More Kagematsu

First off, I was negligent in not linking to an excellent Playtesting thread that Ron Edwards wrote up on the Forge after our game at last year's GenCon. Though the game has gone through revisions since then, I think that you can still get a good feel for what sort of play the game creates. If you're interested, you can read it here.

Secondly, the sketch that I posted yesterday has since undergone some revisions. You can see the new version here:

And here is the other image that I promised, the one that is already finished and ready to go. It took a lot of trial and error to get right, but I'm soooo happy with how it turned out and plan on offering prints of these images at GenCon.

Artwork for Kagematsu

Last year at GenCon, I got an opportunity to play Danielle Lewon's game Kagematsu which was all kinds of fun. It was still in late playtesting last year, and this year she's finally releasing it. It's a super fantastic game, and I was very excited when I got the chance to illustrate this game. (If you haven't heard of this game, go follow that link and read about it. It's awesome, trust me.)

I'm on a bit of a tight schedule to accomodate getting the book printed in time for GenCon, but it's well worth it. I've already had quite a bit of fun working on the pieces for this game.

I've gotten the first one finished already, which I'll hold off on posting for right now. I'm working on the second, which is a fight between Kagematsu, the samurai from whom the game takes its name, and a dragon - one of the many potential threats that the women in the game are trying to get Kagematsu to protect them from.

Here's a sketch to whet your appetite:

I started this sketch off in pencil and finished it up digitally since the dragon was giving me some trouble. I'm super excited to see what the finished version of this piece will look like. Danielle has me doing her pieces in a sort of modified ukiyo-e style, which has been a lot of fun and a good challenge...

It's getting late, so I'll post about Pirate Jenny tomorrow...

Update on my status: a flood of sketches and art

Hi, folks! Just an update on what I've been up to. In my last post, I mentioned that I was working on several different projects. Just a quick update, and then I'll get to the art...

1) Script-writing: Is going well. We're switching over to the scene-writing phase, having just completed brainstorming. I'm somewhat worried about participation, but otherwise pleased with our progress so far.

2) Apologies to Danielle and Emily, but I've since decided not to go through with the print run for Thou Art But A Warrior for reasons I'm not ready to talk about yet. Also, I need to sell down my current inventory.

3) Illustrations for Kagematsu are going well. I'll make that a seperate post, however.

4) Planning proceeds apace for our booth of female game designers and content-producers. We're calling it Pirate Jenny! I'll make that a sepe

5) Black Sky... well, I'll get to come back to it after GenCon.

Now... ART!

I haven't gotten to do a lot of random sketching lately, but Kit asked me to do a drawing in my niece's birthday card. He's a firm believer in twisted oddity for children, because who wants them to grow up normally?

With that explanation in mind...

Odd? Check. Twisted? Check. My work here is done.

Too many balls in the air

Way too much to do to be able to update regularly. Currently I am:

1) Coordinating a script-writing team for a musical - a year long project that will go through December of this year

2) Preparing a small print run of Thou Art But A Warrior

3) Doing illustrations for Kagematsu

4) Helping organize a booth at GenCon

5) Trying to prepare artwork for sale at GenCon

6) Wishing I had time to work on Black Sky

...yeah. So not enough hours in the day.

Anyway. Here's something I did recently that I might explain later

I'm not dead...

Black Sky is occupying rather a lot of my attention. I've finished drafting v1.1 and need to break it again so I can move on to v1.2. I'm very happy because this looks like a game I can actually finish, unlike Delta Choir.

Anyway. I've determined that I WILL finish the cover for Showdown in the next week. Here's a small snippet of where I'm at:

As I mentioned to Seth in my email, the trick will be making him read as "pirate" and not "redcoat" (a lot of it is in the hat). Still, having fun with this one!

Showdown cover - work in progress

Not too long ago I started coloring the cover of Showdown, got something I really liked, and then screwed up the file. I couldn't bring myself to work on it right away again, but tonight I fired up my computer and got about a third of the way through coloring the cover.

I thought I'd post some images of the work in progress, just to give a sense of the progression.

I'm very excited. This is going to be quite awesome.

EDIT: I worked on it a bit more, so I decided to add one more image:

Black Sky: Alpha draft now finished

To quote Hiro: YATTA!

So for the past month and a bit, I've been slaving over finishing an alpha draft of Black Sky - my sci-fi RPG inspired by, but that doesn't slavishly re-create, Firefly.

Don't ask me why, but I decided this evening around 8pm that I was going to finish the alpha draft THIS EVENING. Despite the fact that my parents are coming up for Easter weekend are going to arrive about any minute now, and the section that remained incomplete was the section on conflict, or in other words, the section that makes the game go.

Four thousand words and three and a half hours later, I finished, and probably will have only beat my family's arrival by about half an hour. But the fact remains that I am FINISHED! Which means I get to move on to testing, and having people rip it to pieces! Hooray!

So. If you'd like to take a look at the alpha draft of Black Sky, then please either post here or send me an email: anna (dot) kreider (at) gmail (dot) come. Please, though, expect that if I send you a copy I WILL pester you for feedback.

(PLEASE also refrain from sending this around. If you want to have people ask me for copies, that's cool. But I want to know who has copies of this thing. At this stage, I'm very leery of having lots of totally broken versions of my game floating around the internet that can confuse things when I do eventually publish.)

Please also let me disclaim that this is my first complete game. I have never before created a conflict system and am fully aware that this one will need lots of breaking, I mean, testing before it is functional. Be gentle, I'm not so great at math and I'm sure lots of stuff will need balancing.

Still, I am proud. It took a lot of work, and a lot more time than I would have liked to rip this from my brain meats, but the hardest part is done! Yipee!