[QVAK]
So this game was an utter surprise. I was initially just looking for a very quick and simple cartoony projekt, and something that had been in the back of my mind for ages ever since I saw it as a kid was the game Quaddle from the I guess now rather unknown cartoon Sitting Ducks (swedish dub), and I thought it would be kind of cool to try to realise that into a real game. So this project instead morphed into a roman republic inspired game and not even remotely like how I imagined that Quaddle game, so I might return to that idea some day.

The basic idea behind QVAK would be that the players take the roles of corrupt and power hungry senators in this roman analogue, all striving for more power and eventually enough support to declare themselves emperors. This mechanic would be realized through a system where all players begin the game with the same numbers of votes behind them and then trough performing different actions during the game gain more votes from the other players or trough other channels, and when a player have more than 50% of the votes the may declare themselves emperor and win the game. If none of the players manage to gain more than 50% of the votes by the games end they all lose and democracy is maintained.

Once I knew/thought I wanted to make the Quaddle game I began by looking for what art style to go with. Since I’ve mostly done Hanna Barbera influenced stuff I instead wanted to create something more in a Disney vain. Unfortunately I don’t know the name of the artist but my main influence was the 5Y short stories from the back of PK (The Duck Avenger, basically Donald Ducks superhero alter ego). Always loved the style of those shorts, and would’ve loved trying out that water color style, but it didn’t really pan out with the sort of marble statue feel that I went with for the illustrations.

I was also hugely inspired by Heiko Günther absolutely gobsmackingly beautiful redesign of “Glory to Rome”. That is a 100% where to roman angle came in; began drawing roman looking ducks and then I was stuck.

I began the actual design of the game by simulationsly trying to define the direction for the artwork and for the graphic design. Once I had an illustration I felt confident with and some direction for the graphic design I moved over from PS to Illustrator where I began drafting a more finalized design. Once I felt satisfied with the leader card (will probably never create non-character driven game) the other components came with very little struggle. Partly because I had defined the graphic design with the leader card but also since I trough all the different iterations had made a bunch of unused graphic assets that could be reused for the other cards.

Sometimes feel that I went with a little too simple of design, considering how much time I spent trying to come up with other interesting ways to convey the information, in the end it’s probably just a sunken cost fallacy on my part.

This porcess is not very different from how I usually approach these types of illustrations, but here is a quick breakdown of my process for the statues/portraits.

1. Begin with a pretty tight sketch, but not to tight as I want to leave some room for interpretation in the inking sketch. On this projekt I actually sketched out all portraits at the same time.

2. Inked the sketch using a somewhat rough brush

3. Blocked in the painting with two values, simple light and dark separation. I accidentally painted on the wrong layer so the beak is a little rendered on this particular portait.

4. Went over the whole paining and rendered it, then added a gradation map (?) to get that brownish texture to better match the feel of the card.

Here are all the leaders together. I think I achieved some nice variation in characters both purely based on shapes but also the different personalities. Though I did have some sort of Asterix and Obelix feeling throughout doing all the portraits, must be the cartoony roman feel.

The goods cards. Not much to say except I somehow found these super enjoyable to design and illustrate. The format for these would be the width of a mini card in a square, so 4,5x4,5 cm? I was initally thinking that certain goods would only be available at certain places, but in the end decided that it would make it a needlessly complicated system, as nothing else in the game was geographically bound.

The tokens for the different actions. The players would interact in a sort of reversed Caverna worker placement way, instead of placing you worker on an action space, you take the action space and place on your worker/leader card. Not really thank inventive but it allows more connection with the leaders you have. The actions would be the following: Market, Political/Senate, Temple/forum, Trading and Warfare.

A little photoshop mock up of what the componentes would look like in action. This is basically what each player would have in front of them. A action token over a leader to indicate that that action and leader have been spent for that round, your remanining unspeant leader and all the unsold goods you have.

Front and back for the last two card types of the game.

The policy cards have, if enacted, different game changing effects, in this case it gives a player exclusive right to a trade action token. I imagine that the policy cards work in the following manner; If a player take an policy action they may draft two policy cards, keep one and discard the other. These policies may then be played during the policy enactment phase, and among all the policy cards played the one which gain the most votes is enacted. This would create room for some negotiation among players to gain votes from other one another, or what policies to enact or whatever. The twist would be that each round/year/month one policy must be enacted, so if only one player have played a policy card then that policy is enacted.

