Unit 12 Evaluation

My project was a collaborative project with Finley O’Brien were we made a physical nightmarish card game. So with inspiration from previously made card games such Yu-Gi-Oh! ,Hearthstone etc we wanted to put our nightmarish take on it, also our own rules to make it not so easy that its boring, but not too complicated that you give up. So what I mean by that is it is easy to pick up the rules and start playing, however strategy comes into play on which cards to place and how to your beat opponents.

Our main focus was the designs and making them look as good as we imagined and with the use of collaboration that was possible by having 2 minds working on it. My role was mainly illustration based so most of the drawings were done by me then they were digitally enhanced by Fin and we decided how they should look, same with templates and text. However when it came to printing we would of liked to of used the print lab to get high quality authentic feeling cards but it was to expensive so we had to go traditional and cheaper with 2 parts paper 1 part card so it still kinda feels like a real card from a card game.

We aimed for 40 cards all with unique designs but due to it being time consuming and difficult to come up with 40 individual designs we settled on duplicating 20, which then worked out to a fair advantage anyway as both players would have the same cards. In addition we ended up with 36 with 2 cards being different as the production didn’t go so well and we lost or didn’t have enough prints in the end. But it still worked out to being a great product and we had to do some problem solving to make it happen, which isn’t that bad considered this is the 1st physical game I made. That of course meaning that the production and time management would be something to reflect and improve for future products.

Finally we did some primary research to get an outsiders look on the game and give feedback. So the feedback for improvement was some of the designs and the print quality, for example if it look to dark to tell what it was, also we did some game testing to try out rules and make sure they made sense but overall people liked the designs. I believe the project went well being the 1st physical game I made and self directed brief and a collaboration showing great design teamwork with myself and Finley.

Target Audience for the card game

We made sure when making the card game that we focused on design and play-ability but also the target audience and which demographic would be interested in this card game and also who it would be suitable for. So when it comes to age there is no limit to how old you have to be so everyone feels welcome to play but how young is a different story, not so much they aren’t allowed more just being suitable for reading and understanding text or how the game works etc. Also the young age with it being a nightmarish card game that youngsters don’t get frighten, as the main idea is to be creepy and scary. So some of the illustrations might not be suitable and if they understand the text or not.

Problem solving

We came across some problems in our project and had to do some problem solving to get to our final product, meaning that not everything in our project is up to the standard we imagine and originally thought out. For example the card we wanted to print our designs on to to make a authentic card look and feel would cost too much money to print, so we had to go with traditional and easier design with printing on paper and making a 3 layered card with 2 bits paper 1 bit card. Giving it a similar feel and cheaper so we could still make the card and solved the price problem.

Another problem we came across is that some of my illustrations when drawn on paper and without digital touch up it didn’t look so scary and creepy like we intended, therefore we then collaborated to come up with a creepy, nightmarish look in Photoshop. So Fin would digitally do them up to look better and we both had ideas of what they should look like.

Then finally with problem solving come the testing of everything like correct sizes of the the cards the templates printing with readable text etc, also actually testing how the game plays with the rules being tested and if everything didn’t work we worked to resolve any situation.

Thumbnails, initial ideas, experimentaion and final product for Vulnero

This is the initial concept designs for mine and Fin’s game “Vulnero” and for the designs we experimented just trying out ideas, that’s why some of the ideas didn’t make it to the final product. Also with experimentation we tried to implement our unique art style for this project so we have a variety of drawings, although we had our main focuses, mine being illustration, we both did some drawings; meaning some drawings look different as the have unique art styles.

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This is our final products were you can see with the use of collaboration we achieved these. As Finley had more skill with Photoshop we decide he would have the digital design role, however I tried some experiments of card designs as seen below.