What We’ve Learnt This Week (25th September 2023)

Have you ever wondered what goes into making a brand-new board game? So have we! Why not follow along while we figure things out.

This week we have been learning:

How to design and make stickers. We want to be able to offer promotional materials to help spread the word. Everyone loves a cute sticker, right?

We started by brainstorming some ideas for which images and characters would best represent the game and translate well into stickers, and dreaming up some snappy slogans that we think will be particularly enticing. Armed with ideas, Harry used Stable Diffusion XL1.0 to generate the artwork, just as we do for all the Quaeleon artwork, with several iterations and touch-ups from photoshop as required until we get a cute little character or image that we love. Next, Harry brings the image into Adobe Illustrator and uses tracing tools to clean up the artwork and vectorise it, before adding the text with some nice pathing around the art. Once complete, we end up with something bold and beautiful that we hope our future players will love.

This week we’ve been reading:

The Art of Game Design: A book of lenses by Jesse Schell

This week we’ve been watching:

• ‘Magic, the Gathering: 20 Years, 20 Lessons Learned’ from GDC
• ‘Why Magic Systems don’t feel Magical’ from Tale Foundry
• ‘Why Cities Are Where They Are’ from Wendover Productions
• ‘WORLDBUILDING MISTAKES you don’t know you’re making’ from yinka
• ‘Worldbuilding: How to Make Names That Don’t Suck’ from Jed Herne