We had a great year in 2021 with the publication of Happy Dim Sum, Hotpot Havoc and Combo Cone Paradise under the Mercat Games brand. The feedback for our lighter family games has been extremely positive though there are many feedbacks on how we can improve on the games. The common question we have is, "Is Mercat Games going to make games other than food?". Food is Singaporean's core identity and it is one of the important cultural aspect of our society and we will going to continue to be making food games into the future. However, we will be taking a hiatus from food for our next few games and focus on other aspects of the Singaporean identity, such as our multi-culturalism, before coming back to our Singapore ever obsession over good food.
On the Capital Gains Studio line of games, we will slated to launch Zombielife Insurance into retail early this year, once we are done with our Kickstarter fulfillment. In the meantime, we are moving into 2 major new directions for our educational games.
Exploring the World of RPG
After tackling the challenge of incorporating real world finance concepts in board games, we are taking on a new challenge of incorporating them into a role playing game! One of the key regret we had while designing Debtzilla is that we didn't have much time to delve into the story telling part for the sake of restricting the playing time. With Debtzilla RPG, we will be able to delve deeper into the various stories that we wanted to tell and bring the Debtzilla experience onto a different platform. We will have the usual dice chuckling battles, but one key difference is that your character sheet no longer consist of your character attributes, but will revolve around a balance sheet and the gameplay will resolve around how well you manage your money, while hunting down scammer and financial fraudsters. RPG also gives educators and game master the flexibility to modify scenarios or encounters to emphasis on a certain aspect of the game, like scam education or debt management, which is previously harder to modify in a well balanced board game. We are looking to launch the game sometime in late Q1 2022 and will mainly be available in a digital format.
Starting a new Metaverse!
We are also branching out from the world of finance into a wholly new theme: Dinosaur! Other than serious obsessions over Stonks, the boys in us never outgrew our love for dinosaurs. We decided to kick off a 30 mins card game exploring the interaction between the more aggressive meat eating dinosaur and the more defensive herd instincts of herbivores. The game will come with our usual gamification guide and is a great family game. Here is the first glimpse of the artwork we are working on:
We are also hoping that events will resume in 2022, so that we can meet our friends and community and showcase the latest games we have developed. It has been fruitful to be developing games during a pandemic, but nothing beat the fun and laughter from the community as they try out our latest products!
We hope to see you in person soon!
