Scratcher Catcher

Almost penniless, the player receives a letter from the tax authority claiming that they have discovered heaps of financial crimes in your past and you now have a month to come up with $30 000 or face jail time. As a last resort, you visit the local corner store and buy a scratch lottery ticket. Just as you are about to scratch it, a strange man approaches you, shouting at you not to scratch it as it has a rare serial number!

Scratcher Catcher was developed in two weeks as part of a course in game prototyping. The brief was to make a game involving “collecting” and “chance”. My idea was to combine the two and make a game about collecting rare scratch lottery tickets! The team consisted of me (as Lead Game Designer), another designer, and two artists.

The most advanced feature of the game is the dynamic and probabilistic generation of the lottery tickets. The system was designed to follow one of three prize plans and randomize if the ticket was a winner or not (and of how much) whilst simultaneously using traditional scratch lottery tricks to make the player feel like they were close to winning, even if they are not. On top of this, the rarity elements of the tickets are similarly randomized, including serial numbers, “special editions” and sparkly print.