Earlier this year I had the chance to work on the 2023 Festival of Neggs event for Neopets! In this blog, I'll discuss the process I took to design the game and UX for the event. Let's get started!
About Festival of Neggs
Festival of Neggs is an annual event to celebrate Neggs on Neopets! (Note: Neggs are food items that you can feed to your Neopet, some having special effects on stats, abilities, and other effects.) The event is hosted by Kari, the Negg Faerie, and each year the setting, activities, characters, story, etc. change.
For 2023 the team decided to host it at the Virtupets Space Station! During each day of the event, players participate in a scavenger hunt where they are given a clue to a location to find a Negg to collect. Finding the Negg will reward players with a prize.
This year we had a fun Tarot Card micro-game as part of the event that I had the pleasure of working on.
Tarot Card Micro-Game
During the event players speak to Orion, a fortune teller, who asks you to collect energy to complete his divining. We wanted this to be an interactive experience to make players feel immersed in the story and feel that they are contributing to the divining. So we made this into a higher, lower card game!
We also used this opportunity to promote a new tarot card deck we released, reusing the art from the deck in the game!
Gameplay
The tarot card deck consists of 22 Major Arcana cards. We didn't want to overcomplicate the game by adding other arcana cards so we kept the deck on the smaller side. We also didn't want to frustrate players by getting locked in the game so we made the requirements for continuing onto the story accessible by giving two different ways to continue on.
How to play:
Two cards are displayed in front of the player, one facing up and one down. Players have to guess if the hidden card is higher or lower.
If players guess incorrectly, they lose!
To continue on in the story, players can either guess 12 cards in a row correctly or played 3 games (whether or not they lost)
After completing the game and moving on, the game is available throughout the event and players can go back to play again for fun if they want.
Process
After setting up the game requirements, I started wireframing the game and other pages needed to demonstrate the scavenger hunt. Afterward, I created a flow chart with the wireframes within a Miro board to share and discuss with the team throughout implementation.
Wireframes
Flow Chart
The Result
The event lasted 16 days and the tarot card game was positively received by the community! Below are some screenshots from the event.
Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed the design breakdown for the 2023 Festival Of Neggs!