was happy with it. Then they brought in a developer, Jonathan Gilmor, and I handed everything to him. We had a couple of great meetings where we discussed my vision for the game.
One of the really interesting things throughout the whole process with this game has been balancing that sort of newer mass market gamer with the hobby gamers that play board games all the time. It’s not going to be their heaviest deepest game but we want them to be able to engage with it and have fun. They are the bulk of our playtesters, which makes it interesting because sometimes they try to make it more complex and you have to pull it back to being more friendly and keeping the rules small. But I’m really happy with where it went overall.
CS: Do you have a favorite board game?
RT: That’s a grand question. I have two answers. It really depends on who I’m playing with because, for me, board games are so much about connecting with people. When my mom visits and she wants to play Scrabble, that’s lovely, but if it’s my gamer friends, we’re going to do something bigger. The other answer is actually Crokinole which is a classic Canadian dexterity game that my dad loved and we played when I was growing up.
Image Source: Mayday Games
CS: Could you walk me through some of the basic rules, and age range? What would you want to explain to people so they can get an idea of the game?
RT: Hello Kitty: Day at the Park is definitely designed to be a lighter family game. You probably wouldn’t take this game and give it to two 8-year-olds and tell them to go play, but you could sit down at the table and include an 8-year-old in the game. The game is designed to be played with all different age ranges - everyone can sit down at a table, no matter the age, and have a perfectly lovely time.
The game has two major mechanics that you might see in other games. Tile laying is the first of these and at the start of every turn; you choose one of two tiles that you’re holding in your hand. Some of the tiles have grass, trees, etc. on them. You line them up and pick where on the existing map or park to add that tile and depending on where you put it you might get a bonus. The next thing players do is move their character around the park that everyone is building together. This is to collect resources. The resources represent things such as birds, cupcakes, or flowers; the sorts of things you might experience at a park, and you’re collecting those to complete adventure cards that you have in front of you. You’ll do things like fly a kite, do yoga in the park, or have an ice cream cone. And those cards are how you get points. Depending on how many players, you might remove some of the tiles to make the gameplay about the same amount of turns per person.
CS: I like that it’s not just geared towards kids, it's geared towards everybody and I think that that’s really good for a game.
RT: That’s one of the major things with this IP. People have grown up with Hello Kitty and now they’re sharing it with their kids. People of every conceivable age love Hello Kitty. We really needed to make a game that worked for everyone because Hello Kitty’s fans are all ages.
Image Source: Maestro Media
CS: Were you able to play test the game with any friends or did specific rules make this harder for you?
RT: Early on I did a lot of playtesting at home with my family. Once the game got more solid, we de-Hello Kittified the content, and I was able to take it to a Con and play-test it with folks there. I just couldn’t tell them what it was called. By the time they were ready to do the mass online play testing, the game had been announced and there was no problem with letting players know about the Hello Kitty world.
CS: Do you have a game in mind that you’d love to do next?
RT: I have a few games that are in the queue with various publishers. I have a couple with Kid’s Table Board games who did Creature Comforts. Maple Valley is the stand-alone follow-up to Creature Comforts. It’s getting fulfilled soon and shipping. I have one that doesn’t have a name yet that’s coming out next year with Pencil First Games. I’m really hoping people love this game and we can do another Hello Kitty game because it was a lot of fun. There are always lists of ideas that I’m sort of poking around with. I feel like you have to have multiple things on the go because when you get stumped with something you can switch focus to something else. This is what I do now full time so in theory I should have lots on the go, but they all got signed to different publishers so now I’m back to ‘what do I do with myself?’
CS: What advice do you have for someone who wants to get started in game design?
RT: I think that the biggest thing is you learn to make games by making games and so don’t just make a game, make lots of games. Get your bad games out of your system. You learn from doing it wrong. So many people want to make a game and on the first try they want it to be amazing and do really great on Kickstarter and no, that’s not going to happen. Just make them for fun, learn, and do lots of them. That’s how you get better.
CS: Do you have any upcoming promotion events besides the Kickstarter that people can be on the lookout for?
RT: Maestro Media's social media manager, Beneeta Kaur, is hosting how-to-play live streams on her Twitch channel (twitch.tv/beneeta_k) every Tuesday at 4pm EST until the campaign is over. It's a great opportunity to learn how the play the game and ask any questions you may have on how Kickstarter works and how to buy the game!
Hello Kitty: Day at the Park will be available on Kickstarter.com starting on September 26, 2023, for 30 days. For the first 48 hours, there will be a special called “FRIENDSHIP 48” in which, in the spirit of Hello Kitty’s kindness and the game’s focus on friendship, anyone who purchases the game within the first 48 hours will receive a complimentary copy to share with their loved ones. “It’s competitive but it’s friendly competitive and it’s meant to be charming and welcome and hopefully for lots of folks that’s something that they want on the table,” Roberta added. Don’t miss your chance to snag a copy of this amazing game.
The Kickstarter campaign is live now: Helly Kitty: Day at the Park
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