Capstone Project - Client & Employee card layouts
Mood Boards -
When thinking about the cards in my game, I wanted to look at how other games handled character cards in terms of their layouts. I gathered together some references of cards that I found particularly interesting and cards that I thought might fit with the simple nature of my game.
During my research, I also saw some games that used custom tokens for their characters, I really like this idea and I think it makes the game stand out against other games that use just the simple deck of cards format, however in making custom tokens you add on an additional cost to production and may also increase your carbon footprint. For this reason, I think I will stick to the standard deck of cards format, especially as if I want to get an actual prototype developed, I want to keep production costs as low as possible.
Thumbnails -
Using my mood board as reference, I created a set of 6 layouts that I could potentially use for the client card. I had to keep in mind the main aspects this card needed, that being the name and the priorities icons.
Looking at the layouts, number 2 stood out the most to me, i think as I am prioritizing artwork on these cards it offers the most space to show off the characters whilst still making the name and icons very visible to the players. For this reason I also liked number 5. Out of personal preference I prefer having the art at the top and the card details at the bottom, I personally think It just looks a bit neater but I did want to gather some peer feedback as after all how the card looks to the player is more important than how the card looks to me.
Feedback -
Of my feedback, I got some very useful suggestions to take design number 2 and move around the position of the icons and the title to see how that would look. You can see underneath my thumbnails [bottom right] is me implementing this feedback to see how it looks. I thought the title at the top was a little harder to see just and might get lost when I draw in the character, I intend to create a stone like border around the vital aspects of the card too so I think that might also take up a lot of space on the upper area of the card in this formation.
Another piece of feedback that I got was that number 6 was very easy to read, This layout would also give me more space to write things which may be more useful for the employee card as opposed to the client card. I kept this in mind whilst moving onto the next step of the process.
Thumbnails continued -
I decided to go ahead with design number 2, sketching up some thumbnails of the artwork for the cards. I wanted the pose to be eye catching whilst also showing off his personality. In some of these sketches [particularly 4 and 7] i had him portraying more of a holidaymaker feel, Reclining with a magazine or holding a cocktail. Whilst these are very whimsical, i also liked designs 1 and 3 for their portrayal of his eccentric and sassy personality. I gave Grug a little dinosaur to mimic a small chihuahua that would stay in a handbag, i thought this was both quite funny and quite cute.
Thinking about backgrounds and foreground details, I made a set of 3 mockup cards with different styles. Of these I really like the sky and scenery of background 1 [i think it contrasts nicely with the character and makes him feel more like a tourist], I wanted to combine this with the stone foreground decals of design 2 and 3. I think the cave background was nice but clashed too much with the character and made the card feel a bit busy. Looking back on this, I think its nice that the client cards look so different to the employee cards which makes them hard to mix up.
Feedback 2 -
For my artwork thumbnails, I asked my peers which designs they liked best, with 3,4, and 7 being the most popular. I also really liked number 3 so decided to draw a second round of iterations with designs 3 and 4 just to see how they would look on a more finalized concept.
Employees -
Moving over to the Employee card, I used the client card layouts and altered them to fit the needs of the employee card, that being the name, purpose, and hiring cost. I want the cards to look like they belong together, so reusing some concepts helps me keep everything looking the same. Referring back to the feedback I got earlier on, I think design number 6 works best for this application. It gives plenty of space to write the purpose of the Employee whilst also offering space for icons to explain the mechanics further, making the game overall more accessible. The horizontal orientation also clearly separates it from the client card to negate confusion when setting up the board.
Using this as my final choice, I created some thumbnails using the character "Gremmie the Thumper", I opted for poses that showed off one of two things, her strength or her hunting abilities. Of these designs I really like design number 1 and number 8, I think these two feel the most dynamic, energetic and reflective of her spunky and energetic personality.
