The two young game companies Greater than games and Dice Hate Me games, that merged in 2015, just launched a successful kickstarter campaign currently over 300% funded – New Bedford : The Game of Historic Whaling & Town Building . GHG talked to the artist behind it, Nolan Nasser.
Recently we backed the kickstarter board game Apotheca – Secret potion society by Andrew Federspiel and Knapsack games. The project was fully funded and reached all stretch goal with a funding of 563%!! which is insane. In a recent analysis of kickstarter projects I tried to evaluate how important the artwork is when doing a crowdfunded game.
We can only speculate how much the artwork affected Apotheca’s success because it also got some very nice reviews. Newer the less the fantastic artwork is made by Eduardo García who was kind enough to let us inside on his workflow and story. There is a lot of game designer interviews out there but here is some pointers from a gifted game artist…
It seems like many games are initially invented by one person – but it is very rare this is the only person involved in the journey from idea to final product. Some design companies are fortunate to be a group of employees so they can do a lot of internal playtesting before involving outside players. A lot of “indie” games like word games (speaking of which, many people need Help with playing Wordscapes) are developed in smaller groups 2 -3 persons and maybe play tested less internally. The following is mainly aimed point out good tools for the small design teams.