Party games are one option to play when it comes to groups of friends who want to play together — especially during the last year of the COVID-19 pandemic. From titles like Super Mario fun and Overcooked Along with the increasingly popular Jackbox series, there is an increasing number of games for entertainment. A recent arrival on the party game scene aims to offer players the option of creative writing in the form Crazy Fanfic.
In development since December 2020 and launched in April 2021. Crazy Fanfic is all about sparking creative writing for groups of two or more. Self-described as a “fandom-crazed mess of exposition,” this party game was born out of a love of pop culture, going to conventions, and being a fan of developers Zee and Michael.
Born out of an attempt to recapture some of the convention-going energy that was actually lost during the pandemic, there’s something special about Crazy Fanfic.
Origins of Frantic Fanfic
Crazy Fanfic it started from the creator Zee’s initial idea of a few three-minute presentation nights (a game that really grew in popularity during quarantine where you create a PowerPoint on a topic, usually of your choice, and present it to a group) with friends, with a twist. The concept was that instead of knowing the topic in advance, Zee and friends create topics, mix them up, pull from a list, and then have to put together a presentation beforehand.
This presentation evening eventually turned into the first online version Crazy Fanfic which used Google Docs, a Facebook event, time tracking on the phone and Zee which manually sent links to friends. In this form, Crazy Fanfic was a game where several friends would write the beginning, middle, and end of a story before all the pieces would be put together and each story would be read aloud. A few days after this event, the idea of a website or app came to Zee.
“I was staring at the ceiling thinking ‘Damn, how great was that game night… when can we do it again, how can I make it better’?” Zee tells Digital Trends. “And then it dawned on me. Oh my God. It could be a website. Application. something. We could develop this. And so we did! We were developing Crazy Fanfic from December 2020 and it’s been a fun ride ever since.”
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Apart from wanting to have fun with friends, Zee also missed being able to attend conventions during the COVID-19 pandemic. “So I thought very hard about the things I missed from the congress,” says Zee. “What panels I missed. What a vibe it was. I really missed the bad fanfic reading panels, which I thought were hilarious. Bad writing and over dramatic delivery is very, very funny. If I could somehow combine launch parties with bad fanfic reading panels… I feel like that would be fun to do!”
Michael, Zee’s boyfriend and developer, makes up the other half of the two-person team behind it Crazy Fanfic. After Zee put together what would develop into the finished version gameshe and Michael eventually decided to create a website.
“We ended up going with the website because coding the app was so time-consuming just to get to all the different app distribution networks,” says Zee. “Then came the concept of the visual. I’m not a web designer by trade so there was a lot of back and forth and learning what we could and couldn’t do there on the fly. Michael is a back-end developer so he learned all the front-end parts you see in the game over the last eight months. I created mockups in Photoshop and Michael would translate them into actual working code. The first time we saw text entered on the page and then transferred to the next section, it was magical.”
So what do you get when you combine a love of fan fiction, the humor and chaos often found at late night convention panels and an idea? you get Crazy Fanfic.
What is Frantic Fanfic?
Thanks to the work Zee and Michael put into the game, Crazy Fanfic is an easy game to play with friends. The Quick Start Guide is full of useful information on how to get started playing quickly with a longer version available as well as a guide for individual streamers.
But in the most basic sense, Crazy Fanfic allows a group of friends to each write down character names which will then be shuffled, the names will be chosen by the group, and then each player will be asked to write a different part of several fan fictions using the chosen characters within a time limit. After each section of each fan fiction has been written, the group will be asked to read each one aloud.
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Winning the round comes down to the reactions each fan fiction elicits from the playing group. During the part of the game where you read what you wrote out loud, group members can react with as many reactions as they want. Crazy Fanfic it actually relies on the cooperative side of things, even when determining which player won the game.
Reading Department Crazy Fanfic is where a lot of the energy the creators wanted to reclaim from bad fan fiction panels comes full force. Similar to live panels where bad fan fiction is read aloud, players Crazy Fanfic then read your own monstrosity that they all wrote together. This often results in laughter and chaos distinctly reminiscent of a late-night convention. “We had a three-hour session and by the end of it people were losing their voices from laughing so hard,” Zee said.
With three game modes currently available (Standard, OTP version and Self Insert), there are many different ways to play. There are four different timing modes available, such as a lightning lap and a more casual option, which can affect the game even more.
Zee offered some advice for new players Crazy Fanfic. “Make the most of it by inviting some people who you know love fun party games and are willing to try something new and get a little creative and silly! We find that the best games are played with about four to eight players, so you can get a really good mix. But you can play between two and 16 players if you really want to.”
The future of Frantic Fanfic
While Crazy Fanfic is still new to the indie party game scene, which hasn’t stopped Zee and Michael from working on updates for the game. Shared on the game’s blog, the recent update included some tweaks to the settings screen and, by popular demand, enabling two-player mode.
Since this is a two-person team, updates are done in Zee and Michael’s spare time. Zee said they both work full-time, so updates will come as time and energy allow. But a new mode is coming soon with the three game modes currently available.
“Soon we’re introducing another mode – the one where you only see the previous part [the fan fiction section that has been written] and all other parts become hidden while the game is active. We still don’t have a name for this mod, there’s a little debate because the phone is kind of broken, but not really because nothing repeats. It’s more like lost pages from a diary, trying to pick up where someone left off in a mysterious way.”
With a number of future updates that include an interactive audience feature that will allow people to vote on their favorite stories while watching games broadcast on platforms like Twitch, Zee hopes Crazy Fanfic are high.
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“Future hopes include making a physical copy of the game, making a bunch of different mods, and it would also be cool to see a “big streamer” if the game is live with a big audience!” says Zee. “I’d also really like to take this game on the road to a bunch of different glitches, pending COVID protocols.”
With a very positive response from players so far, even reaching the goal set by both creators to have more than 500 people playing at once in June 2021. Crazy Fanfic continues to see more and more ridiculous fan fiction written by gamers, and some of that real-world convention energy is coming back online.
“We made something that made a lot of people happier and made them laugh at stupid things,” says Zee. “And during a pandemic and coming out of a pandemic, when things look so bleak in the world … it’s really nice to say you did it.”
Interview responses have been slightly edited for clarity.
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Source: newstars.edu.vn