Crazy good news to start the year off right–I arrived home this afternoon to find out that one of the games I worked on this summer has been officially announced. AEG’s Nightfall, a deck-construction game about vampires and other undead nasties, is coming out in early 2011! (And, if you head over to the Nightfall website, you can win one of 100 copies of the game!)
It’s interesting what changes were made between what I did and what is in the final work. What I was tapped for was to design the card face–the artwork was already commissioned (and several, if not all of the artwork, was already completed). My art director handed me working files and a quick overview of the gameplay; I took those and built out the card. Some time after my work on the project was over, the art director left AEG, and during that time, the card went through some other hands. But there are still my paw prints all over it. (I also didn’t even know the name of the project until I was halfway through the work. My original files aren’t in a Nightfall directory, they’re in a directory called “Oh No Vampires”.
Here’s one of the final cards: (Ms. Reyes didn’t have a name when I worked on her.)
The blood/health damage track on the edges of the card are still there, as are the treatment of the paper background for the card text and the grouping of the colored moons in the upper left. And while the general layout is still there, it looks as if some aspects of the game changed, requiring another redesign of the card face: I can look at my original notes and see that some elements just aren’t on there and references for some game elements aren’t present.
Although I would have liked to have all of my work in the final product, I’m glad that some of my design work made it into the final work. I’ll probably talk more about the job as the release date for Nightfall gets closer (well, at least what I can say that doesn’t violate my non-disclosure agreement with my original art director).Â
Anyway, you can head over to the Nightfall website and try to win a copy of the game for yourself. Check it out!