After simplifying the game, I wanted to begin playtesting and iterating as soon as possible, so I started by designing and creating my card prototypes. Originally I wanted the game to rely on it’s art to carry the theme, and I intended to do this by creating appealing visual designs for each of the cards, but I soon realised I wasn’t capable of this myself, and therefore decided to come up with a different solution
Approach
I decided to design the cards for 4 key factors that I defined as potential key areas for print and play style cards:
- Printability: The cards should be printable on any kind of printer onto A4 paper, and therefore not be complex enough to waste ink. This especially meant limiting the use of colour in the design to allow non colour printers to print the cards.
- Self Drawn: I toyed with the idea of allowing players to draw their own cards, and therefore wanted to design the cards with the art as a representation of the object that the card described.
- Theme: I wanted the cards to express the theme of the game, and help players to understand the tone of play quickly
- Feasibility: I am not an artist, and therefore wanted to make the design of the card’s art as simple as possible so that I could draw them myself.
Initial Design
I began by creating a simple outline for the cards, and chose to have it as a dotted line as those were common to represent places to cut with scissors, I also rounded the corners to give them a little bit of that classic card look.
I then drew a simple Celtic infinity knot, as I had to choose a symbol for my game’s points system and I find Celtic symbols appealing to look at and their rounded nature makes them nice for coins. I used this symbol to represent the value of each card, and the symbol next to the value helps both to denote that it is a score value and that it is representative of money to convey the theme of the game.
I then added the card name in a stylised font and added patchy parts to all the text to make it look more hand drawn. I used this iteration of the card to create a version of the print and play game where you can fill in the art yourself for all of the cards.
Finally I did simple line art for all of the cards using a textured brush. This art should be a nice visual representation for each item, and helps to convey the idea of the game.
Finished Card
Thematically the cards are supposed to represent IOUs used by the Vendors in trading, so I wanted the cards to look like scrap pieces of paper shoddily drawn up by the players of the game to trade their stock with. I also realised that this meant the cards would look more authentic for the game printed on low quality paper, and more authentic as they crumpled and tore over time. I mocked up a version of this to represent the visual.
I then printed these cards to cut them out for playtesting and as I did this found some potential ideas for improvement:
- The cards I created were standard playing card dimensions, but this also made them very difficult to cut out on A4 paper as there are many corners and 4 cuts are required for each card.
- Where individual cuts could separate two cards, instead they released them from a “frame” which wasted a lot of paper. I could either…
- Push the cards into the corner of the paper, and remove the rounded edges and use the extra area on the paper to add new parts to the game i.e. formats for them to track scores or a set of mini rules.
- Separate the A4 paper into 9 equal parts and waste no paper in the process.
I also uploaded the cards onto playingcards.io so that I could play the game online with friends that enjoyed board and card games already, as well as taking them with me for the holidays to play with family members with less interest in those type of games. This would allow me a wider variety of player types to test and give feedback on the game.