Intaxicated is a two player game in which a drunkard — too intoxicated to make it home on their own — has called a Brewber to safely take them home from the bars. However, finding a drunk person in this spaghetti road town is like trying to catch a cat. GPS isn't working so the Brüber driver is on the phone with their drunkard trying to coordinate the pickup location. The drunkard is stumbling around town, trying their best to direct their driver to them before they black out.

This project was created for Paolo Pedercini's Experimental Game Design 2017, at Carnegie Mellon University in. This assignment was about "updating the classics" — Monopoly, Battleship, CandyLand, etc. Our team was assigned the game Battleship, and told to "fix it" by adding a narrative play style. After much research, prototyping, and playtesting, our team came up with inTAXIcated.

original game packaging for Battleship

Our initial prototypes explored the concept of two players trying to find eachother, given only limited information about the game map. We created a paper cut-out overlay (think a door peephole), allowing only a 1" square of the underlying paper to be seen at once. We then designed and printed out various images, overlaid with 1" grids, and playtested variations of a turn-based where two players tried to marco-polo their way to the same location, without looking at eachother's map.

early playesting maps

we made a simple chess timer website to structure turn taking

Eventually, we decided to move to a digital medium, and theme the game around the concept of "drunk ride sharing". We spent a considerable amount of time tweaking the map and adding and balancing constraints for both players.

early prototypes of the driver UI

initial development of the map

We made use of blurring and animation to simulate the effect of being drunk. We also adopted a familiar branding design.

totally original branding design

Adding rules screens

Paolo and Aman playing the final version of our game