I need artwork again, anybody game?

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Lucifer
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I need artwork again, anybody game?

Post by Lucifer »

Here I am, trying to freeload again.

Anybody up for making board game art?

First, compensation. As usual, I don't have any money. However, if you like games like Clue (Cluedo for y'all Europeans), I can almost certainly arrange for you to buy it at cost, no profit for me. Depending on what the cost ends up being and what the shipping costs will be, I might actually be able to swing giving you a free copy of the game.

So, what's the game?

The working title right now is Spygame, because we suck at naming things. We took the basic Clue mechanism of using cards in a solution envelope to create a mystery, but this is about spies, and it's not a rip of Clue.

You play two characters at a time, in a city square with no roads. Somewhere there is a hidden safe that contains some important spy documents (we haven't worked up the backstory yet). You walk around looking for clues, interrogating other players, and generally trying to win. To win, you have to go to the location of the safe and dial the combination. If you're right, you win. If not, you lose.

There are traps available that can be put on doorways and information cards. Some are lethal (hence why you get two characters, you can keep playing even after one is killed).

When interrogating, the subject is not required to tell the truth. We have these Truth cards that you draw to see if you can tell a lie, and only the interrogator and the subject know if the subject has to tell the truth. So there's a level of intrigue there. Also, you are only required to tell the truth about what is in your hand, and since you can drop information (and leave traps on it), you can take the risk that someone else will find the information while ensuring you're not able to tell the truth about it when questioned.

Sounds weird, I suppose, but it's been fun so far. We're probably approaching the framework for the rules and will just be tweaking them to make sure they're balanced.

Now, the art needed:

* Portraits of 12 characters.
* Portraits of nine buildings
* Trap portraits (currently 6, but we're talking about dreaming up 6 more)
* A variety of ways to represent the Truth/Lie dualogy (if that's even a word). "Pants on fire" is one, a polygraph is another, but nothing like graphic torture (although a good cartoony torture graphic would be nice), whatever else you can think of. You can combine Truth and lie into the graphic, and make separate Truth and Lie graphics. Plenty of cards to put them on.
* A representation of a number in a combination (currently using a safe graphic I found on openclipart.org, but not really digging it).
* A representation of probability. I didn't find any dice I liked on openclipart.org, but failing to get this asset from someone else means I'll settle with something on openclipart.org.

* Top-down views of the interiors of the locations.
* Top-down view of the tiles characters walk on (not street pavement, not sidewalk pavement, something more spy-like, like cobblestone. Variety is nice here, the Clue board is boring to look at because the halls are all the same, so grass trails, etc. Also, make sure the Park has a taco truck in it)

* Optional: a cool spy-ey texture for the back of the cards that I can render a color/gradient onto and have it just look really cool.

The style is somewhere between caricature and photorealistic, leaning more towards caricature, but not outright cartoony. The content can be cartoony, like if you want to draw a torture graphic showing a person tied to a wall with a knife-thrower throwing knives. It also needs to be like a cross between Spy vs Spy and Bond, or Inspector Gadget (the cartoon, not the live action film). The game has a touch of silly in it, so the artwork has to reflect that.

The deliverables should be 600 DPI, 300 might be ok if we don't have to rescale it for anything. SVG is preferred, but not required. I know there are some of you who could draw something up on paper, scan it, and color it fairly quickly and have it be the overall quality level we need to make a professionally published board game. (Anybody who's curious, yes, there are print-on-demand board game services)

If you're interested, reply here with what you're interested in providing and I'll PM you the relevant contents from the spreadsheet that contains all the information. Unless you're just interested in doing board game artwork and seeing it published, I'd ask that you not commit to do more than you can provide in a couple of hours of leisurely arting that you'd normally do anyway. If we don't get the whole list, that's fine, as long as we get as much as available contributors are willing to create. The portraits and top-down views of locations are the most important, but really, I'm freeloading here, so we'll take anything.

As for the characters, they're all parody characters of TV show people. For example, there's a Mr. Weston, clearly a reference to Burn Notice (a show about spies, if you haven't seen it). There's an Agent Lister and an Agent Rimmer. There are three fictional characters that I've created, and those of you who read my book will recognize one of them. There's Sam Ash, which is a combination of character names of characters played by Bruce Campbell (Sam Axe from Burn Notice, Ash Williams from Evil Dead). You get the idea. The locations, except for Fastburger, are standard city locations (Public Library, Museum of Natural History, a pool hall, a bar, etc). Fastburger is something I might try to draw myself (Ok, I will, but you might want to take my drawing and make it into something that looks good) because it's a location in my stupid web comic.

This game is a labor of love, really. A family activity. So you'll get to join my family in the credits for the game, at least. We want a professionally printed version of a board game we've created, and it's totally possible. Having such a thing means, of course, that I'm going to try to sell it, because that's the sort of thing I do, and my kids are excited about having a game they developed being sold to anybody who's interested in it. It's fun, we've had fun every time we've played, even laughing to tears, so we know we're on the right track.

So, any takers?
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Be the devil's own, Lucifer's my name.
- Iron Maiden
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sinewav
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Re: I need artwork again, anybody game?

Post by sinewav »

Do you have a prototype to look at?
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Lucifer
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Re: I need artwork again, anybody game?

Post by Lucifer »

Depends on what you mean by prototype. We have a playable game that you can print out on your own printer, game board and cards, but you'll need to find your own game pieces and dice.

I don't have much in the way of artwork for you to look at, but if you get nanDECK, I can send you the current assets for cards and the script to generate them so you can see what we're working with now. I was honestly hoping for new perspectives not tied to current card layout, because I can change the layout to accommodate really good ideas.

The current game board is a straight up rip of the Clue game board. I haven't started working on developing the new game board that fits better with this game.
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Be the devil's own, Lucifer's my name.
- Iron Maiden
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