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
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...
[..] the biggest challenge is that there’s no literal interpretation of the game outside of the pieces. So, we had to concept an entire art style and brand around two pieces of information: there are many games you can play with pyramids, and the pieces themselves...
The timing was perfect and so was the theme of the game. Some of my favorite things in the world are science, character illustration and board games, and STEM perfectly combined all three. What is more, I absolutely love vintage themes...
