Pickpocket Wrestling

Pickpocket Wrestling is a game I designed in 2021, specifically for a compilation of card games I'd been working on (which included both One Armed Robbery and Friends Strangers Enemies! Man!). It's sort of a dexterity game, sort of a minimalist sport that uses a piece of index paper instead of a ball or puck. I think what I really like about this project is that it's the one where I figured out I could include information relevant to the game in a form that's "in universe" with the art I wanted to draw (by putting the instructions in a thought balloon, basically), which I think worked pretty well, and which I continue to do basically all the time in my zine games today. This was the first time I did anything like that!

I've actually never played this game! It's fun, in theory. I couldn't tell you if it's actually any good, or if I'm just perpetually too pleased with myself. If you ever print these out (preferably on card stock), let me know! You can even play it with a couple of regular playing cards if you want, or some other object, for kicks! I think I suggested playing it with cups of water, in which case you might want to play outside.

There's no deep meaning behind why it's called "pickpocket" wrestling. I just like the word pickpocket.

Lizzie Smithson is picking the pocket of her rival, a punk thief with black lipstick. The rival is attempting to pick the pocket of a fancy mouse, but the mouse has noticed her and is angry at her. Lizzie Smithson is thinking: Criminal, me? What are you, a cop? Well, this is card 1 of 2 you need to play Godahl Drury's Pickpocket Wrestling. See other side for instructions!

Lizzie is picking her rival's pocket, but is annoyed because her rival is flirting with an attractive lady that Lizzie herself would like to flirt with. The rival is, of course, picking the attractive lady's pocket. Lizzie is thinking: This is a game for two players. To begin, each player puts one of these cards on the back of one of their hands and balances it there. They may not touch it with their other hand. Both players then stand two feet apart from each other. Now, on either player’s count of three, both players must do everything in their power to make the other player drop their card. The first player whose card falls off of their hand loses, the remaining player wins.

Lizzie Smithson is attempting to rob a fancy mouse, who seems angry at her. Her rival, a punk who is also a pickpocket, is giggling while picking Lizzie's pocket undetected. The rival is thinking: Woah, can you read my mind? Anyway, this is card 2 of 2 you need to play Godahl Drury's Pickpocket Wrestling. The other side of this card will teach you how!

Lizzie Smithson is picking the pocket of an attractive lady while flirting with her, her rival seems annoyed by Lizzie's rambunctiousness, and is also picking Lizzie's pocket. The rival is thinking: This is a game for two players. To begin, each player puts one of these cards on the back of one of their hands and balances it there. They may not touch it with their other hand. Both players then stand two feet apart from each other. Now, on either player’s count of three, both players must do everything in their power to make the other player drop their card. The first player whose card falls off of their hand loses, the remaining player wins.

Game rules if the images don't load:
This is a game for two players. To begin, each player puts one of these cards on the back of one of their hands and balances it there. They may not touch it with their other hand. Both players then stand two feet apart from each other. Now, on either player’s count of three, both players must do everything in their power to make the other player drop their card. The first player whose card falls off of their hand loses, the remaining player wins.

This game also has an itchio page! It's here.

Ten Card Crook

The very first Lizzie Smithson game! Released in (iirc) mid 2018 as a physical card game, and put onto itch dot io as a print and play game a little later. As the name implies, Ten Card Crook has ten cards, and thus ten illustrations (well, eleven, if you count the title card). Don't worry too much about the rules, this game is way uninteresting. It was sort of a testing grounds for the kinds of game design I wanted to do, though!

Push Card pushing right. Lizzie is picking a flirtatious guy's pocket, who is making his girlfriend uncomfortable somehow.

Mark Card. Medium shot of Lizzie picking a bald rich guy's pocket.

Push Card pushing left. Lizzie is picking someone's pocket. Nothing else interesting is happening in this crowd scene, as far as I can tell.

Okay, some explanation: So the year was 2017, and we were starting to get the first real rush of digital stores closing down. The iOS store had already shuttered all of its old material, leaving cool stuff like Tim Roger's Ziggurat to turn to dust. I believe this was around the time when the Wii shop channel was announced to close, too. At the time, I had basically one big fear in mind: Would the Sly Cooper games disappear forever? The PS3 and Vita stores only had so much time before they would suffer the same fate, after all, and old PS2s are not going to last forever. Seems like the series, which I adored and still do, might well just disappear from the face of the Earth some day! And I was really concerned, so I determined myself to create something that recreates the spirit of what I liked about those games, if not the reality, and work it into a state that could potentially be preserved for hundreds of years to come.

