Tuesday, December 17, 2013

Flat Design / Minimal design in games

As I am a big fan of simplistic, I usually kept the artwork of my game or any illustration as simple as possible.
Kept the basic features and form the image by using fonts and shape. Nearly Every illustration I have done so far is kept to the same concept.

Most of the boardgames in Europe or the US have very detailed artwork and I do love them sometime.
For example, artwork for Seasons, Tokaido, Mascarade and the new game from the Essen 2013 -CV.
Mascarade - Repos Production

Tokaido - Funforge


CV - Granna Games

They are colorful and varied in style but they all share 1 same element which is attractive!

Japanese boardgame/cardgame are more to my taste, not many components, cards and small tokens are the usual stuff inside the box. Oink Games and Kanai factory are probably the two publishers that have similar artwork to my game. and yes I do adore them both.

Kobayakawa - Oink Games

Love Letter - Kanai Factory

It's an art how to represent 1 character, 1 animals or 1 events with minimum drawing. I guess I will jump into the world f iconography next.

Here is the new game that Table Friends will be hopefully publishing next year in Spring Q1.
I will release more info when it's avaliable.
SHOWTIME inspired by Charlie Chaplin

That's all from me this time, have a good week and enjoy the Christmas.


Friday, November 1, 2013

Color of the Game


Red, Orange, Yellow....White, Black. What are the most frequent color you found on a game's box?

Most of the games now has a theme color. For example. RA by RK use a Yellow theme to give a Egyptian theme. Felix - the cat in the sack use a green theme, well, all of the FF game are green.
Is there a color that will attract people the most? and do the color of the box shows what is this game is about. Does a green game box means it is environmentally related?A Japanese Publisher - Oink Game is one of the publisher use "Flat Design" in all of its game series. I love their work and how they use simple colors and shapes in every game they released so far.

Many games don't even have a theme color. There are so many colors and makes the whole box looks luxury if it success, a mess if it fails. Are the games unlike CD or mobile phones, where the box does not need to stand out when look at a distance?

I am not very good in drawing when I was young (still not yet professional till now). so I tend to use very simple shapes and symbols when doing artwork for the games. There is a new game coming up from TF which I think it can probably sells really well especially in Asia. I can't give away anymore info then telling you this is a party game. I will release a bit more when the game is ready to roll out from the printers.


Fingers crossed on this, I hope this can be done sometime in the next season.




Thursday, October 17, 2013

What about a Roulette that you can decide the winning spot?!

Roulette is a common gambling game in all casinos, numbers, red or black are set up already in a particular pattern. I have an idea if the player can actually decide where player's win, everyone wins or dealer lose at a certain spots.

Player will receive several cards and on a players turn, they must play a card on the roulette and at the very last turn, everyone bets. After that the result will be revealed and it is possible that the reuslt is targeted at one player win/lose, everyone win/lose at the same time.

The theme of the game comes from where players can't go to sleep and try to count the sheep and reach a certain target number. 

In addition to the player decision on how the roulette will look like, in order to add a bit more tension, it is possible that player can lose what they have won so far. This means player will not be able to do a minimum bet every turn. So no runaway winners here!

The question this game is facing is actually "how to decide the result?"

Roulette is pretty much a luck based game, where the fun comes from, which is a concept that I don't want to remove.  Here are some current thought that I have and might work or not:

1. Deduction: Like Hattari where player receive some info and they can share.
2. Dice: Player roll dice.
3. Sim.Action: This is the original mechanism that I used, and this required all players shows how many fingers at the same time and the total will be the results.
4. Combining the numbers on to the card.

Any thought from you? yes, the smart lads sitting in front of the screen and just finish reading my work ?!