Mammoth Messages is a very simple party game about communicating words using only cave drawings.

On your turn, you draw multiple random words and a bunch of simplistic drawing tokens. Before the timer runs out, you must communicate those words using nothing but those tokens! How you reveal, use, or combine the cave drawings, though, is entirely up to you.

It combines two very common party game categories—word communication and visual communication—in a way that just makes sense intuitively.

What’s special?

First of all, the game was invented and made in 3 days. That’s the benefit of a very simple ruleset and a strong framework already in place ( = my game studio website) to display and generate material and rules.

Secondly, ever since I started using generative AI, I’ve been a bit annoyed at how quickly I came to rely upon it. I still did 90% of a project entirely myself, but that other 10% usually meant the majority of all graphical assets started with something generated by AI.

For this game, I purposely told myself to create the cave drawings myself. Generative AI was only used twice: for a background and for the mammoth you see on the main logo. Everything else was done myself, I guess to prove to myself that I can do that.

March 26, 2024 professional own project