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.