Push Card pushing right. Lizzie is picking the pocket of a guy who's about to push someone over. In the background, the flirtatious guy's girlfriend storm away from the flirtatious guy.

Mark Card. Medium shot. Lizzie is picking a tech guy's pocket.

Push Card pushing left. Lizzie is picking the flirtatious guy's pocket, who is being punched by his girlfriend.

Well, that's what inspired me to start making physical games. There are, hmm, a couple of significant flaws with the reasoning that led me here (physical cards wear out very fast over time, and also the Sly Cooper series is so popular that it seems significantly improbable that it could disappear any time soon--piracy would rescue it), but never mind. This is my first attempt to earnestly make something that checked off the same boxes as Sly. I had to make some choices in deciding what elements to recreate, but I ultimately decided what I liked best was not so much the lore or the story (which seems to be most peoples' favorite part, or so they say), but I really really loved just hanging out in the hubworlds and just endlessly picking pockets. I literally spent more than 100 hours doing only that back in 2006 when the games were new, and when they came out on Playstation Vita, I spent 100 more hours doing only the same. So I figured I could make a game that could evoke that feeling, and make something good along those lines, and ride into the sunset with a good game under my belt, and then I spent the next 4 years endlessly revisiting the concept and the characters I created for it, finding ever more superfluous angles to explore the concept with.

Push Card pushing right. Lizzie is pickpocketing a guy who is making fun of her girlfriend. Everyone looks sad.

Mark card. Medium shot of Lizzie picking a flirtatious guy's pocket.

Push Card pushing left. Lizzie is kissing her new girlfriend while picking a rich guy's pocket. It's worth mentioning that this is one of the only illustrations in the series where the sky is visible. I usually try to hide it so as to imply that Lizzie, though free from the confines of morality or the law, is still a prisoner in some deeper way. Or something!

Ten Card Crook was never a very good game, but it proved to me that my ideas WERE worth pursuing, even if they were unlikely to be financially successful. The art is well underneath the level I can do now (at the time, I mostly drew pseudo-realistic drawings of humans, but Sly Cooper was a furry game and so Ten Card Crook had to be too) and I was kind of just bullshitting my way through a complete project, but at least I ended up with a finished thing I could build on through sequels! In later years, I would figure out that there are more interesting ways to explore a plot in a card game than what I attempted here, and I also found ways to streamline the actual gameplay so that there were fewer unimportant numbers to keep track of and there was less downtime between turns. At this point, my main design inspiration was the Oniverse series of card games (literally one of my main goals of TCC was to make a version of Onirim that had an endless mode) and I love those games but I'm glad I moved beyond my inspiration eventually.

The one Pickpocket Card. Close up of Lizzie Smithson picking a tech guy's pocket.

Anyway, that's the game. It's okay, bordering on bad, but I'm proud of it and it was the start to my finest creation of my life. Thanks for reading.

This game still has an itchio page too. It's here.

Ten Card Crook: Remastered

This game sucks.

Push Card pushing right. Text beneath the top reads: After playing this card, if holding a card, you must play it before drawing another card. Lizzie Smithson, master pickpocket, simultaneously robs a tech bro, who has caught a fellow pickpocket red handed, and a flirtatious guy who is creeping on a lady.

Push Card pushing left. The tech bro is eyeing Lizzie accusingly. Lizzie holds her fingers crossed in front of him, diverting his eyes from her hand, which is lifting the pocket of a rich man. Said rich man is yelling at a poor girl, who has taken notice of Lizzie's robbery.

I made this game as a sort of remake of Ten Card Crook (vanilla), based on design knowledge I had gained from designing One Armed Robbery (at the time not yet released). The original Ten Card Crook's flaws were kind of grating on me, and I thought "I can fix this" and I made some quick changes to the rulesheet and the cards, assumed it would play fine, and then *fully illustrated all ten cards* (Plus the title card!!!) and put it on itchio and forgot about it for a while. About a year later, I played it, and was horrified to learn that my changes actually made the game much worse.

