More Games Please brings you interviews with the best board game artists and designers. We find out more about their inspiration, the challenges they've faced and how they created the games we love.
All in Interview
How a game works isn't always immediately clear, but you can say a lot about what the players will feel like by giving them at-a-glance information through visual communication
At first I just started designing the characters that were going to be based on Heinze and me. I read ‘Understanding Comics’ and ‘Making Comics’ by Scott McCloud and just started drawing some. Three out of four were jokes about board games, so together with Heinze I decided to throw away the idea of a webcomic about geeky subjects in general and decided it would be better to focus on board games.
When I first started on Skyward I made an inspiration folder on my hard drive and kept filling it up with artwork I found [..] As I'd never really drawn any isometric art before, I didn’t know how long it would take or what style to do it in [..] I started looking at more pieces still in an isometric style but with a lot more detail, like something out of an RPG.
I wanted an old and detailed styled map. So I contacted Daniel Hasenbos who is a cartographer [..] and by intense research [..] added historically correct buildings and monuments throughout the Roman empire.
Joeri Lefevre provides the all the card art and the amazing box art. I wanted his art pieces to be classical and to depict different situations in the daily life of Roman people [..]
When I started out I tried to do everything for fear of upsetting people, and I still catch myself falling into that mindset every now and then. But I think it’s better to be upfront with clients at the start about deadlines, or whatever the issue may be, rather than dropping nasty surprises on them later..
I'd also recently moved to Europe for a stint and loved seeing all the old castles and wanted to do something with that. So I combined that with my affinity for isometric projections and started to play around and liked where it went. The game features a bunch of unique environments, such as..
Never stop learning and practicing! As my professors used to tell me, it’s the mileage that matters. There are plenty of people with pure, raw, exceptional talent, that have their path laid out for them. But the rest of us just need to work hard. For both art and game design..
Achieving my life’s dream at 21 was eye-opening. Setting aside the 70-hour working weeks, what I found at Disney was that I didn’t enjoy being a cog in an enormous machine. Turned out what I really wanted was not to work with a specific company, but rather, the chance to shape my creative work in a meaningful way...
