Cosmic
Conquest
About
In this 18 card wallet game, you co-operate with 2 other players in order to defeat the aliens on a planet that you all crash landed on! The cards consist of 1 planet card, 4 character cards, and 13 item cards.
For this project, I created all of the item and planet designs, as well as the designs of the rulebook. Alongside the art, I also helped create the design of the overall gameplay.
Project Preview
TLDR
-
Created the first early concept of the game
-
Created the early version of the game with paper
-
Balanced the game through excel
-
Prepared the cards for InDesign
-
Designed all the card icons
-
Connected all the excel information to important boxes for each card in InDesign
-
Designed the rulebook diagrams
-
Designed the game logo
Game Design
First Concept
As a team, we decided on a co-op playstyle pretty early on, but designing a co-op game with very little available cards was a tough decision. I took it upon myself to figure out the possibilities of gameplay, and created an early prototype of the card game out of paper scraps.
early designs of the cards
Card Balancing
It was important to make sure there is no scenario where it is impossible to win or where one character is more likely to win than others. For this, I tracked each card on an excel spreadsheet, including all other information that is relevant to each card.
calculating probabilities of character wins
list of all items on one side of the cards
Card Creation
Another spreadsheet was created for the purposes of working with Adobe InDesign, and to keep each card easily sorted and created in bulk. Working with InDesign's "tagging" system, all the information was put on the spreadsheet, and then imported into InDesign to create the cards.
Icon Art
Initial Designs and Final Designs
The first designs were created alongside the first iterations of the cards.
The original idea behind the items you collect would be items that can be found on an alien planet, alien helpers, and items that pertained to each character specifically. The goals were to keep the items correct to the narrative, as well as the world.
Rulebook Design
Rulebook Layout
I began by transferring everything that was written in the rulebook into InDesign.
two pages of the rulebook in InDesign
To fit the required information in, I had to optimize the used space by taking away unnecessary information. To make it even easier to read, I highlighted important information in a contrasting colour to the background.
Diagrams
In accompany to the text, I created visual representations of complex mechanics to help players comprehend the actions in a visual way.
two diagrams showing two types of card trading
Game Logo
As an important part of the front page of the rulebook, as well as the backs of the character cards, a logo was created for the title of the game. I designed the concept, as well as the final version of the logo.
