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.
I took my passion for drawing to another level by practicing daily and trying to develop a workflow and an identity in my work. Now that my personal work is more defined, I realize how that has an impact on the possible opportunities that are more in line with what I love to draw.
There are surely those who would argue that a Sicilian setting is the most classic one, but we always had an American setting in mind. That allows for a wide variety of characters and illegal businesses, as so many different people and cultures were present in the US gangster scene during the first half of the 20th century…
I have been into tabletop games since I could remember. Fireball Island was a pin in my childhood timeline. Soon after that, Hero Quest began to open my eyes to all the possibilities that you could create with a game; the worlds that could be designed and all the adventures to be had exploring them. With such a love for illustrations, games just felt like the natural next step.
The first thing I showed the rest of the team were different color palettes that were very limited, for directions we could go in. Having a limited amount of colors was very important in establishing the style as unique and recognizable. The hope was it would be eye-catching and different enough to warrant a further look...
I think there's so much to learn from traditional methods arts and crafts, and other things such as making and growing food. They can take a lot longer, but the products are so beautiful and there's so much more intention and engagement with the process.
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.
