Army Evolution

Thought you might like to have a look at how the card layouts have evolved.

This is a tremendously early prototype.  At this stage the game play is pretty much complete, but as you can see there’s still a lot of work to do on the card design, and also the puzzles were still very much being worked on.

The shields are there, as you can see, but their entire purpose got shifted around between this version and now.  There used to be a puzzle based on the hand image that you can see in the bottom right of the portrait, but that got - well, moved into something else.

The portraits at this point were just placeholders, to be used in the internal prototypes and no further.  I took the images from a D&D website; they were intended for use on character sheets.  I never intended those placeholder images to be seen by anyone but me and a few close friends, so I’ve pixellated this example. Thank you, whoever runs the web site where I got the placeholders.  I wish I could remember your address so I could link to you.

The original characters’ names mostly got changed too.  “Jonas” got replaced by someone else.  Can’t say much more about that, unfortunately…

This version came from about halfway through development.  As you can see, Paul’s version of the bat-girl is now in place, although it’s just on a white background at this point.  The shields have evolved into a form that’s much closer to how they finally ended up, although there are currently only four shields rather than the final five, and although they’ve changed shape a little, they are still rather more geometric than I’d like.  Still, they are more satisfying in this format than they were on the previous version.

The borders of the cards are now coloured.  On this version I’ve also added those little blobs that you can see around the borders, which actually won’t last too long.The colours on the cards are still all flat.

We’re going to get around to textures and shading in later versions, but at the moment I’m concentrating on making sure everything - the game itself and the puzzles too - works before making the cards look really pretty.

And here’s the final edition.  The shield shapes are much better now, and there are textures or shading on all the surfaces.  Some of the colours have changed, for example the dots on the second shield are now orange and blue, which fits the overall colour palette better.

Also, you might notice that I’ve changed the aspect ratio of the cards now, so that they’re narrower.  This is called “trumps” format, and changing it was a fairly late design decision.  Luckily, because the cards were all rendered in software, it wasn’t too hard to make the change.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 16th, 2008 at 10:25 pm and is filed under artwork. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.