I also used the stone layout I created for the Grug card to help create the info area for Gremmie's card. I like the idea of icons being used to represent tokens, and as Gremmie is a hunter who collects fauna tokens, I used an ammonite to represent this. I chose the ammonite as it is immediately recognisable as being an animal whilst also being more visually interesting to look at than a bone [I also just think ammonites are really cool]. At the bottom of this section is also a little bit of flavour text about the character, This doesn't add anything to the gameplay, but gives some context to the characters and makes them more appealing to the players. These bios should be short but amusing, in this case it is kind of ludicrous that Gremmie can take down a huge tyrannosaurus rex with nothing but her bare hands.
Feedback 3-
One of my peers also really liked number 1, I agree that this design really shows off her personality the best. I also could just really visualise what the card would look like with this design, so this was the one i chose.
Implementing Feedback -
Using my silhouettes as a base, I drew over them with the final design, referring to the reference I made of Gremmie to make sure her outfit and features were correct. I had to interpret what my design would look like from the front view as I hadn't drawn a front view in the reference I made.
I think in the future It might be useful to make a turnaround of the characters in case I need to draw them in other places to make sure they stay as accurate as possible. This might add on a bit of extra time to my schedule however so I might have to have a look at my gantt chart to see if i have the time to do that [Without looking I feel confident that I would be able to do that, I think it would only tack on an extra 2 hours or so per character as I don't have to worry about rendering or anything].
Here is the final card concept, I added the background as a cave wall with painting marks behind it which I really love, this helps tie my art style in with Neolithic cave paintings which is something I wanted to do from the start. I think it retains enough of my art style to feel like this project is representative of my artistic abilities whilst also joins in the theming of my game. Too this sets the employees apart from the clients which is something I want to keep in mind. I am very very pleased with how this card turned out, and as I have the layout of the card saved in layers it means that translating any future designs into final cards should be much easier.
Final Designs -
Here are my final design considerations for the client card "Grug the Stylish", I was indecisive about which design I liked best but I think design 2 [the one with the dinosaur] looked the best. I also thought adding a white outline to the stone nameplate and icons made them much easier to see. I still need to decide on what Icons represent which attribute so right now they are represented by the letters they begin with [in this case Trendiness and warmth].
I liked the cooler toned colour pallet as it was easier to see against the character in the mid ground, I also think having it be different to the employee cards makes it easier to separate the two whilst still having them look like they belong to the same game.
With this in mind, here are my two final card concepts [things might still change depending on how my game actually plays but visually the final final cards should look pretty similar to this]. I designed what i thought the Flora icon should be, this being a fossil of some tree bark. Even if it isnt immediately clear that this is supposed to be tree bark [prehistoric trees had scales more than bark so it looks a bit different to how you expect tree bark to look] the square shape of the bark sets itself apart from the round shape of the ammonite, making it easy to distinguish between the two when they are placed on a card.
I also considered that having the employee card on a landscape orientation means technically theres more space vertically on the board to stack employees, this means that potentially people could hire more than one employee [potentially stealing employees away from other players] to stack on their board. I would need to find a way to level out the mechanics on this one to make sure it remained fair to everyone and that one player couldn't immediately lock themselves into wining by hiring every employee in the game.
Trello -
I decided to make these two card concepts to be put in my presentation pitch to show off how my game might look, I'm glad I did this as it also made creating further concepts for other characters much easier and also gave me a starting point to design the other two card types within my game. My next step is to create some furniture concepts to turn into the furniture cards, this will also require me to more solidly set my games mechanics so I also want to create a mockup of my game in paper and play it with some people to test what works/what doesnt work. At this early stage its easier to edit things than to wait a lot further down the line and risk having to scrap a lot of work. I will prioritize doing that next, and do at least 2 rounds of playtesting, one with me overseeing the game [explaining how to play] and one seeing if my players can understand the mechanics with no input. I will gather feedback through a google form to make it easier to get answers to specific questions.
I have most of my research complete at this stage, I wanted to take a trip to Creswell Crags today to complete my research section however I did not realize they were closed on weekdays during January, so as soon as they are open I will make sure to visit.
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