Creating Group Interview

It’s officially been one week since we launched Group Interview: The Game and the response has been amazing thank you to everyone who downloaded it. The messages have been super kind and we have actually been taken away a bit. From local card game shops showing interest to people taking it to try out. We thank you.

But how did this little April Fools joke come about? Well, that’s what we are here to cover today! In today’s update, we are going to touch a little bit on Group Interview and how it ties in with what we are doing at Smash Attack as well as its connections to ShapeVS.

ShapeVS origins go back to Dean and Seth talking about bad job interviews, group interviews and Dean thinking about how an interview at ShapeTECH would go. For those who don’t know, ShapeTECH is the name of the fictional company that runs the ShapeVS Testing Program that our game, ShapeVS, is in.

From one DnD session to another, the idea formed about building a game that takes inspiration from the types of weird questions some businesses ask in their interviews. And by golly does some of the stuff write itself.

“Dungeons and Dragons and Cards Against Humanity served as major inspirations.”

The idea was to encapsulate that awkward feeling you get when put in a situation you know have to be in, but don’t like how it’s turning out. We have all had some bad interviews but holy moly is there some real stinkers out there.

During the concept phase, we went over tons of different rules and ideas, such as:

• Scenario Building
• Salary Negotiation
• Timer Based
• Job Pitching
• and more…

But it became clear that we need to bring everything in and find a way to engage as many people as possible in the beauty of the interview. And that’s when it hit us, the worst part of an interview, talking yourself up.

“This is a question based around a real incident that caused this to be added to the interview process. Not the exact question was more about first aid but damn.”

From cover letters to resumes, interviews are about talking about why you deserve the job more than the others. By itself is already awkward but in a room full of people, actually painful. Everyone judging you, the nerves, all of it.

So we took that as the basis and knew we wanted it to be question-based but how to set yourself apart from games such as Cards Against Humanity and the many other “black/white” card games. This is where we got the DnD inspiration from and built the focus around resumes that can be other people/characters.

“The resumes are the big part of the game! Make yourself, be someone else or do something crazy!”

From here things started falling into place. We had a way for players to get super involved, questions that were very weird, awkward and strange. We were happy with how things were progressing but through playtesting realised that round the table taking turns to do questions was not the way to go.

We settled on a player taking the role of the Interviewer (think DM in DnD) and from here they would guide the game. Ask the questions, decide who got the job and more. The game was really falling into place now. We had a few more practice sessions before realising hey. We actually have a thing here.

And it mainly came about due to wanting to just take some time to breathe from ShapeVS. Whilst development was going well, it does take it out of you to put all your focus on one task.

“ShapeVS news is coming soon“

But we did manage to find a link between the two. In building the world for ShapeVS and the rules of Group Interview, the team came to wonder what it would be like to actually work for a dystopian company whose sole design is to create the perfect society.

Working with the ShapeVS team allowed Group Interview to grow, eventually including the additions of the Action Card system which was designed as a way for the applicants to fight back. Which is a theme we have played around with in regards to ShapeVS and the world we are building there.

Who knows if we will come back to Group Interview but we wanted to share a little bit about how it came to be and again thank you all for playing.