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.”

Imagine KC Green’s super funny writing and facial expressions combined with Lindsay and Alex Small-Butera’s inherently cute drawing style and badass action sequences. Dats what dis cartoon is gonna be. The Story War cartoon is gonna be so good. Did I mention we’re doing a cartoon? We are doing a Story War cartoon! with KC Green and Lindsay and Alex Small-Butera.

ALSO HEY! Have you backed KC Green’s kickstarter yet? WHY HAVEN’T YOU BACKED KC GREEN’S KICKSTARTER YET!? If you back KC’s Kickstarter you’ll get his comic and ALSO some other cool Pokemon-inspired comics. You guys like Pokemon? You guys like Pokemon. BACK KC GREEN’S KICKSTARTER.

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.