Norsaga Art Design, Part 2

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This is the second in a series of articles tracing the creation of Norsaga’s artwork. To see where it ends up, check out the gallery on the main site.

The red Might heroes were the first to be designed, and are perhaps the most iconic in the game. The red/red Berserkers showcase the color's stylistic elements: top-heavy with tiny legs, wild, a bit bloodthirsty, with no thought of defense. Tattoos were an early idea that ended up moving to blue.

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When I agreed to start drawing the game, Kevin provided me with a ton of red concept art to get things rolling. As you can see in the gallery, a lot of the look and feel from these early sketches made it into my final art.

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Including concept sketches for each of the red-dominant hero classes:

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As with the other colors, he also sketched a page full of random details and bits that I could use for red, which was a huge time-saver.

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Take a look at how the early Jarl sketch above translated into the final design, and all the yellow traits that it exhibits (which were covered in detail in Part 1) .

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To make each color further recognizable, they each had their own background setting. Red scored the high mountains, but terrain from each class's recessive color sometimes bleeds in as well: in this case, forests from green, water and mist for blue, and stone spires from yellow.

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There you have it: the creation of Norsaga's burliest heroes.

Meeple Mechanic designer interview with Kevin Bishop

  During the first week of the Norsaga Kickstarter we won the Meeple Mechanic's Kickstarter Badger award, which recognizes well-run campaigns. We were super excited about this, not least because of this cool graphic:

This week, MM creator Daniel Zayas interviewed Kevin about the design process for the game. You can read the interview here, as well as other interviews with cool people, since Daniel does this regularly!

The interview contains some great questions from Richard Ham (Rahdo Runs Through),  Gordon Calleja (Posthuman), and Seth Johnson and James Ernest (Titans of Tabletop). They all have cool projects currently on Kickstarter and worth checking out.

Demo night at Family Game Store on April 18

If you're in the DC area, come demo Norsaga with its creators! On Saturday, April 18th 2015, from 6pm to midnight we'll be at the Family Game Store in Savage Mill, MD.

http://www.familygamestore.net/

If you haven't made up your mind about backing our Kickstarter, and don't want to cut a bunch of paper for the free Print & Play version, this will be your chance to try the real thing!

The demo will be during their regularly scheduled Saturday game night, so you'll also have a chance to check out all the other great games they stock. Years ago Kevin got a copy of the awesome out-of-print game Gheos from them! (Try finding that online.) So either way, you'll be happy you came by.

Norsaga Art Design, Part 1

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This is the first in a series of articles tracing the creation of Norsaga’s artwork. To see where it ends up, check out the gallery on the main site.

If you browse back through these blog posts you'll notice Kevin's gone into quite a bit of depth on the design of Norsaga's gameplay. Now it's my turn to cover how the artwork came to be, starting with the look of the yellow Faith heroes.

Yellow was actually the last color to be concepted, and the most difficult. While the body types for the other three colors are fairly exaggerated and based off of distinctive shapes, the yellow silhouette is a square. Their feel revolved around defense and large shields, things which generally obscure the little character details being emphasized in Norsaga.

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Here's Kevin's early mockup of the stylistic elements for yellow; this was before the triangle silhouette was traded to red. We initially gave yellow dominion over large hats and helmets, an idea we later rejected because it hid heroes' faces. Below you can see what elements we finally settled on.

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The yellow/yellow Champions show off every possible yellow design element, and most prominently feature the defensive theme with their large shields. While I was doing all of the drawing at this point, I was lucky to have a bunch of great concept sketches from Kevin that gave me piles of little details to draw from.

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Whenever I needed a pouch, or a trinket, or a shield detail, I'd start by pulling out these pages full of reference doodles, and expand from there. In some cases I liked Kevin's sketches so much I copied his designs exactly (notice the totem in the middle, which went to Finn Sigilsworn).

Having established what made a hero yellow, I then mixed in identifying traits from the other colors to show the varying recessives. See the yellow/green healer below, showing a bunch of green's minor traits.

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This was another aspect that Kevin went over thoroughly with me before I started drawing, and it's thanks to him there are so many iconic features for each color. In the end, you can glance at any hero in the game and figure out what their dominant and recessive traits are from the artwork.

I'll be covering the other heroes and sagas in future updates. For anyone currently backing our Kickstarter at the LEGEND, MYTH, or ETERNAL levels, you should soon have a clear idea of what colors you want your custom hero to be!

-Matthew