Push Card pushing right. The tech bro is suspiciously eyeing a man in a trenchcoat passing by. Lizzie, meanwhile, is robbing the same rich guy while he yells at the poor girl again, making her sad. Lizzie sympathizes with the poor girl's situation.

Mark Card. Medium shot. Lizzie is picking the pocket of the flirtatious dude, who is creeping on her.

Push Card pushing left. Text beneath the top reads: After playing this card, if holding a card, you must play it before drawing another card. Tech bro grabs Lizzie's hand, but is astonished to find it empty. So astonished in fact, that he fails to notice Lizzie robbing the flirtatious man with her other hand, while said flirtatious man creeps on the same lady, who looks very uncomfortable.

The principal changes were in speeding up the game by requiring fewer mid-game shuffles of the deck, which reduced the randomness by a lot, and dropping the requirement of the player having only three turns to play a held card, so that they wouldn't have to keep track of both the number of turns AND the score in their head (I actually like this change). IT TURNS OUT, though, that the lack of randomness and the relative simplicity of the rules + the small number of cards in the deck meant that it is way too easy to put the game into an infinite loop! With very little practice, it can be done in just a handful of turns! The game's completely broken! And I released it with my name on it! Man.

Push Card pushing right. Lizzie is hanging out with the poor girl from earlier, who seems happy to be in her presence. Lizzie robs the flirtatious man once more, while he gets punched in the face by the lady he's been creeping on.

Mark card. Lizzie Smithson pickpockets the tech bro.

Push Card pushing left. Lizzie and the poor girl are kissing. Absent mindedly, Lizzie robs the rich man, who scowls at the two of them. Off to the side, the tech bro has attempted to catch the man in the trenchcoat in the act of theft, but has caught him empty handed, much to the man in the trenchcoat's annoyance. The tech bro seems very embarassed.

I'm also a little embarrased by the art, which renders as being way too small on the actual cards they're meant to be shone on. Altogether, this game was a failure--but a useful lesson on the importance of playtesting! (Note: I actually have come to realize that playtesting isn't REALLY required in EVERY situation--but it would've saved me some heartache here! uh lol)

This game does have an itchio page, but I set it to private. If you've read all of the above and you're still curious, feel free to contact me for a link to the download--I'm not putting it up where just anyone can see it, though.

One Armed Robbery: The Original Art

One Armed Robbery Original Title Card. Lizzie Smithson is standing on the sidewalk and holding an empty wallet, looking at it concerdedly.

I'm going to be quick about explaining this one cause it's not important:

So in 2019, I came up with the idea for making a solitaire card game that did not require a table to be played--you could play it on the bus, or in a grocery store line, or similar, and it would be kind of an endless score attack game that could go on however long you wanted it to. Anyway I made it and it ended up being the best piece of game design I've yet accomplished, like still, even today.

Anyway I illustrated all the art for it, to the best of my (at the time) ability, and then I found through playtesting that my instructions were not thorough enough to actually teach someone to play the game, and I rethought my ideas for expansions, and by the time I had finished perfecting the design, the art I had drawn was well beneath the level I could do then. So I did it again.

I redrew every single card in the entire game, by hand, sometimes multiple additional times, until I had gotten it into as good a state as I could manage. It was grueling, but I got it done. The redone art is the drawings you'll see if you go to the One Armed Robbery Webcomic back on the main page--the card game uses the exact same art assets.

I'm not proud of what I'm showing you here, but this is the best I could do in 2019. I'm sharing it because I'm planning to delete my instagram soon, which was previously the only place you could see this piece of Lizzie Smithson history--whether it's actually worth preserving is a question I'd hesitate to give an honest answer to, but here it is regardless.

Lizzie is picking her girlfriend's pocket, who herself is picking Mark Fifty's pocket, who is flexing at Green Forty trying to impress her, but she is not impressed. I should clarify real quick that the exact same things happen on these old versions of the art that happen on the versions on the One Armed Robbery Webcomic drawings, so if you're already familiar with those, all you need to know is that the linework in these is sketchier, and the colors are done with colored pencil instead of marker.

Lizzie is picking her girlfriend's pocket while preparing to smooch her on the lips. Her girlfriend is elated. Brown Twenty is handing a big bag of cash to Lizzie's landlord, who grins evily.

Lizzie is nervously picking Brown Twenty's pocket, while Mark Fifty is nearby, being kind of mean to him. Lizzie is nervous, because her girlfriend is off to the side, holding a bat, but it is not yet clear who she intends to beat the crap out of.

