Kickstarter Project part two : Artwork
I am an artist, so the whole creative process comes easy to me. This would make someone think that designing a game would be easy… well not so much. Sure I have the skills and the tools (Though my computer needs a serious upgrade). What is really causing the problem with getting Role Vs Roll completed is time. Doing everything yourself does take time, and that is something that I do not have a lot of. I started with a few designs for the back of the cards .. I wanted to find something that was simple and too the point. I was able to find some public domain images and modify them with a unique look and feel to create the back of the cards. When designing something it’s always a good idea to design many versions and get feedback from other people on what they like best. I found that the Twitter community was very good at feedback. The semi-anonymous nature of Twitter makes everyone very honest without inviting too many trolls. I took 12 different designs for the face of the cards and put it all into one jpeg.. Posted it on twitter and braced myself for the impact of comments. I have learned that when you ask for feedback you get it. So If you are designing your own cards be ready for this. The feedback resulted in the current design for the template. One of the key things for asking for feedback on a design is to NOT USE REAL TEXT. The problem with using the real text is that the grammar police will not be able to see past the typos to really look at the art. Graphic designers have been aware of this for a very long time. So I took a page from their book and used lorem ipsum and old Latin literature from 45 BC. By the way you can find the full text to used just by doing a search for lorem ipsum The next issue is that I am very tempted to paint each and every card like I am doing with the up and coming Kickstarter project Invoke. But I have learned that is going to take a whole lot of time. So in this case because Role vs Roll is supposed to be a simple project I’m going to use photographs. I searched the web for public domain images looking for anything that might fit the card and at the same time not have any requirements of attribution to the original artist (that does take up time and space on the cards… better to avoid it all together) Each image is then heavily edited to give its own feel to the cards. Some of the art I am still not happy with the results. I think that I am going to offer for an amount to have the kickstarter rewards to be that if someone backs the project for an amount over $200 I will have them send me a photo (set to work with the theme of the card) and their face will become the art for that card.. Might be fun. I am also thinking that it would be fun to ask the backers for feedback on the card art and work with the backers to make a better deck of cards.