The military card would be a lot more straightforward; a player take the military action which allows them to draw a military card. On this card their leader is placed in a situation with two different routes of action, giving them different resources or advantages. In this case the player faces a surrendering general which they may either add as one of the leaders or kill to gain gold. I like this mechanic as it adds a bit of role playing to the experience, are you playing as ruthless warlord or more of a diplomat?

First game with a whole game board! Wooo. Then perhaps my next project can be the one where I actually get to design the box and manual (although the “Mafia” game I made a box for, but there the big challenge laid within designing and crafting the actual box out of whatever cardboard I had laying around)

To the left we have a display of all policies enacted, which also work as a countdown to the games end; once the eight policy has been enacted the game is over and if no one player have gained more than half the votes then the populus wins and democracy have been secured.

The middle field is spaces for all the actions tiles. In hindsight they should also have some graphics to indicate which sort of actions should go there, as there is some thin thin thematic flavour over the placement of the action tiles, trade action being placed at important roman ports or trade routes, military actions being placed close to the edge of the empire or where they fought a lot of conflicts.

and finally to the right we have the diagram over how many votes each players has, the VP track of this game if you wish. I like how it is an easy system to gauge how many votes each player have just by the height of the column, and also easy to check how many votes players would have combined if the would cooperate over a policy or something similar. A little side note; it would be interesting if one could develop a system that really encouraged creating pacts between players, so that players could have something along the lines of Caesar's triumvirate and in the end be stabbed in the back.

A closer look at the game board with a photoshop mock-up of the policy field. Not much to say but in hindsight I would’ve liked some more contrast between the background and the card, now the blend a little to much into the rest of the board.

A mock-up of the action tiles, although i did a pretty bad photoshop job with this one, looks a bit to 3d-rendery for my taste. But I hope I conveyed the idea how they would be used on the board.

[QUESTING DRAGONS]
Aight, so let’s ignore the 3 months without a post and the pokémon projekt that fell apart. So the last couple of months I’ve been doodling with this Dragon Quest inspired projeckt, that I know hastily name “Questing Dragon”.

The vague idea behind the game was some warfare game mixed with some plotline/quest mechanics from Arkham Horror. So I imagine you are fighting a war with regular army pieces while at the same time you have a few hero characters moving around the map, solving quests and supporting the war.

I began this project like many others with collecting references and map out what inspiration will go into the projekt, primarily to make the design feel focused. I fell in love all over again with Akira Toriyama's work when I noticed all the similarities to Ken Sugimori’s work when I was trying to mimic that style for the pokemon projekt.

This is actually not my first stint with Akira Toriyama's style, I made a few comics in that style for an art school assignment some year ago, and it is really encouraging to see that I’ve improved a lot. My overall shape construction is much more on point, but the inking is what I’ve improved the most

For the actual design of the characters I had long wanted to merge Jack Kirby's character design into a different style, and this seemed like the perfect projekt. Looking through just a slice of all the stuff he’s done it becomes so overwhelmingly obvious how creative this man was, so many great designs for just throw-away characters. The graphic design of the components themselves was heavily inspired by any and all covers designs associated with Dragon Ball or Dragon Quest.

Basically I dove straight into this projekt without having much of a macro idea how I wanted it all to fit together, but I did to this preliminary sketch just as a checklist what I wanted in the game and how stuff interacted. And when you look at the finish components you can see that there weren’t any radical changes to the overall layout of the cards.

I just semi-traced a Toriyama character to have something to work off of before I dove in and explored the style myself, just added the swedish liberal party's logo (cause it looks like a dong). As you can see the design of the card did not evolve that much, just got more and more refined, although the finished design, which you’ll see later have another color scheme and some extra details.

Initially I wanted to have the “graphics” (the non character illustration part) done in photoshop so that I easier could get a rough texture to match the illustration. But after testing it out in Illustrator I felt like it matched the illustration pretty well, even though the graphics are sharp vectors and the illustration have the fuzzier brush lines of photoshop.

Don’t know if this is to any help to anyone, but I’ll just write down some notes about each step that went into each illustration (same process for the items).

