Everything Islands and the Masterplan

This may become a recurring thing. I have once again moved through a whole week, and basically all I have to show is a little Masterplan sketch and the fact that someone besides myself has done a bunch of work. Let’s begin with Everything Islands.

So things are going smoothly over there. I think this is going to shape up really nicely, although I will say that suspicions are running high after last year’s disturbingly war-like game. A few people have decided, smartly, to take the path I tread and make a shovel, which is naturally the best thing to have. More importantly, the cool artwork keeps coming. Today we have the DM’s in-game avatar, Captain King Daggerbeard. Hopefully my involvement in the project will pick up once he has a good handle on what needs to get done, but until then, I’m happy to have something to post that isn’t thrown together in Illustrator.

As far as my own work goes, it goes slowly. Alex and I had another Masterplan Monday, and it didn’t really produce any great visuals. What I can say is that it produced the schedule for producing stuff so, yeah, that’s a step in the right direction. Next week will almost certainly result in something new. Here’s the only thing we had for this week:

What we are looking at is a very, very early mock-up of the land tiles for Masterplan. They will need to have the triangles drawn into them, and the pattern will hopefully be much cooler, but the overall style is pretty much there. I’m looking for a light-colored, two-tone pattern to represent each land type, and we were both excited by the idea of using some colors more than once, so that no type was made of two completely unique colors. We’re going to request help from the friend who made the colors for Shima, so my god-awful palette choices will not remain for long.

On a different level, we pretty much came to the conclusion that Masterplan, while very fun, will not be something that we try and market on TGC. It is going to cost somewhere in the $50-$60 range, which is just too high for an independent game. We will technically publish it, and it will be available for purchase, but realistically it will function more as a prototype that we play with friends and maybe one day try and bring to a bigger publisher. Either way, it’s gonna be really great to see Alex’s design brought to life with some real components.