Reviews & Previews of Indie and Kickstarted Games
It’s common when trying to make polished prototypes to go in search of free art to flesh out that idea. New designers, not yet ready to sink lots of money in their game, often struggle to find good art, photographs, or illustrations to use. And more importantly, some times, high resolution images. This list is meant to help you find those locations. This post originally ran on Fairway’s personal site.
There are lots of free sources of high resolution, public-domain images out there. Many of the best pieces to use are illustrations from old books or oil paintings. And lots of new designers try to use those in their games. There’s usually one problem: just slapping them onto a card usually looks terrible. And while the following might not work for a retail version of the game, this will provide cleaner prototypes. In this quick tutorial, I offer three tips for “doing it better” using Gimp. This post originally ran on Fairway’s personal site.
Fairway definitely has a thing for art games. Today, he previews the current Kickstarter, art-themed card game: Pigment.
Chris is back with a new podcast: Art as theme. Chris chat with Mike (Fairway 3 Games), Michael Epstein (Copper Frog Games) and Alisha Volkman (designer of Underlings of Underwing and artist) about using “Art” as the game theme.
Today, Fairway is taking a look at a brand new service from the folks at The Game Crafter that lets you “automagically” create and maintain cards and other component images with templates and a spreadsheet: Component Studio. This new service will make the lives of anyone creating or maintaining large numbers of game components lives much easier.
It’s the perpetual creator question: how much of the art really has to be done before I launch my campaign? In today’s lesson, Dan takes a stab at answering that very question: how much art is enough?
Today, Dan discusses the current Kickstarter campaign by Hidden Creek Games: Dragon Dodge. He talks with these first time creators about the challenges they faced, components, art and reviews.
There are so many great resources out there for budding creators who are interested in funding their games on Kickstarter. Despite all of the advice out there from people like James Mathe and Jamey Stegmaier, it seems creators still make some major mistakes when launching a Kickstarter campaign.
Feature article on designer and illustrator Royce Banuelos and his Inktober journey with the board game, Codenames.
There are many paths that lead into the Indie Jungle – the “self-publishing” path, the “crowdfunding” path, the “pitch to a publisher” path and even the “print-on-demand” path. However, there is another path that many new game designers often overlook, one that can be uniquely fun, creatively challenging and infinitely rewarding…the “game design contest” path.