1. first up the pencil sketch (not actual pencil but you know). Obviously this comes in several steps with a tighter and tighter sketch, although I tend to not go too finished with the pencils as I want some leeway when I ink the picture

2. This was a step that I added pretty late in the process. Realised I had to plan out where I wanted to have my light source and where I wanted to have my solid blacks. Also just a quick and dirty way to figure out the color scheme, especially important when you are working with so few colors.

3. Inking step. Toriyama did not have a dramatic amount of line weight variation, so the inking is mostly the same weight all over, with some slight variation. Also noteworthy if we compare to Ken Sugimori; there are very few really sharp edges on the inks, all volumes are very fluid and fluffy and has some thickness to them so there are seldom any sharp edges. This stand in sharp contrast to Sugimori which is almost entirely sharp edges.

4. Final step the digital watercolor. As I presented in the reference pictures in the beginning I was taking the colorscheme straight from the Dragon Quest manuals, really fell in love with the two-tone printing style. At first I was really confused how I were going to achieve that effect and tried several different methods; I tried painting the whole thing first in grayscale and then via clipping masks and layer effects apply the colors, and I tried to switch the image to CMYK mode and play with those channels. In the end I found the most straightforward way was to just pick the colors and make a color pallet that I limited myself to when coloring the artwork.

Still have a really hard time getting the water colors not to look over-rendered, certainly something I will have to practice more with. In the case with Toriyama, aswell sa Sugimori, the use of the white of the paper is super important. If you color everything it will not look like something out of the Dragon Quest manuals. I do think I found a good way to bring in a lot of white in my illustrations.

I’ve long have issues as to how present the cards in the best manner, I feel like just posting the raw image file does not do the projekt justice. As I don’t have an access to a color printer I instead cut and glued together some mock-up cards that I then could photoshop the cards onto, to get something more presentable. And I think the turned out allright, get a better feel what they would look like printed. The cards are all ridden with spelling mistakes, ignore those.

I basically came up with the factions as I went, which in hindsight was not the optimal way, spending a few hours doing some simple concept art and making a distinct design language to each could have saved some time later. I knew I wanted to have some overtly one-dimensional bad guy faction that harkened back to the Dragonlord, but also mix in some elven wilderness vs civilization sort of stuff, that became the Antler. For the Caprinae I wanted to reuse the sheep design from the manga comic I had made, and explore that notion further of sheep warriors. Unfortunately I never fully developed what their culture or civilization would be like, which left them feeling a bit bland. The Heir of Frei are just red headed viking people, with perhaps some Kirby New Gods stuff thrown in.

So the first card Cloud is basically just Nightcrawler but like not blue and with white smoke instead.

Princess Annika’s design was actually inspired by some of those pop-up ads for horrible browser games that came up while I was looking for references. I liked the hairstyle and how it sort of felt like some “Leia on steroids” kind of thing, which I sort of the idea I had for this character, very much Leia.

The last card “Son of Hemsdal” was the first character illustration I made and I should probably remake it with all the new coloring techniques I have. Though it is a struggle trying to have the character dark and stereotypical evil looking while also bring in all the white spaces that are needed to emulate the Dragon Quest manual style.

Here are the item cards which you can equip you champions with as the go around questing. There’s no frame of reference but these are like mini card size like 7x4.5mm (?), while the character cards were regular poker sized cards.

Funny thing with these illustrations were that the axe to quite some time to make, I went through several iterations and played around with perspective and all kinds of things. A few days later I sat down and basically drew and colored the rest of the items in the same time it took to make that one Axe. And I feel like they turned out much closer to the DQ manual feel, the Axe became a bit to over-rendered.

Ignore the card names and abilities, they were just spur of the moment so that all cards wouldn’t have placeholder text. They are also ridden with spelling mistakes

not much to say, though I really like the mace. It was really hard to make a maul that does not feel or like Mjolnir from the Thor comics, especially hard when your main design inspiration is Jack Kirby.

