Now that I had a playable prototype (with a theme and everything!) it was time to show it to more players. This time however, I didn’t have a playtest group. Not only that, it was July 2020, the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Everyone was at home in quarantine, and it would have been irresponsible to break it to get someone to playtest my game. Time to get creative! My cousin Miguel wanted to try it, so I improvised a setup with a tripod and a webcam in order to run a playtest through Skype. Since Cortiça has no hidden information, I could handle the cards for both of us. All he had to do wa ..read more

The first prototype for Cortiça, handmade and still without a theme, or a name. At the end of Part 1 I had a high level idea of how the game could work, but it hadn’t been tested and I had yet to define what it would be about. At this point I could either look for a theme to design the game around, or try to get the game’s basic rules to work and then find a theme that fits. The good thing is, there is generally no wrong answer here. As long as they’re in tune in the end, you can start however you want. Given the strict component count for the competition (18 cards!) there was a risk of fallin ..read more

Photo of a cork oak tree in a dry Alentejo field, by António Carrapato At long last, let’s talk about Cortiça! What is it, and where did it come from? After Blight Chronicles: Agent Decker wrapped up, I was done. It was such a negative experience that it left me incapable of working on my own projects for a while. It taught me what a panic attack was, even if I didn’t have a name for it yet. Every so often I’d come up with an idea for a mechanism or a theme that seemed interesting and would write them down, but as soon as I started to develop it into a prototype, there would be instant splitti ..read more

Hey everyone! Remember this blog? It’s been a while since I posted regularly about what I’ve been working on. Sure, there was the odd update and catch-up here and there, but there was so much that wasn’t mentioned here, from new game prototypes, to a new design being picked up by two publishers and even winning an award before it was out! Why did I stop posting? Let’s get into it. If you follow me on Twitter, you might have seen me talk about most of these things. It was so easy to tweet a photo or a quick note about something, compared to writing a proper post here, and there was an eager au ..read more

Every so often I look for talks about the process of designing games and only found a few. Maybe I’m spoiled by all the postmortems that happen in the videogame medium but I’d love to see something similar from boardgame designers, especially about working with IP or adapting games from one medium to another. So when Gamedev Camp invited me to do a talk and let me pick the topic, I knew what I had to do! I went with the design process of adapting SUPERHOT from a videogame to a card game. I hope you find it insightful ..read more

I was interviewed by Alice Vilaça for the radio show “Portugueses no Mundo”, which is about the experiences Portuguese people have when they’re living abroad. If you speak Portuguese you can listen to it on their website on on the video below, which has subtitles in Portuguese. In addition, here is the transcript in English: Alice Vilaça: Manuel Correia is 34 years old. He’s from Lisbon and is in Ireland. He arrived in Galway in January 2020 and it was here, in Ireland, that it all began – in 2013, followed by other international experiences. The two years in Ireland were followed by two in G ..read more

The second prototype for Fortune Tellers, 2013 Fortune Tellers is a game I’ve been thinking about for eight years. Back then I tried two different prototypes. The concept had potential but the gameplay had flaws that I didn’t know how to solve at the time. It was enticing and intimidating, much bigger than the ones I had made before. Shortly thereafter I had to move out of the country and left it behind. I still think of it regularly because the theme makes me laugh and because – as far as I know – there hasn’t been another game like it. Since it’s something I’d still like to play, I guess I’l ..read more

Here is a quick catch-up of what’s been going on lately: Empire of Sin It’s out, boss! Empire of Sin was released on December 1st on PC, Mac, Playstation 4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch. This is several milestones rolled up into one. I had never released a game on a console and now it’s out on pretty much all of them! Also, until now all of my videogame releases had been digital so it’s a special thrill to be able to hold it in my hands (once my copy gets here) and to see it on store shelves. Imirt Imirt represents game developers and creators from all disciplines throughout Ireland, both ana ..read more

For the second part of the catch-up I’d like to talk about digital games. These don’t come up as much here because of NDAs but I do like to celebrate when they come out! Cook-out: A Sandwich Tale Cook-out was my main project at Resolution Games. It’s a cooperative game about making sandwiches in virtual reality, for the Oculus Quest and Rift S. It was really fun to work on because virtual reality is in such an early stage that there aren’t many standards on how to do things we take for granted in flat screen games such as menus, which suddenly become complex once they’re diegetic. If a floati ..read more

Hello, how are you? So much has happened since the last post, I thought I’d do a couple posts to catch up. This one is about my analog projects, in chronological order: January 7th: I gave my first talk! I was one of the speakers at Run for the Border 2020 in Dundalk along with Jordan Bradley, Pete Mc Nally and Donal Philips. It was a short talk called “So, you’ve designed a board game. Now what?”. It was about the different paths you can follow in order to get your game published, with the suggestion of using print and play as a way to grow an audience before either showing it to a publisher ..read more