Hi everyone!

Right now we’re still plugging away at expansion cards and finally making a dent in our huge backlog of customer service emails.

Check out this flamethrower! The final image is the big one! The other four are earlier iterations of the card in the design process! The device itself was drawn by Olga and the final fire effects were drawn by Alison. The crappy photoshop mockup was by Brad.

Fire is really really hard to draw! (Ice is even harder to draw!)

I remember watching a thing about the making of the Lion King and they said they had to delay production and redraw the entire ending multiple times because they couldn’t get the fire to look right. The fire looked great in the lion king so we used it as a reference for our final art:

Here’s some things to consider when drawing fire:

• Fire is a light source so shadows cannot be cast on it (look at the earlier red iteration where there were it looks like a ribbon with shadows - it looks really cool but it doesn’t look like fire!)
• Fire can’t be semi-transparent (like the iteration on the bottom right) because it looks… weird. Fire goes from red to orange to a 100% transparent, with a soft glow around the edges. But it can’t just be a layer that you reduce transparency on or use the eraser on because it’ll look funny to see the yellow part - the brightest part - anything but opaque.
• Fire has to be really detailed. The first iteration (where the spout is longer) is a little too paint brushy. Even though fire is in motion you can’t draw it motion-blurred or it looks weird. Fire almost always photographs perfectly so motion blur doesn’t really work on it. You need to draw all the little nooks and crannies for it to look right.

Anyway, this card is so cool! It’s part of a trio of tool-like elemental items (Taser, Flamethrower, Fire Extinguisher) that share similar designs. Olga is an industrial designer so it’s super helpful to have her on board! We imagined these items were made by some sort of sinister Black & Decker-like company that gave all it’s weapons a consistent look and feel. They’re coming out great!

Check out the first new Warrior card from Story War vol 2! This card is the Mech card! The 9 pictures below are some earlier sketches and unfinished versions of the Mech that’ll give you an idea of our process.

First Brad had the idea to do “a baby kangaroo piloting a robotic mother” and then Tom drew that. Then Jaime drew various poses and we came up with the idea to give her tank treads instead of feet. Then Vondell re-drew it so that all the machinery looked technically accurate. Then we tweaked the pose to look more boxery. Then Josiah drew the background and we tweaked the colors and lighting to make him pop out of the background.

We may have some more tweaks to this one before final print, but it’s definitely good enough to post! It was a lot of work! Hopefully we’ll rarely have to put this much work into a single card again, but this character has a lot of moving parts - both figuratively and literally.

We’ve got a pretty good system of combining the talents of multiple artists onto a single character or concept and it’s really fun to work with so many cool people! We’re still open to new artist applications but we’re waiting until we nail down a style for volume 2 before we bring on anyone new.

Anyway, how cool is the Mech card? Her caption will be something like, “This genius orphan couldn’t wait to grow up so she built a metal mother.”

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!

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

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.

Vondell here!

check out Dark Castle’s progress from sketch to completion! Somebody lives in here, maybe. Some sciencey type person, no doubt. They might not be evil, but if they’re not evil, they’re absolutely awful at decorating. This is one of the last new battlefields we’re adding to the base set after playtesting at PAX.

Thank you guys for coming to the livestream! It’s always a good time, somehow. Remember that if you missed it, you can rewatch it here for 30 days. you must watch it on repeat for 30 days straight. No, that’s not true.