A few different card types, the two different spell cards, black borders are the “chaos” spells which are more powerful spells that must be discarded after use, and the white borders are “order” spells which can be used multiple times. I was looking for some suitable symbols to further indicate the different spell types, but I didn’t want to go with the classic chaos cross so I searched the internet after some cool looking actual historical chaos symbols. In the end I just went with a triangle, sharp and radical, for chaos, and a square, stable but boring, for order. Side note I was surprised to find out that the chaos symbol (chaos cross) was invented by Michael Moorcock in his Eternal Champions books, always assumed that symbol had some historical background.

The two cards to the right are the quest cards, I made them in this case the same size as the item cards, but if made properly the would regular sized poker cards. Although this is the only card back I’ve show all of the card backs have a similar design with some illustration and some fluff text. I actually really liked the idea of having some fluff text on the back side of the card, like it further establishes the context of what you are doing in universe.

[SANTA'S JOURNEY]
I guess a generic title is better than no title, Santa’s Journey it is. This post was supposed to be published earlier but I temporarily lost the the files so I were not able to do a wrap up post until now. Though one could rightfully ask why I’m posting a Christmas themed entry at the beginning of March.

Anyhow this project basically came around after I had wrapped up “Tales from the Poorly Administered Crusades” and was in a overwhelming christmas spirit, and wanted to design something fitting.

There isn’t much to mechanics for this one, though I had some vague Arkham Horror-esque mechanics in mind where the elfs use their different abilities to make gifts and help Santa solve the various issues that come up on his journeys. I was also thinking that a game so heavily focused on one holiday season would not be played very often, so the mechanics needed not be as complex as other games since you would not play it often enough to grow tired of it, like other games you might play several times a year.

So these are the elf cards, players would probably have three of these that they use when they cooperatively try to solves Santa’s issues. I knew from the start that I didn’t want to work in a completely new style so went with a HB Flintstones/Jetsons inspired style, I also knew that I wanted something lighthearted and cartoony.

I don’t have much in the way of process pictures of these, though the painting for the characters portraits follow a very similar approach as to that I used on “Sleep-deprived ducks conquering Europe”, a style that I’ve started to to myself refer to as the “Golden Book style” (although Golden Book artist used a wide variety of styles, I’m merely refer to those books by Norman McGary and Hawley Pratt that I was using as reference). The christmas wreath and the foliage on the back of the card was painted following the method used by Eyvind Earle when painting foliage for Sleeping Beauty.

I found myself doing the entire graphic design in Illustrator which In this case speed things up a lot. I usually have done sketches in Photoshop and then transferred them to illustrator to clean them up. But since I started with vectors right away this time the design got to a finished state much faster. Not sure if I will use this method as a standard, but it sure worked for this design and will probably work for similar projects using this flat kind of graphics.

I’m actually really satisfied with the way these cards came out, the graphics and the artwork really melded. And in a perfect, and unrealistic world, the red and yellow would be printed with some manner of glitter color or foil effect to really make them look christmasy. For now I just used a foil texture over the graphic elements to try to simulate that.

So these are the gift cards. I imagine there would be several of these cards, demanding different skills from the elfs to make them. This would have been part of some basic engine in the game to advance, Santa can’t move on to the next house unless he have the necessary gifts.

The gifts were painted with similar process as with the elf cards, the golden book style for the gifts themselves and also for the large present on the backside of the cards.

Although I’m not entirely satisfied with the back of these cards. The present itself I’m fine with, but I would have wanted some more elaborate design for the actual text.

The graphics are similar to those of the elf cards, just different colors and some new elements. I referenced a lot of gift wrapping and similar when I tried to get inspiration for the details of the graphics.

The event cards are those I felt the least finished with. The mechanical though was these are extra complication that occur during Santa's Journey that the Elfs either have to solve or suffer some permanent effect. It also displays my best attempt at a Dr Seuss style rhyme.

I had a hard time picking a subject matter for the backside of the card, but I eventually settled for a fireplace. I imagines that it would be in peoples homes were the issues would come up for Santa. There is also the aspect of reading stories by the fireplace, since I feel that the event cards would be where the story of the game would develop.

Though it was hard to get these card to fit graphically with the rest of the game. The Elf and Gift cards complemented each other very well, but these ones, even the front side, didn’t really fit with the overall color scheme. I made two different backsides depending on if I wanted the light frame or a dark frame. The chimney on the light one just feels off, the dark card works much better but is such a hard contrast to the other two card types.

