Cantrip Games

We finally got Volume 1 sent off to the printers, so now we can...

Wed, 22 May 2013 18:20:04 -0400

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...

Sat, 11 May 2013 09:39:49 -0400

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...

Thu, 09 May 2013 04:51:00 -0400

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 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...

Tue, 07 May 2013 15:38:24 -0400

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!...

Mon, 06 May 2013 16:55:12 -0400

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...

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 09:31:25 -0400

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...

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 13:39:00 -0400

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!

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

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 20:16:50 -0400

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.

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

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 19:44:42 -0400

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

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

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 17:22:00 -0400

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

Story War Drawcast: Trapped Temple

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 12:34:33 -0400

Story War Drawcast: Trapped Temple:

Hi! Vondell here.

We thought the Elf was the last card the needed a full revision before print, but we just remembered the Trapped Temple! We’re giving it a full overhaul to make it more interesting visually. Come on in and watch me do that! Woohoo.

Check it out, here are the Warrior, Item and Battlefield card...

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 10:45:00 -0400

Check it out, here are the Warrior, Item and Battlefield card backs for Story War! Click on them and check out the details! The logo was designed by Ned Hugar, the border was designed by Maré Odomo and the textures were designed by Farid Safaie.

It took us MONTHS to settle on these. There were so many challenges involved with coming up with the card backs: We wanted each one to evoke a book cover and also their role in the game. But they couldn’t be too literal because we intend to do expansions that share a common card backs but have different “themes” - for example, a scifi expansion would look odd if it had a leathery book texture on the opposite side. But the cards need to all have the same backs so that they can be mixed together. So I told all of that to Maré and he came up with that book-like white border which looks really great.

We went with red triangles for Warriors, because it evokes “attack” and blue circles for Items because it evokes “defense,” and green checkers for Battlefields because it looks like a chess board or a field. We originally had “gold” for items, and they were briefly called “Treasure” and they were a thing you earned and spent. But we decided that items are used in much more interesting ways if they replenish automatically. Also, yellow is a difficult color to balance with white and”red green blue” sort of makes more sense as a set than “red green yellow.”

Each card back needs to have some distinctive texture so that Story War can be played by color blind people or in low light - I’ve tried playing it with non-textured backs in bars, etc, with colored lighting, and it’s always difficult to tell the decks apart. The textures are designed to make it easy to tell which card is wich without relying 100% on color, but also keeping all three backs on a unified theme. Farid did a great job on these.

The logo was the first thing I designed with Ned Hugar. Originally it had some lightning bolts around the sides - the stars and lightning bolts were going to be a recurring motif, but people kept parsing the lightning bolts as superscripted “S” shapes, so we got rid of them. The star became the logo for the game, and it’s a recurring motif you’ll see a lot on the card art.

Before we even had a logo, we had a celtic knot looking star thing as the “Triforce”-like symbol for Story War:

We eventually settled on a more cartoony art style and a less serious tone, so we got rid of this star (which we called the “five point lotus” - SO SERIOUS) and replaced it with the new star. We originally called the new star the “cute star” at first, but have since renamed it the Wishing Star.

We decided to make the Wishing Star it’s own item card after discovering problems with the genie. It was hard to limit the genie’s powers, and also a genie felt like he should be a servant to someone else - it didn’t make sense to put our “wishing” mechanic on a Warrior card. So instead we added the Wishing Star, which will grant any wish your heart desires but not without an “ironic twist”:

The idea that the Wishing Star can do whatever you want, but someone else (the judge) is going to mess it up for you is sort of the core idea behind Story War.

I think a lot of people will hear about the concept of Story War and get excited about the idea that it allows for unbridled creative freedom, like Minecraft in Create Mode - but that’s not quite the case. The fact that Story War is a mandatory 3-or-more player game means your creative freedom is reined in by input from other people, which I think is a really interesting concept. I’m really glad the Wishing Star exists, even though it was one of the last new items we added, it feels like a thing that was meant to be in Story War all along.

We’ve got less than 2 days to send the game to the printers. If you didn’t get a chance to back our Kickstarter you can always pre-order Story War here.

Story War Drawcast: Elf

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 23:20:53 -0400

Story War Drawcast: Elf:

Hi! Vondell here. Tonight I’ll be working on the Elf card, which is a warrior we’ve had for a while but we’re making it better and also we’re making it me. Brad’s got the Dwarf, Tom’s got the Leprechaun, and now I’ll have this guy.

Come hang! The playlist tonight is pop hits from the early 2000s.

Can we still back the project?

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 23:35:25 -0400

No but you can buy the game here.

do deluxe backers still get the reward cards?

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 23:09:15 -0400

Probably? We can’t promise but maybe. It depends on how we end up doing the bonus cards. But, probably, yes. You should still go back it anyway though.

Is there a minimum amount of money we have to pledge to The Reward kickstarter to get the bonus cards?

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 20:43:10 -0400

You just need to be backing both but, you know, don’t do like 1 cent. Just back both projects sincerely. It’d be weird to get bonus cards for a thing you don’t even fully care about?

How will you know if we back The Reward?

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 20:29:51 -0400

We can figure it out using computers!

Are you already backing Story War? Do you want some...

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 20:16:23 -0400

Are you already backing Story War? Do you want some Kickstarter-exclusive cards? Go back The Reward and you’ll get these two bonus cards based on the bromantic leads, Vito and Wilhelm! You have less than 55 hours left to back it before it ends!

(PS: Do us a solid and reblog this post, so everyone has one last chance to back The Reward and get these exclusive cards!)

vondell-swain: hi blog i just finished drawing this for 9 hours...

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 13:49:46 -0400

vondell-swain:

hi blog i just finished drawing this for 9 hours straight in the drawcast that started last night. it is now 8:30AM.

it’s the Carnival card for Story War! this baby is yet another one of the new battlefields that will be included in the base set of the game! hot diggity.

there were a few people who stayed with me in the livestream for practically the entire time and many more who popped in and out. some people popped in at the beginning and watched for a while and then went to bed and then woke up and then went to class and then popped back in and watched me finish up. we live in a crazy world. if you have 8.5 hours that you are looking for a method to burn away, you can relive the experience here.

(story war is available for preorder here!)

now i’m gonna go eat something because i have to go to class in 2 hours.

Omg, vondell.

Story War Drawcast: Carnival

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 02:35:12 -0400

Story War Drawcast: Carnival:

Hi! Vondell here.

It’s a weird time to start a drawcast but here we are. Tonight/this morning/this afternoon (whenever it is wherever you are) I’ll be working on the Carnival card!

As always, we’ll be at the mercy of my music tastes, so I hope you’re into swedish swing jazz hip hop. Or at least willing to try new things.