Kickstarter Training Wheels Pt 2 - The Art
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), but what I don’t have is TIME.
Doing everything myself takes time, and that is something that I do not have a lot of.
Asking for help only gets me so far, because my Wife has less time than I do. I started with a few designs for the back of the cards. I wanted something simple and on point. I found some public domain images and modified them for a unique look and feel. When designing something it’s always a good idea to design multiple versions and seek feedback from other people. I discovered that the Twitter community is a good at way to run informal market surveys. The semi-anonymous nature of Twitter makes everyone honest and the character limitation reduces the occurrence of trolls. I took 12 different designs for the face of the cards and put it all into one jpeg. I posted it on Twitter and braced myself for the impact of comments. Don’t ask for feedback unless you are ready, willing and able to accept it – without ego if possible.
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. You are seeking a response to the art, not the content. Using the real text will result in readers not being able to see past the typos to concentrate on 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 text from 45 BC. This is what you see all the time in word processing program templates. You can find the full text to use by doing a search for lorem ipsum My next hurdle was setting my own expectations. As an artist, I am very tempted to paint each and every card like I am doing with my next planned Kickstarter project Invoke. But that is going to take a whole lot of time. Role vs. Roll is supposed to be a simple project. My Kickstarter training wheels if you like. So I’m using public domain photographs and images. Anything that might fit the card and at the same time not have any requirements regarding attribution or non-derivatives to the original artist was sought. I’m all for supporting other artists – but with limited space on the cards and the limited scope of the project – best to avoid it altogether for this project.
Each image was then heavily edited to give its own feel to the cards. Some of the art I really like. Some I am still not happy with. But managing my expectations means remembering that it doesn’t have to be perfect to launch – it just has to be outside of my head.
One way I plan to improve the art is to offer a reward – for backers of a certain amount; if they send me their photo I will edit it and turn THEM into a card. That might be fun. I am also thinking that it would be good to ask the backers for feedback on the card art and work with the backers to make a better deck of cards if the stretch goals can support the needed time to do it.