The front of the card is not completed. At the time I were working on the Event cards I did not have access to Illustrator, so I where not able to make up any new graphics. Though I imagine these would probably be the most complex ones as I imagine would have to fit a lot of text, both descriptive text, and what happens if you fail or succeed the task

I might continue this projekt next christmas if I get in the mood. It was really fun but didn’t feel like continuing the project halfway into january, this need to capture the holiday spirit. But there is a good jumping on point if I continue this next christmas as a had some vague sketches for the map to work off of, and also I would revisit the event cards and see if I can solve some of their issues.

[TALES FROM THE POORLY ADMINISTERED CRUSADES]
As it seems like I am moving on with different projects I might as well post these before I get too deep into the new project.

This is a mock up for a medieval themed card game, where you hire characters with different skills to help you expand your kingdom either through military, political or economics means. I had the idéa for that very basic mechanic first and decided to give it a medieval theme, as that is a style I rarely explore and thought it would be a great learning experience.

Now in hindsight I’ve realised I have a habit of developing game mechanics that will allow me to write and design many characters for the game. I am not sure if this is bad since it is something that I find attractive in games, as I feel it adds immersion, making the world feel more populated and lived in.

In the past I’ve had the problem of approaching my projects with a holistic view, designing at a macro scale, planning out and sketching the rough blueprints for all the game elements at the same time. This is in itself probably the best approach since it establish a coherent language throughout the game. My problem have been that once I feel satisfied with my rough design and move forward with designing the individual pieces I have lost some of the excitement about the project. Probably because there are now less opportunities to explore and solve design issues, it’s just a matter of executing the rough designs. So this time around I decided to just dive straight in and develop the design language as I go. This card was my first go, which was done rather quick and gave me good idea what changes I wanted to make.

Some quick notes on the painting process, since it is a step-by-step and also pretty much the process I used for the rest of the portraits. First a tight sketch, pretty close to just lineart but with some guidelines to help me better understand the form for the painting stage. Then I blocked in a simple two value system (in the later portraits I did add a third and fourth value). In the third step was rendering, playing with edges and values to describe the forms, and put a gradient map (?) over it. Blocked in the colors, then put the render above the colors on multiply and finished by adding some more details to the painting.

My drafts for the final design for the character cards. I was referencing a lot of 12th century graphics, and was actually surprised by how many elements there actually where to play with from that era. Once I got to a design I was satisfied with I cleaned it up in Illustrator and made it into proper vector graphics.

Not much to say about these really. I was aiming for a somewhat cartoony style, but had no particular artist in mind so this is pretty close to what my “normal” style would be. I did really like the style of the first one, the monk, and tried to maintain that style for the other portraits but once I started to understand some, actually very basic, rendering concepts I fell down the hole of making fully fleshed out portraits instead, with minimal linework, to further understand these concepts. It was actually the very basic concept that I first heard from a video with Steve Huston but never really comprehended until now; different value equals different plane, same value equals same plane. In practice that means that similar values will appear flatter/softer and more contrasting values will appear harder/sharper.

Here are the finished fronts to the character cards. I gathered up the graphics from illustrator, the portraits from photoshop and collecting it all in one indesign file for simplest editing. There is a lot of placeholder text at the moment, I just switched around some of the icons to make each characters abilities to appear more distinct. Do comment and tell me what you think, especially the card design, I am not sure if I went overboard trying to emulate the 14ht century graphics and lost some of the readability.

[Misc]
Just throwing this out if it might interest anyone, although the actual text on the artwork is in swedish.

I had the opportunity to run a “Werewolf-esque activity” for a group of teens a few weeks ago, and decided to try out Two Rooms and a Boom after I’d seen Shut Up & Sit Downs video of it.

Though I did find the theming to be a problem; the gameplay is a bit too playful and lighthearted for a theme that is basically about a terrorist/suicide bomber taking out a president. I felt that the theme could make some people feel very uncomfortable. And since I had to translate the game to Swedish anyway I just went a bit further and rethemed it to a pulpy Maffia theme.

The artwork was not a priority in this case, I just threw something together that was readable and looked okay- I was not trying out any interesting designs. Although I did only have access to a B&W printer so I had to design around that limitation, which was somewhat fun.

