[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.

[PCA]
This is a board game mock-up that I initially began sometime last fall and have been working on it on and off since then. Within a short period of time I was watching a lot of the 60’s Scooby-Doo cartoon and saw the movie Contagion (2011) which sparked the idea of a Pandemic styled game set in a Hanna Barbera/Scooby-Doo influenced world where characters had very different sets of skills and all players had an individual victory condition. I liked the idea of different factions trying to handle a common problem, but where they all have different agendas which make cooperation much more challenging, which also solved my main concern with cooperative games where I feel like one player usually end up in charge ordering the other players around. Just for the sake of having a title I’ve called it PCA (Pandemic Control Agency), feeling a bit hesitant directly referencing Pandemic in the title since it’s one of the main inspirations for the concept, but my naming skills are very lacking at the moment

I began the process by collecting a lot of references of character faces that appeared in the earlier Scooby-Doo shows, and then tried to deconstruct the faces by redrawing them, drawing over them, trying to understand the style. And after a while I started to see some design patterns; I couldn’t really construct the faces “part by part” as I were used to, going from a generic face to more and more specific features. Instead I had to establish a bold head shapes from the very start. When I later tried to design my own characters based on the Scooby-Doo style I found that I was using too many lines, packing too much information into the faces. Scooby-Doo characters seldom had more than 4-5 bold lines/shapes that made up the face.

The pictures above are the finished character portraits. A full version of the game would probably have more characters, but for this mock-up I just wanted a few designs to show the variety of the actors. As I might have hinted at earlier it would be set in the 60’s in some fictional area in the middle east where the cold war powers played out their influence. I wanted the characters to be of different hierarchies in the factions to underline the chaos generated by the outbreak. Everything from regular doctors who are flung into positions of authority to businessmen trying to protect their skin in this conflict

One of my design philosophies is that I want the actual playing pieces to be immersive, actual “props” that fit the narrative of the game instead of just icons representing game mechanics. Therefore since the narrative is that some intergovernmental organization, called the PCA, is trying to solve this pandemic outbreak the character sheet are supposed to look like the files that the PCA have on hand of important actors in this area.

Keeping with the Scooby-Doo theme I was looking for a graphic design that could look like “in universe”, something that could have been seen in a cartoon of that time. Admittedly a lot of the graphic design in Scooby-Doo are not very complicated so I had too look outside the cartoons for inspirations to make a more well rounded design. I found a lot of fake documents from spy movies, and some real documents from the same era to be very useful to my design.

As I mentioned earlier each player would have a secret objective to bring in a element of conflict to a otherwise cooperative game. I am not sure how it would work out mechanically but it would be interesting if these objectives were handed out at random, making an American businessman protect russian interest or a Russian general working on behalf of a hospital.