Ben: I completely agree with Jade here. We wanted to keep the game fairly casual which means refining the rules down to a certain level of simplicity which was not easy. If we did everything someone else suggested it would have been a mess. While making the art of the game, the biggest challenge we ended up having to let go of was making the cards be ambigrams. We thought it’d be great if the cards read both for the active player and the opponent. Though an interesting idea, in execution it became very limiting as the skeletons and words would always need to be symmetrical. What was preserved from that exercise is the text message on both sides of the cards and the design still being far more symmetrical than most games. The other interesting challenge was making the game functional for colorblind players. We played with a friend that was colorblind and that’s what inspired the symbols for each disease.

What was the inspiration or core idea that drove your work on Side Effects?

Jade: I’ve had a lot of tragic experiences with mental illness, and I have a very dark sense of humor. Knowing that many of the drugs we’re prescribed to make us well also cause us to become sick in other ways, I started to develop a game where you were racing other players to treat a series of diseases. I think my decision to focus on mental illness was birthed from my frustration that people don’t like to talk—or even address—mental illness. So, I guess you can say it’s part satire, but mostly I wanted to make a fun game that looked cool and could be played at a bar.

Ben: For the art, we looked at a lot of apothecary/booze labels, art deco and nouveau poster design, and tarot cards. Initially, I made some variations of the two most common types of cards of the game, diseases, and medications, and eventually refined those into two hero designs that all the later cards matched. The art was mostly built in photoshop and some illustrator, and then very importantly we printed and playtested the cards numerous times (even rounding corners by hand) until we arrived on the design that we have now.