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.

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.

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.

Can you believe we didn’t notice? Can you believe nobody noticed? Can you believe nobody who reblogged the box art noticed? Can you believe we did side by side comparisons to argue over things like his cheek being slightly off model.

and

we

We already sent the box out to printers but we literally have to “stop the presses” to fix this detail.

We are so stupid. I cannot believe we made a whole game given how stupid we collectively are.

The good news is we noticed it now instead of a month from now.

The bad news is that we are stupid.

Hey everybody!

We just finalized the box for Story War!

It looks like this! How cool is this?

Pretty dang cool.

KC Green just finished storyboarding the Story War cartoon! Here’s a few choice frames! Ha ha ha can you believe our most ridiculous Kickstarter reward is actually happening ha ha ha wow I kind of thought we were going to just apologize and under deliver on that one.

Next step: Lindsay and Alex are gonna actually animate the frickin’ thing! The storyboard is so good you guys. KC Green is so good. This cartoon is gonna be great.

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!

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!

Hey everybody, we have some big news today!

These gifs are test animations from the Story War animated short! Making a cartoon was our Kickstarter’s $200k stretch goal, and I bet you thought we were bluffing, didn’t you? You totally did.

The short will be animated by Lindsay and Alex Small-Butera (who made Baman Piderman and the gifs above) and it will be written and storyboarded by KC Green (who does Gunshow and the Regular Show comic). We’ll be posting about the cartoon’s progress on this blog, and we expect it to be finished by the end of the summer.

Our Kickstarter is over, but you can still pre-order Story War here!

mr-bananabeak asked: Is there going to be an updated print-and-play with the new artwork and base set cards?

Yes, but we’re waiting until we’ve sent the final deck to the printers so that we only have to release an updated (and final) version once, instead of asking people print out and cut a whole deck several times. We haven’t actually finalized the final deck yet.

rittz asked: do you have an estimate on when the cards will get shipped out? sorry if you keep getting asked this!

We will soon! We’re still finalizing our production schedule!

Check out the new Trapped Temple card! with the old card too for comparison.

What a solid improvement! It’s so good. It’s so much more dynamic and it’s a lot easier to see what’s going on. It reads a lot more like an intense hectic platforming level in a video game, which is how we’ve wanted it to be played all along.

Thanks for coming out to the drawcast! and as always you can go back and watch it any time here.

I’m really pleased with the improvement I managed to get out of this one. This was the final total revisiting we needed, now we’re just scouting around making little tweaks on other cards until we put in the final order for the base set! (tonight!)

-V