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Since I already had characters designed for my storyboard in a cartoonish fashion, and since the subject matter of befriending an odd alien cat was already rather goofy, I wanted to stick with simple, fun aesthetics. Once I decided that the game board would be of space, a solar system, I made a version of it. Planets, the important squares, were defined in bright colors.

Use of movement on a grid as my core mechanic made a lot of sense to me. Not only did it allow for an easily measurable resource of sorts (one that could be split between the characters or increased/decreased with friendship), but it had some relevance to my story. The characters’ movement from place to place in the story was a driver of the plot and important to its sense of space. In my storyboard the astronaut is shown approaching a planet, walking through its open land, back at the landed spaceship, and leaving the atmosphere with their new friend. This connection of themes wasn’t a main point, but something that helped the game to feel even more tied to the previous narrative.

As for how movement would occur, I wanted to use mechanics that’d introduce more choice and complexity. So far my game was fairly simple. Entirely random mechanics, like dice rolls, wouldn’t do.
From here I arrived at the idea of move patterns and choosing from several cards. Using the grid I had decided on and specific paths through the squares shown visually, I wanted the characters to have decks of cards the draw their movement options from. With separate decks, I could even control the relative abilities of the two characters.

These decks, unlike other mechanics for moving, would become more predicable to the players over time, as they learn what kinds of cards are most and least common to draw. The way I decided for them to be drawn was three at a time, with the player choosing just one to use that round. See 3 cards discard 2 means the decks would have to come with many cards, but it gradually gives players lots of information. Each draw / move cycle would be part of a round. In just a few rounds, they can probably tell what the most common movement patterns are, allowing them to plan around what they will probably get to do next turn.

At this point, I had decided that the main goal was to visit all the planet squares. If the alien’s only ability/purpose was the combining mechanic and I didn’t want the two characters to feel entirely separate aspects of the game, I needed to limit its ability. Then, it could likely not be the sole contributor to getting the characters together to become friends. The alien’s deck of movement would be mostly shorter paths, compared to the astronaut.

The other main technology my game needed was game pieces for the characters.

Though it wasn’t impactful to the game, I thought the idea of the flat character images being held in stands that look like spacecraft was really fun!
With all the colors already going on in the board, I decided that limited palettes for these objects was best. Red and blue being classic “opposite colors”, I thought it was a nice contrast between them. If combined, I decided, a different figure could be used to display that.

Since this is them together, I chose a purple as if their colors had mixed. In all of this, I tried to adjust the colors to be different enough from the planets to be distinguishable as unrelated uses of color.

While visiting all six planet tokens was the win state, the lose state, I decided, would be based on a round limit. Like an amount of months that the astronaut and space maintenance worker would be expected to be finished in, the player would only have so many rounds. This number was initially 10, but with 6 planets, this would require the player to move directly from planet square to planet square to succeed. This, I didn’t think, should or would be possible. I instead went with 14, so that the astronaut had 2 rounds per planet or so, plus extra. If developing this game beyond concept, this (and the movement cards) would require a lot of testing to get right!

Finally, finishing up my design document, I decided on the working title of ”Friendships”. Though pretty cheesy and a pun on spaceships, I thought it worked as an extension of the light hearted feel and summation of theme.

The theme that I identified within my narrative, very easily, was companionship. My story was fairly simple, the final storyboard especially being quite paired down, but was clearly about a character’s life being improved by embracing a new connection in an odd, alien friend/pet.

Though the story concludes with the characters becoming friends, I decided fairly quickly that uniting the characters would not be the final goal of my game. Much more interesting, I thought, would be to allow the players the option to ignore friendship, but use mechanics to encourage it. If the astronaut and alien being together were mechanically beneficial to the player, not only would they be more likely to seek it out, but the idea of the alien creature soothing the astronaut’s loneliness in the story would be represented.

In order to do this, I needed a system I could reward a friendly player through and another final goal, which I found in the idea that the astronaut was on a work mission when they found the alien.

Since there were two characters, I considered a game where one player is the astronaut and the other the alien. The idea of a cooperative board game was interesting to me, but I again had a goal problem. If I were taking inspiration from the astronaut maintenance worker job, what would the alien player be doing? How would the characters functionally “become friends”? What would that mean for the characters? My thought was that befriended characters would move together as one, so would players have to share power over the path of the game to gain the benefits? A single player game, by contrast, would easily allow for control of the characters being more fluid. The two could move as one, a team, sometimes and be separate at others.