Malaysian Holidays postcards are released!

My fifth published game will be Malaysian Holidays, and this is a collaboration project between Cili Padi Games and Specky Studio. This time I am just the designer, and they are the publisher. 

The whole idea for this game came from two things. First, I had wanted to design a game which could be widely accepted in Malaysia, i.e. something which non-gamers would like. I wanted to find a topic which many people would find interesting. Gameplay needed to be simple and easy to grasp. If I wanted to make a game sell well in Malaysia, this was the kind of target audience I should aim for - the non-gamer. The second thing was what made me pick this topic for such a game. On social media I sometimes see people plan for holidays for the following year. They check which days of the week the public holidays fall on, and identify long weekends, and also potential long stretches of holidays that can be created by taking one or two days of leave. For example if a public holiday is on a Tuesday, you can take the Monday off to create a four-day stretch. Malaysians like to make use of these long stretches to go back to their hometowns, or to go somewhere else for holidays. We have many public holidays, because we are a multicultural country. We love our public holidays. Every time the national football (soccer) team wins some tournament, or a national badminton player wins some trophy, people will start asking whether the prime minister will announce a special holiday. I'm sure fellow Malaysians can relate to this. All this led me to decide to turn Malaysian public holidays into a game. 

The design and development journey has been promising and encouraging. Non gamers and casual gamers quickly get hooked. Once when I visited an educational books publisher to pitch one of my other games, I brought several of my other prototypes for showcasing my portfolio. When they saw my crude prototype box, which was a brown cardboard box for food sachets and only had "Malaysian Holidays" hand-written on a plain white sticker, they picked it up and asked what's this? And we ended up playing it immediately. Malaysians love public holidays! It's in our DNA! That lousy box had no art at all.

After Buddhima from Specky Studio and I agreed on our mode of cooperation, he engaged Lim Chi Qing from Sunny Day to create the art for the game. This is a project which needs a lot of art. We feel that every public holiday in the game should have its own art. So this was a lot of work, truly a labour of love. I really like the art style Chi Qing used. The game itself is not yet published, but the art is now made into postcards, and they are now available. If you want to order some, please reach out to Specky Studio: link.