November was slightly quieter than September or October - it couldn't not be - but, once again, overall progress moved substantially forward; especially in enhancing Magnate's gameplay and recruiting new team members. New boxart sketch This one has been a long time coming. I am glad to say we're finally making good progress on the cover art. I've always liked the placeholder art we have, but there's something a rather old fashioned about it. It's not as dynamic as it needs to be and I don't know it captures the feel of the game sufficiently either. I am very glad to say we finally have a sketch of what the new art will look like. There's still a lot do...
In his first article for the site, Jaya Baldwin - new member of the Naylor Games team, makes a forceful case for both titles *** "Ladies and gentleman welcome to another exciting episode of Boardgamemania! In the blue corner we have long standing heavyweight champion Dominion! The game that started an entire genre and really packs the Donald X factor. Meanwhile iiiin the red corner, we have new kid on the block, featherweight Star Realms!" *** It's a classic scenario: two games with a certain amount of similarity are pitted against each other, argued over and taken apart in order to figure out which is 'better'. When those two games are trying to fill exactly the same niche, it's a...
I’ve never made a print and play (PnP) game before. Is that ok? Well… maybe I’ve been missing out. There are lots of reasons to create a good PnP game, even if you don’t think of yourself as a ‘crafty’ person. Read part I? You can read Part II here. I have a confession – and as far as the board game industry goes, it feels like a pretty embarrassing one. Until recently I had never, ever printed a game from the internet. Not a card game, not a dice game, not an enormous eurogame. Other than a brief fumble with a 2 player Brass board which lasted all of 5 minutes (before I spilled coffee on the poorly sellotaped,...
The new Magnate site has launched today. It contains key information about the game’s many features: like its comprehensive tutorial mode (designed to allow players to learn without a rulebook) or its realistic 3D buildings of different types. As we get closer to launch, I’ll be adding more details about the game as well as updating the art and design elements as they develop.
If you aren’t already subscribed to this blog, you can sign-up there to get notified when the Kickstarter launches. The campaign is the due to launch in the Autumn of 2018.
A collection of resources to help you speed up and improve the process of working with artists. Especially useful if this is your first game and you’re the one in charge of making sure it’s beautiful. As part of my journey to getting Magnate to market, I’m embarking on an entire aspect of the game development process that I have very little experience with: finding, commissioning and working with artists; specifically game illustrators. At the community newspaper I run, we work with cover artists quite often and have produced lots of excellent magazine covers (link includes a selection from our print archive though only up to late 2017). But the briefs for Croydon Citizen covers are relatively simple. There’s a...
