[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

[BORA BORA]
Some weeks ago I tried to redesign the graphics for Stefan Felds game Bora Bora. The original artwork never sat right with me, it just felt like very bland depictions of generic polynesian scenes and both the layout of the playerboard and map where frankly a mess. It also did not take advantage of the interesting art style already present in polynesian culture, especially in their tattoo designs which I based most my designs on.

It was a rather time consuming style to work with since all the graphics had to fit neatly into each other to achieve that polynesian tattoo style. It required a lot of going back and forth between photoshop, where i did the rough designs and tighter sketches and illustrator where I did blueprints that my sketches had to adhere too and also finally the finished graphics were done in illustrator.

In a perfect world I would have the player board printed directly on to a sheet of wood, of even etched into the wood. That process would probablly end up being to expensive so I would probably settling for some rougher brown cardboard that might simulate the wood texture.

Some sketches of other man and woman tiles of the game. I felt like the very mechanic was somewhat sexist, and the interaction between the mechanics did not make sense why they would have to be men/women. Therefore tried to rework the graphic to rather display different aspects of polynesian life, in this the sword/knife would represent combat and the sun riches.

[Brother’s Creek]
After watching a lot of Rusty Lake playthroughs, especially those of Jesse Cox and Dodger, I was inspired to create a mock-up for a eire card-based game in that vein. My vague concept for the game would be that players take on the role of a group of siblings returning to an old family mansion and by drawing and activating cards uncovering unsettling family secrets.

The game mechanics are pretty vague at the moment, and the card text just link to playing more cards. I don’t have a clear victory condition in mind, the game would probably be more of an experience where you collectively uncover and create the story of the game. But there would have to be some strong mechanics to differentiate it from a straight-up roleplaying game.

This was an interesting design process since the graphic card elements and illustrations emerged at the same time. Usually I finish one element at a time, and part by part reaching the finals piece, this time around I went back and forth between the graphics and the illustrations. While it was interesting to keep adjusting the design and optimizing it, I never felt like a component was done and I kept coming back to stuff to that I should just have let be.

These are all the cards I’ve finished at this time. I was aiming for an late 1800’s early 1900’s feel, partly because that’s the time period I had in mind for the narrative, but also because a lot of graphics from that era feel at their core a little eire, maybe subconsciously caused by Lovecraftian stories in that era. But I didn’t want to go overtly dark or creepy with the graphics, which is easily done when working with that time period. Too me it just gives off a Tim Burton/Goth-kid vibe that I am not looking for.

In hindsight I wish to rework the graphics. After doing some print tests I noticed they are not properly sized, they also felt a bit too simplistic when I return too look at references from that era. So when I come back to this project I would like to redo the graphics, illustrating some sort of environment cards and character cards. I sort of lost steam on this project when I was attempting to paint environments, my technical skill was just not on the level I had in mind. That’s a skill I must improve before returning to this project.