Battle Cards

Spent some time putting together the 'battle cards' for the heroes and the enemies. The asset size (max 128x128) meant I made the choice to make the cards wider than the traditional playing card ratio to make best of the room available, the lines needed to be much thicker than I first created so be readable at that scale - the same being true of the bold easily identifiable shapes and iconography. I experimented with quite a few palette combinations for both cards but particularly on the enemy card -  red bordering green came up the best - particularly with Orcs in mind; at one stage I had metal bolts in the corners till I realised that it looked like an 'Etch-a-Sketch of Doom' :O

Zero to Hero

I'm in the final stretch on the art now and needed to create a 'Civilian' character for some of the game encounters that take place. 

I remembered the very first character sketch I did when working out the style -  at the time I developed this sketch into a basic template character on which to base all the other character classes to come and as I was trying to work out proportions it remains the only human character not to have a 'hat' of some description ;) So it seemed apt to use this guy (with some modification obviously) as the Civilian  (above right). Which got me thinking on where it all began, and as I've never posted him up before I thought I'd add the first character to created based on that initial sketch and template - the Mage (above left).

I managed to dig out that first sketch (below) which I scanned - well actually, I used my camera phone to photograph ;) you can also see the scribbles for the mages staff and his hand.

Heaven & Hell

It occurred to me that I never posted up the final Paladin Hero character. He's lived in the game build for quite some time now but every time he popped up on screen the problems surrounding his fitting into the 128x128 square nagged at me - he just never looked as comfortable as the other characters. So recently I pulled him to pieces, rescaled, simplified some of the complexity in components of his armour, adjusted some areas of high contrast which were moire'ing at scale and supplemented his tome (which although nice didn't read well at scale) for a kite shield - much better :)

Standing alongside him is the Undead Skeleton Paladin, I introduced some minor changes (tears, scratches, horned helm, icon swaps and cloak palette) to make him suitably different but readily readable as the Paladin class.