The Four Kingdoms

 

I wanted to show some thumbnails for a new project I am working on called the Four Kingdoms. This will be a game available on Kickstarter coming in early 2018. The premise of the game is kingdom building where you compete against up to four other players to advance your kingdoms military and technological achievements. The game starts out in the era of Middle Ages Europe and as the game progresses you gain victory points for growth of culture, social advancements, and military conquest. As players progress their kingdoms the game culminates in the end of the era and birth of the renaissance. 

The game is similar to Settlers of Catan but does not rely on dice rolling mechanics for resources and expanding their domain. We tried to work in lots of historical significance that let to advancements of western civilization, so it has that aspect too. It also vaguely reminded me of the Warcraft games where you construct building and upgrade them to get better benefits, but without the orks, ogres, and elves.

These are some preliminary sketches that are done for almost all projects I work on just to get an idea of the different visual interpretations of the concept. I try to come up with at least three unique concepts for each idea just to give more options to choose from.

There were four basic visual formats I utilized for this, the top down isometric perspective for the buildings, character portraits, event scenes, and the illuminated manuscript style.

Below are some of the mock-ups for card layout ideas and icons, which is a complete job in itself.   I want to try something very unique for these but its going to take a lot of  precise geometry.

 I will be posting more on this project as it evolves over the coming months.