We finally got Volume 1 sent off to the printers, so now we can look towards the future. Here are the very first early sketches for cards from Volume 2 of Story War! This is Vondell’s first sketch of Police Dog and Cat Burglar, who are the fuzz and the furry underbelly of Volume 2’s more urban setting.

Also hey is that a dramatically different tone and creative direction? Yes, it is! Volume 1 focused on popular concepts from fairy tales and mythology, and volume 2 will focus on popular concepts from action movies and saturday morning cartoons. But also we don’t want everyone to be a dumb old human like they are in those mediums so there’s going to be a lot of anthropomorphic characters.

Giving animal attributes to a Story War card really adds a lot of depth to the gameplay - you already know Police Dog is good at smelling and Cat Burglar has night vision without having to define those powers on the cards!

Ah man! I’m already so stoked about Volume 2! GET STOKED.

This is a little mini-animatic I just made based on KC Green’s rough storyboards for the Story War cartoon. Lindsay and Alex are gonna translate it to a proper animation storyboard this week and then they’re gonna start animating the dang thing.

We’re recording Medusa and Gremlin’s lines on Monday. This is happening.

PS, here’s what Fairy and Goblin look like when properly animated:

Y’all are gonna love Fairy and Goblin so much. Lindsay and Alex are gonna voice them. So imagine Lindsay and Alex as treasure hunters with super powers. Get hyped.

Hey! I just noticed we haven’t really updated about what we’re doing with the cards and stuff in a while! Today (toDAY) is the deadline for sending the cards off to the printers. We’ve spent the last few weeks doing minor revisions and trying to get a consistent look and feel across all the cards, replacing art that’s always bothered us, and doing some last minute adjustments based on our PAX playtesting.

Since we brought Lindsay and Alex on board to help with the cartoon, they gave us some really good advice on making the character faces appear more consistent and expressive and cartoony across the board. So we’ve been doing things like that. Here you can see the wizard’s face updates! He went from a glowy-eyed halpert-faced guy to a really expressive cartoon guy which is a much better look, I think!

Once we send the final deck off to the printers we’ll ALSO release an updated print-and-play version of the game, that will more closely resemble the final game!