Fateweaver Milestone - Fate Cards v1

We've been hard at work on the Fateweaver prototype as a funding opportunity looms ahead of us in August.

Sophie's been implementing the ruleset we came up with months ago while adding animation and design in Godot. I've been creating the main art assets that we'll need to make the game playable but also have some of it's final style. I'm happy I spent so much time trying out different styles because it gave me time to really get better at the one we went with, woodcuts.

With a few social plans cancelled for the weekend, I was able to get my last remaining cards done this weekend and declare version one of the Fate Cards ready to go.

Fate Cards

I did a first reveal of 3 cards 15 days ago. Looks like I averaged about 1 card a day with that timeline. Faster than I had planned! The first few cards were slow going but as I got used to the brushes I had to work with things started to go rather smoothly. Here's a big spread of all of them.

There's no name or text on the cards because we printing the text all in-engine.

I'm fairly pleased with how most of these turned out. A few needed touch-ups once seen in the game and I think there are a few I might continue to tinker with when I get fed up with seeing things I want to change after many game playthroughs. The owl (Night) and squirrel (thief) are on watch for being too cute. While a few others already took multiple takes.

This river card took much longer than I thought. It was one of my early exploration cards and I felt pretty confident about drawing a simple river. But the thing about woodcuts is that the style isn't often used to depict landscapes. So my original ideas for the composition really struggled due to having too much empty space. I still don't love it but I do love the fish.

I re-did the snake here multiple times because I couldn't find a way to do scales that didn't look one, too busy, and two, too simple. I knew I didn't want to draw every individual scale but I still wanted to imply enough scales so that it wasn't just a worm.

Sophie was building out the functionality of all the cards while I was drawing them so they've already nearly all been implemented in-game. Which brings us pretty close to being rules complete! Next up is 10 items that the player can acquire. Which will also be my next art tasks.

First character

When it was too hot to sit at my art desk I did some dabbling and research into character design. We don't have all our characters plotted out yet but there are a few early ones figured out.

While the cards took a decent amount of exploration and experimentation, I'm still more afraid of doing the full body characters. I'm still happy with the characters I did for Spellphage but I want this set of characters to be sharper and more designed than those. A full on level up.

I have created more completed art this year than probably any other year before, but it's been for fairly specific things. Backgrounds, character sprites, small assets, all these cards. Very few pieces have been fully rendered characters.

If we get the grant we're applying for there's a good chance we'd try to commission characters from another artists. It would free me up to learn more Godot and work on the supporting assets. But I would love to be able to pull it off, I just know that I should really take my time with each character. Ideally 1-2 weeks would probably be enough time to achieve something I'm happy with but with a minimal 8 characters = 8 * 2 = 16 weeks aka 4 months...

4 months isn't the worst given our timeline. We haven't started writing the story or tying the characters into the world, that will take a few months right there. So if I start characters in August my calendar would be full till December. Could still aim for a February early access release...

Suffice to say this and future blog posts will probably have spoilers in it. But since the story won't be out for months I'm pretty sure most people will forget some early spoilers.

A lot to think about! What I really wanted to show was how even with all the drawing I've been doing I'm still producing some pretty ugly stuff between the good stuff.

We're thinking about tying certain cards to certain characters (which will be easier now that the cards are done) which led me to an idea for the Warden card. I thought we could have a mysterious warden character who, upon a first meeting or two, is covering their eye. Either out of injury or exhaustion. And then would later reveal that under there hand is the stylized eye from the warden card.

I tried to pull off a 3/4rds face with arm up a few times one evening. Everything was coming out bad. I kept trying and they even all came out looking the same? Close the iPad, went to bed. The next day I chopped up a few "close enough" references and took another shot at it. And instantly got something I was actually happy with.

Sometimes it really is a matter of getting the bad attempts out to be warmed up enough to get the drawing you want.

I don't know what rendering style we want to go with yet so I'm keeping this character in basic greyscale as a general placeholder for where characters can appear in game.

Conclusion

Big strides with Fateweaver this week (the last 3 weeks really). I have some small bits of studio business to look after in the next few days and some family commitments so I think it will be a low art week coming up. August will be about characters, getting ready for QGCon, and submitting a grant application. With a little cabin trip in the middle as a mini forced vacation so that my wife and I step away from our own to-do lists for a few days.