Party Phase Zone: How I Learned to Stop Worrying: Part 1

• 04 March 2025
• ramble,
• real_shit,
• ring_racers

My creations are usually pure chaos. No shed of balance of any kind, and usually play.... really badly. On purpose.

However, this might just be the most chaotic thing I've made yet.

Fig 1. Party Phase thumbnail.

This is Party Phase, a track designed to fuck over you considerably. A track that relies on not just strategy, but random chance.

What started this

I don't normally participate in "jams". If you don't know, a "jam" is an event where people make stuff from scratch within the allotted time limit. I don't go on jams much, simply because I think it's a hassle, especially when you have to meet up in person. No leaving this box for me, usually.

Eldog, as the people like to call her, decided to start said jam, named the cerv.id classic, and the theme of said jam was:

This meant that the track had to work within both race AND battle. This was perplexing.

A track that works in race and battle doesn't sound hard in concept, you could just, dedicate an entire area for race and battle respectively.

However, I wanted to be adventurous. I wanted to be different from everyone else who had the same idea. The problem is, it's much harder to make a race layout also fit as a battle arena.

Not only that, with my subpar layouting skills and terrible decoration choices, this would usually end badly.

Until I realized I could mask how bad the level is with a shittier gimmick.

The Gimmick™

Ah yes. The Gimmick™. Most sections are littered with spaces around the map that you can decided to touch, or not to touch.

It's possible to complete the entire map without EVER touching them, in fact!

insert picture of party phase spaces here

Touching these will trigger specific machinery within the space, and also your own Ring Racer as well!

A space can be of 4 types:

• Blue (Ring Gain)
• Red (Ring Drain)
• Green (Random Event)
• Purple (Chance Time)

Triggering a space will also add it to your log at the bottom right of your lenses, right above where the ping counter would be.

These spaces explain themselves, except for the last two which I'll cover more in detail right now.

I fucking hate the green

Returning from Mario Party, is the random space, which triggers, well, a random event.

Fig 2. The random space.

This will usually be 80% the cause of deaths due to one effect alone. It's also 40% the thing that will screw you over, atleast in sessions with more than 2 karters.

It can trigger a variety of things, usually player specific like:

• Give the player a random item
• Double their items, or a free sink if none
• Change to the opposite color
• Increase follower size
• Make you fatter
• Straight up kill you, which is sometimes unusually common, depending on the board's seed

Some directly involve the board, such as:

• Spawn a landmine on every space
• Spawn a battle monitor on every red space next reroll
• Force every space to be a specific one next reroll

Some don't affect the board, but can affect you or anyone else:

• Make the next random space run two times for a player
• Spawn a monitor with a hidden surprise..?

The machinery in these has no concept of weights. It will always be random. You can even get the same event multiple times in a row!

Though atleast with random spaces, you can choose to not get screwed over.... which ties in to the dreaded Chance Time.

FUUUUCK

Also returning from Mario Party is the chance time space and mechanics.

Fig 3. Your worst nightmare.

Once someone lands on a chance time space, karters cannot initiate another one, even if they are standing on another chance time space.

It will then show 3 slots, in order:

• The first victim
• The type of chance time
• The second victim

The main purpose of this mechanic is to screw specific karters over, if you time it right!

Unfortunately for you, if you screw it up, people WILL target you as the chance time is visible for everyone.

This also means you can watch yourself get picked in another karter's chance time and berate them with slurs behind the wheel. Sounds friendly, isn't it?

The Layout

The layout sucks. It may be technical but it's very poopoo !!!!

Though the original layout may be worse, as it was originally gonna be a 3 lap race. Thank god I didn't go with that....

Why a party board?

It's very funny to see people fall off my creation, including myself of course. On the contrary, I probably would have went with a more boring idea that isn't worth a blog post like this if it wasn't for one thing.

A goddess reached out to me.

This idea of a party board as a track started all the way back in December, when I was reading my favorite manga at the time.

It was about a high school boy being blessed (cursed?) by the Love God with getting 100 soulmates. However, he must reciprocate their love back, otherwise they will die a very horrible unlucky death.

Sounds like high stakes, right? Should be physically impossible to do, right? Well our protagonist is clearly the character that would fit more in a shounen than a romcom, as he can not only balance his life, but also balance being with his girlfriends and loving them all back. Every. Single. One.

But enough about that probably terrible plot summary. We're here for what inspired the track's creation in the first place, right?

Around Christmas Day dropped the scanlation for Chapter 200, a celebratory chapter celebrating well, 200 chapters.

This was in the form of The Big Cheese of the Publishing Biz organizing an entire party game titled '100 Girlfriend Party', where each space corresponds to a chapter in the series.

This is currently my favorite miniarc so far, but what really drove me to going with this was the goddess.

Her mere presence alone made me realize how funny would it be to make a party game of my own. And not only design it in a way to be frustrating, but also design it to be fun, in a way...

If she did not appear in my dreams, again, as I mentioned, Party Phase would not have been created.

TBC....?

I'm getting tired of writing this. I don't like typing much so this makes it even WORSE

Next time however, we'll talk more about the inner specifics of this track, featuring my subconscious!

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