To make the cards I basically printed the back of the cards on bristol boards and the face of the card on regular copying paper and then glued the two pieces together. I was pretty naive and thought it was gonna be a much quicker process than it was, the cutting process itself was almost a day’s work (although I had no fancy tools, just a box knife). To protect the cards, and just make them altogether easier to handle, I also sleeved them.

After I honestly spent too much time designing and making actually pretty decent quality cards I decided that I might as well turn it into a proper “game” with a box and a translated rulebook.

Since I have previously worked at a print shop I knew how to design the blueprint for the box itself, but I struggled a lot to transfer the digital box blueprint into a physical object without a cutting machine of some sort. I ended up printing out the plans on several sheets of paper and then tracing the blueprint onto a sheet of corrugated cardboard and then crease and cut the box from those plans. I wrapped the finished box with label paper which I had printed some graphics onto. The box was finished off by some searators that I made using a similar method as the cards, and with a really simple rule booklet.

[SLEEP DEPRIVED DUCKS CONQUERING EUROPE]
Just throwing this out there since it seems like it might be awhile before I can get back to this project. So the main idea behind this project was some mix between an area control/wargame and a worker placement, where one of the main mechanics is that the “workers” (in this case Generals) have individuals abilities and gather strain/exhaust over time.

After I had written down some vague rules to work off I gathered references. I wanted the game to be set in a Hanna Barbera infused Napoleonic era, inhabited by various forms of birds, obviously. Above are some of the initial thumbs i did for the over all color scheme and design of the cards. I hope that establishing this early will help the project get a more cohesive look.

Here are some studies I did before I began making the artwork for the game. As I stated earlier I wanted a cartoony Hanna Barbera infused style, primarily since I’ve fallen in love with the style trough previous projects. I went on to study some backgrounds from 60’s Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound and Snagglepuss cartoons. A great source for references was Yowps blog where he writes a lot about old HB cartoons and also share a ton of screencaps. I Actually learned a lot trough these studies, even techniques that can be applied to more realistic paintings.

A great source for information on the technique was John K’s interview with Art Lozzi, where he goes through all the tools they used back in the day.

This is where I am at with the playerboard. In a earlier drafts the lines where much straighter and thinner which made the board come out more realistic. The thicker wobblier lines like in this iteration are essential to achieve the HB feel. I also had a really hard time with the leather texture and went through several different variation, and found that the exaggerated size of the texture helped it look not too realistic and more cartoony.

Currently my biggest concern are the “gold” emblems on the side. There’s such a dissonance between the thick lines of the overall design and the thinner lines of the emblem. I am struggling to find a way to achieve a consequent style that still can afford me some details when need.

For the General cards I wanted a style that was more fleshed out than just colored lineart, which would’ve been in line with the HB influence, but still not as complex as a full on rendered paintings. Fortunately I found the Hanna Barbera books that Golden Books made. They were the perfect mix between line art and painting. Basically they were using slight gradations and colored lineart to help sell the 3-d shape.

Above are a few of the studies I did when I was trying to figure out the style. I went through more details on in an instagram post, but basically the process I found the most practical was a tight sketch, then block in the base colors, render the shapes just slightly with a chalky brush and then add lineart where needed to hel define the shape.

Initial draft of what I think the General cards could look like. As I said earlier I struggle with balancing the bolder lines with finer detail, I think this one will stand out as out of place with the player board.

I wanted simple one color backgrounds for the portraits so they would be easy to differentiate, and also resemble portraits from the Napoleonic era which were often just gradations with some vague ocean/sunset background. Although I feel the background are too simplistic, might return to add some vague background details.

The cardbacks are not finished, and suffer from the same detail vs. boldness problem.

Please do share your thoughts, or if you have any questions.

[Misc]
Over this summer I have been focusing on improving my landscape painting skills, so I haven’t really had any side projects that I’ve been working on. But I did make these one-off cards from some stupid ideas I had.

Initially I just had the idea for an item or a card called “Chicken Club of Diminishing Returns” and made a simple sketch for it which then turned into a final render. Most of the graphical design elements were made up on the spot but did work out quite well. The Alphabet Soup just came from the absurd idea of using Alphabet soup to try to decipher ancient texts