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.
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