The Game That Will Make You Laugh So Hard You'll Cry: Its Origins
As the title suggests, Awkward 2 isn’t the first game in the Awkward series. Awkward 2 is the sequel to our small indie title we released back in 2018. At the time, Snap Finger Click was a tiny studio with just five of us on the development team. Shortly after founding the studio, we made ACT IT OUT! and we wanted to follow it up with another small game which became the original Awkward.
The first Awkward game is about difficult and controversial questions. Starting out with tame but still polarising questions like “Does pineapple belong on pizza?” and “Should ketchup be stored in the fridge?”, eventually the game ramps up the difficulty, asking about topics including difficult moral dilemmas (“If you could only choose one, would you save the life of a 1-year-old or an 18-year-old?”) and your parents’ sex life (“Who has the best sex life, you or your mother?”).
The idea for Awkward spawned from conversations with our friends. Approaching our thirties and some of us and those in our friend circle had been married or in longterm relationships for many years. We discussed missing those early days of dating when you’re learning so much about each other, telling stories and revealing secrets. It’s exciting and fresh, and when you’re with a longterm partner, although you still have fun and love each other very much, many of us longed for that ‘new relationship’ feeling where you find out something surprising about your loved one.
One of our approaches to game design at Snap Finger Click is to take a real-world experience that’s fun and see if there’s a way to turn it into a game. If you can capture that same feeling of fun from something you already know feels great, it’s almost like your very first prototype! As we experimented, we found that posing difficult questions naturally led players to explain why they had chosen certain answers, and in turn would reveal tidbits of information about their lives they’d never revealed before.
The goal with the first Awkward game was to try and spark conversation and debate, getting one of the players to reveal a new fact about themselves, that no matter how well you know the person you’re playing with, you’ll still find out at least one new thing you didn’t know before.
We originally envisioned Awkward as a game for couples, answering questions about each other and their relationship. But as we playtested together, we discovered that playing with friends and family was fun too - actually more fun, because you tend to find out more intimate secrets from your friends than you do from a romantic partner.
We always felt the first Awkward game could’ve been much bigger than it was. Back then, we didn’t have the team size or budget to do it full justice. In Awkward 2, we have a game that’s much bigger and closer to our original vision. There are six different rounds, each round has its own gameplay, there are 3D visuals, and a voiceover. We spent longer perfecting the questions and trying to cut down on the tamer topics from the original game so that everything is even more Awkward.
After the release of the first game we spent a long time reading reviews and other player feedback, in order to make sure this sequel is a significant step forward. We want to keep growing the franchise and we even released a boardgame of Awkward recently after a successful Kickstarter campaign. We can’t wait to share Awkward 2 with the world!
What are you most looking forward to in Awkward 2?
- Martijn and the Snap Finger Click team
The first Awkward game is about difficult and controversial questions. Starting out with tame but still polarising questions like “Does pineapple belong on pizza?” and “Should ketchup be stored in the fridge?”, eventually the game ramps up the difficulty, asking about topics including difficult moral dilemmas (“If you could only choose one, would you save the life of a 1-year-old or an 18-year-old?”) and your parents’ sex life (“Who has the best sex life, you or your mother?”).
The idea for Awkward spawned from conversations with our friends. Approaching our thirties and some of us and those in our friend circle had been married or in longterm relationships for many years. We discussed missing those early days of dating when you’re learning so much about each other, telling stories and revealing secrets. It’s exciting and fresh, and when you’re with a longterm partner, although you still have fun and love each other very much, many of us longed for that ‘new relationship’ feeling where you find out something surprising about your loved one.
One of our approaches to game design at Snap Finger Click is to take a real-world experience that’s fun and see if there’s a way to turn it into a game. If you can capture that same feeling of fun from something you already know feels great, it’s almost like your very first prototype! As we experimented, we found that posing difficult questions naturally led players to explain why they had chosen certain answers, and in turn would reveal tidbits of information about their lives they’d never revealed before.
The goal with the first Awkward game was to try and spark conversation and debate, getting one of the players to reveal a new fact about themselves, that no matter how well you know the person you’re playing with, you’ll still find out at least one new thing you didn’t know before.
We originally envisioned Awkward as a game for couples, answering questions about each other and their relationship. But as we playtested together, we discovered that playing with friends and family was fun too - actually more fun, because you tend to find out more intimate secrets from your friends than you do from a romantic partner.
We always felt the first Awkward game could’ve been much bigger than it was. Back then, we didn’t have the team size or budget to do it full justice. In Awkward 2, we have a game that’s much bigger and closer to our original vision. There are six different rounds, each round has its own gameplay, there are 3D visuals, and a voiceover. We spent longer perfecting the questions and trying to cut down on the tamer topics from the original game so that everything is even more Awkward.
After the release of the first game we spent a long time reading reviews and other player feedback, in order to make sure this sequel is a significant step forward. We want to keep growing the franchise and we even released a boardgame of Awkward recently after a successful Kickstarter campaign. We can’t wait to share Awkward 2 with the world!
What are you most looking forward to in Awkward 2?
- Martijn and the Snap Finger Click team