Lizzie is picking Brown Twnety's pocket, who is begging Green Forty for... something, but she is refusing, annoying Lizzie.

Lizzie's girlfriend is yelling at Lizzie while Lizzie picks Yellow Thirty's pocket. Yellow Thirty seems bored. Off to the side, Lizzie's landlord is sweeping the haughty Green Forty off of her feet, amazing her happily.

Lizzie is simultaneously picking both Yellow Thirty's and Mark Fifty's pockets, but Mark Fifty seems suspicious, sending Lizzie into a nervous fit. Lizzie's girlfriend is in the background, gazing at Lizzie angrily.

Lizzie is picking Green Forty's pocket, while Lizzie girlfriend gives her the middle finger. Green Forty, for her part, is flirting with Lizzie's landlord, both of them seem happy.

Lizzie is picking Green Forty's pocket, who is dismissing her. Off to the side, Yellow Thirty and a mysterious thief, who has secretly been in all of these panels so far, is giving a large bag of cash to Brown Twenty, who seems delighted and relieved.

Lizzie is picking Mark Fifty's pocket, who is using a gesture with his gun at the mysterious thief who has secretly been in all of these panels. She seems irritated by this. Lizzie is simultaneously smooching her girlfriend, who smooches her in return.

Lizzie and the mysterious thief who has secretly been in all of these panels are simultaneously picking Mark Fifty's pocket. Mark Fifty is in his own little world and doesn't notice. Lizzie and the mysterious thief wave at each other. Off to the side, Green Forty is happily giving a wad of bills to Lizzie's landlord, who accepts them graciously and greedily.

Lizzie, while crying, offers all of he money to her landlord, who gazes at it cruelly. In the background, Green Forty sadly walks away, while taking all of her belongings to an unknown place. She's crying.

Lizzie is giving money to her landord and is clearly unhappy about it. Her landlord grins evily. Lizzie's girlfriend walks away sadly in the background, holding all of her belongings, hopeless.

The final version of this game has an itchio page HERE. It really is the best thing I've done with the character, even though, despite all that work I spent redoing the art over and over, the art in the final version still doesn't look very good. Maybe I'll redo it *AGAIN* someday. Anyway!

Music Demos for an Album I'm Working On

I don't talk about this too much on here, but I'm actually a professional musician--well, basically. I play piano at my local church, and it's fun if stressful. Anyway, in that spirit, I've composed a whole host of piano pieces relating to the Lizzie Smithson character over the years, and I'd really like to compile them into a short album some day, but I haven't really been able to pull the money together to properly book a studio session, alas. (I know I don't *really* need a studio to record these, but I want to play on an actual good piano and have access to proper recording equipment (and help setting it up) and I really can't pull it off without help. So that's where I am with that) Here's some demos of what I want to include in it, though--maybe someday!

Godahl · One Armed Robbery

Godahl · Rambling Roommates

Godahl · Let's Go The Cats

Godahl · Tutorial

Cannon Comic (2015-2016)

Cannon, an older woman who picks pockets, is thinking, There should be a calculator that operates in base 420

Cannon is a webcomic I ran from 2015 to 2016 or so, and is about a lady pickpocket in a crowded city, pretty similar to Lizzie Smithson, but much rougher around the edges. I was never totally satisfied with this comic, but my work on it helped solidify what I wanted to do with my art, and kind of fed into how I developed the Lizzie Smithson series once I finally got around to it.

The comic kind of sucks, it's a real product of me in a very depressed state--I was having trouble with college but hadn't quite cut my losses and dropped out yet, my mental health was not in the best state, and I'd just gotten fired from the only job I'd ever managed to hold onto. So this was more of a stress comic than anything, and I think that kind of comes through in the writing (entirely in thought bubbles, entirely unrelated to any of the actual action in any given panel). I got better eventually!

Here's the link if you want to read it. I make no promises that anything here is actually worth the trouble, and this comic was actually virtually unknown back in the day, but here it is anyway (NOTE: As of currently, I've only published the comics that I actually posted on my tumblr originally--however, for whatever reason, I'd actually drawn about twice as many panels as appear here! I'll complete the archive with all of them eventually, but for now enjoy the stuff that you actually theoretically could've read 8 years ago.)