The story of how Someone Has Died came to be starts at Wesleyan University, where in my last semester of school the film and computer science departments teamed up to offer two video game design courses for the first time. One of these courses was more focused on programming and code, while the other treated games more like films to be analyzed. I took the latter and often our assignments were to design physical, tangible prototypes (along with some Twine too). The task at hand was to create a social game, in the vein of Werewolf and Mafia, that would encourage lots of player interaction. In Werewolf, players are killed and eliminated round after round. Bereft of any better ideas, we thought, hey - what if we started with a dead person. And that’s how we ended up being a game that takes place at a will arbitration.

We decided that the object of the game would be to lay claim to the dead person’s estate. One player would facilitate the game, taking on the role of the arbiter, and ultimately choose the winner. Everyone else would use a combination of cards to craft a character that they would maintain and develop throughout the run of the game; over the course of a few rounds, players would have to make arguments for why they are the most deserving of the deceased’s fortune while incorporating increasingly nonsensical cards.

Even in this preliminary form, Someone Has Died was a hit in the classroom and I decided to continue developing it beyond that class. After graduation, I began testing the game with friends and attending playtesting conventions in New York. I added Liz to the team to help iterate and refine the design, ultimately landing on the four round structure of the final game. Seeing that the responses of total strangers were as positive as that of our friends, we knew we had something good on our hands and began the journey towards our Kickstarter