Team Card art

This is my contribution to the team card art.

I was assigned the organic race. I used earthy greens and browns and highlighted them with slightly less commonly occuring natural colours like oranges and purples which are usually found on butterflies and other insects.

The tonal values were done in the same way as previously blogged in the box art post.

Here is the team artwork with only tonal values.

This is my first attempt at doing the shading and light effects before being reminded to keep it in the comic book style.

Here's the colour layer alone.

Here's the final image with both the colour layer and tonal values layer.

Box Art

This is the box art with step by steps as to how I produced it.

The first stage for me was colouring the characters, board and ships.

The next stage was to create a new layer and give the entire image a feeling of comic book depth, so i set this layers blending mode to overlay and produced all of the lighting and shadow effects for everything by using a hard brush and 70% grey and pure white for lights.

The next thing i did was add another layer with a radial gradient from white to black from the centre. this would draw peoples attention to the centre and make the image more focused on the black hole in the middle by creating the most contrast. I made this layer semi transparent and erased it where the ships were so that they were unnaffected by the effect giving them a more pronounced feel compared to the slightly darkened and pushed back characters and board.

The final stage was to add a background to all of this, I used Jake's file for this. It doesn't have the comic book style we were originally going for but it is a very proffessional looking image that certainly looks polished enough to be used for such a large print.

This final image is the final box art with the title that Bradley produced in the 70s sci-fi comic style that we wanted.

Ideas and roughs

These are my rough sketches for ships, iconography for the upgrade cards.

From top to bottom, going left to right.

1 - A design for a 3D model of a cruiser that could have been used in the game.

2 - Scout design, to be translated into a top down view

3 - Birds eye view for token of the robot race scout

4 - Lightning and shield iconography for upgrade/anomaly cards

5 - Planet for the board/anomaly

6 - Organic race scout idea

7 - Warp gate/shield

8 - Organic race Cruiser/Mother ship

9 - Weapon icon for upgrade cards

More icon ideas for the cards and box/card templates. There're also a couple of scout ship ideas in there.

These are all pencil/black pen drawings scanned in.

Board game research

http://www.bit-tech.net/gaming/2011/10/09/horus-heresy-board-game-review/1?tcs=nl

 

I thought that this game review would help us come up with a decent way of making the tokens for our board game, we could also look at the way the units move in this game to find out how an already established game works.

 

This is an image of my progress through making a token for a ship in the board game.

I started off by drawing a vertical line and drawing half of the ship and copied it over to the other side by flipping it to complete the ships shape.
I then started to colour within the basic line drawing in a seperate layer beneath the line drawing.

Later I removed the line drawing layer by hiding it and started to tighten up the colour work.

It's still not complete but this is going to be my general work flow for the other pieces on the board.
I will then copy a flattened version of the icon into illustrator and make a vector version with only a few colours to make it look comic book like in style.

Research into art style

 

This is all art by Jack Kirby, a comic book illustrator. A lot of this work is from the  70s and has a very retro look about it. The art style is bold, striking and has very high contrast. This is all because of the technology available to the comic artists at the time. The ability to create imagery with alot of tonal value was just not possible at the time, escpecially with the kind of deadlines these artists faced.

Games Art and Design

In our first project we are asked to design a board game, in any way we want and with what ever materials we find suitable.
We are allowed to have help from the tutors via a "drop in" session where at any time during an allocated slot we may present our ideas and have them critiqued by our tutors.

Our first draft for the game was a space-race to escape the gravitational pull of a black hole by doing laps around rings and only moving out one ring at a time after a lap was completed.
We changed this idea to something more fun because of our tutors feedback which explained how we could have improved our idea and which bits were not worth continuing with.

The following is the result of our re considered approach to the brief which is still in testing and is subject to change.

These are the notes from our group meeting on 5th Oct. written by Jake Masham.

Attended - Jake, Bradley, Fed, Jonathan, Andy, Ross, Aaron, Andrew.

Directional Rules and Notes.

2 or 4 Players.

Ages 8+

Black hole.

4 races.

every races ships have the same stats.

3 ship types, Cruiser/Mothership x1, Frigate x3, Fighter x5

Ship stats

Cruiser/Mothership 4att, 3def, 1range.

Frigate 2att, 4def,  2range.

Fighter 1att, 2def, 4range.

(these stats will need to be heavily play tested and adjusted accordingly).

Range = amount of movement the ship can make in 1 turn.

Attack = damage against opponent effected by defence.

Defence = changes the effect of the attack damage.

(will need to work on making the att/def stats understandable in a short instruction, wording crucial).

Combat System

Attackers att - the Defenders def.

eg. Team A Cruiser (4att) Attacks -> Team B Fighter (2def) 

Team A would win the battle and the planet or space station and also knock the defender back 1 ring.

You can attack a player anywhere in the map as this will help you to knock the players into the BLACK HOLE!

Black hole effects

Negative effect of range

3 rings away -1 range

2 rings away -2 range

1 ring away -3 range

This wouldn't effect cruisers.

Planet effects

A ship must land on the planet to hold it, making the ship unusable.

When you have a planet in your control you gain and extra card slot making your hand stronger whilst your fleet is smaller.

5 Planets, 1 in each sector and then one closer to the black hole. (Open for testing).

Aim of the game

To capture all of the planets or to destroy your opponents ships, this is only possable by knocking them into the black hole. The piece is then removed from the board and cannot be replaced into play.

At the start every player picks 3 random cards, these cards become your starting hand this will improve your fleet in certain ways, such as range, att, def or give you the ability to avoid hazards or move to a planet. Every turn the player picks one new cards and must choose to keep or discard it, if the player takes a planet they can hold one extra card, losing the planet will mean they have to discard one card from there current deck. You may only move one ship a turn, the amount of movement will be dictated by the ship stats.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

From this we went on to make a draft of the game and test the concept, trying to work out major bugs and learn if the game actually worked, notes of this will be posted later.

I have some sketches and game concepts from earlier in the week that will be posted at a later date, currently just throwing this up so the group have a copy of the notes and the absent members can see how the project is developing.

- Jake Masham