gaming Archives - Kathleen Kowal

Articles Tagged with: gaming

December 30, 2015

San Francisco Card Deck

This year, my client gift was a custom deck of playing cards featuring landmarks from San Francisco, a fun personal tribute to the city I love and that so many also love to love.

I am no stranger to designing cards, having created a custom deck of poker cards for a charity poker tournament, as well as two card-based games for Google (Data Center Manager and Launch & Iterate). I love games, and also love designing for them, so deciding on a poker deck as a client gift seemed like the perfect pair.

I started back in the summer, thinking how to organize the face cards. There are a variety of options, such as by neighborhood, or by personalities (techie, hippie, by park, etc. I decided on buildings and landmarks because they had a pretty decent correlation by category for each set of 4 face cards and also had a certain amount of historical and intrinsic value to the people of San Francisco. But, as no option was perfect for capturing every aspect of the city’s culture, heritage and history, some icons didn’t make it, such as Dolores Park, AT&T Park, or the Presidio, to name a few that got cut from the long list.

What I did include were 3 categories of landmarks for each set of face cards.

Kings

SF Card Deck Kings Kings were represented by famous tall buildings or towers: Sutro, TransAmerica, Coit and the Ferry Building clock tower. I think I chose them as Kings purely based on height.

Queens

SF Card Deck Queens Queens were some of the beloved bridges that are either in or connect to San Francisco: Bay Bridge both east and western spans, Golden Gate, and the slightly less famous but delightful bridge in the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park. Perhaps I chose them for queens because they hold some of the real power in the city, as far as connecting us to our neighbors.

Jacks

SF Card Deck Jacks Jacks comprised of other famous tourist attractions including the Painted Ladies in Alamo Square, Alcatraz Island, Lombard Street, and the Palace of Fine Arts, which coincidentally happened to celebrate its 100th birthday this year.

SF Card Deck 2 Of course, the real character of the cards lies in the Joker, whom I aptly chose our dear Emperor Norton to fill the role of. It seemed all too appropriate. (Don’t know who he is? Check out the wikipedia page).

SF Card Deck 3

The final consideration for the cards was the color palette, which is very limited. These colors are the ones I’ve chosen for my personal branding, but it’s not a huge coincidence that the cadmium red (not quite international orange, but certainly in the spirit) and sea green are in play for this San Francisco-based designer.

SF Card Deck 1

Want a deck of your own? Email me, and I can mail you a pack ($20+shipping). While supplies last.

SF Card Deck 4

June 1, 2015

Launch & Iterate Tech Talk

I was invited to Google last week for a really cool Tech Talk presented by the creators of the game Launch & Iterate, that I took part in the graphic design for. It was a really great presentation that gave a detailed explanation of the process of creating the game, from the first email exchange where the notion of making a game was first introduced (a good 2+ years ago now) to where they are now with a final product and lots of positive feedback, with all the lessons learned along the way and the things that went right that they’re most proud of.

Eddie and Jessica walking us through the game’s development

Having worked closely with the team on the project from a relatively early stage of the development, it was still enlightening to hear their stories of all the testing and reasons for all the changes they made along the way. I also learned that their target demographic was actually students who were not already familiar with the genre of Euro-style gaming, which for some reason came as a surprise to me (wait, doesn’t everyone play these games now?? Are you saying I live in a board game bubble?).

Hey, they’re talking about me!

They were very generous in giving me a shout-out in the presentation as the outside professional they hired to pull the game together. I probably couldn’t talk enough about how great of an experience it was to work on this project, and how much I have enjoyed watching (and participating in) its evolution. It was inspiring, and of course, puts the fire under me to once again have a go at creating my own game again.

February 3, 2015

Launch & Iterate: a Google Recruiting Card Game

I am so pleased to finally be able to post the final product of this project. It took almost a year to finalize, and it was so much fun to work on, so am thrilled to finally share it.

Launch+Iterate 2 web

This is a co-op game with the end goal of launching the most products. Designed as a game to play at recruiting events, it is targeted at programmers and people familiar with programming lingo and/or Google, but no reason why anyone who just loves games couldn’t play it, too.

The game design and mechanics were already mostly defined by the time the Google team who worked on it decided they were ready to reach out to a designer to create the game’s art. I came in to do a test round with their scratch deck and I was immediately inspired. They had a really good concept for game play, fun and clever ways to incorporate the Google brand and programming job functions into the theme of the game, and also had already compiled most of the details about verbiage, card distribution, game balance, etc. So it was my job to take the pieces and ideas and put them into a cohesive looking deck with fun, bold, Google-esque graphics.

I have played enough card games to understand some of the more practical elements required in making a good deck of cards, such as combining colors with symbols to make identifying types of cards easier (especially for color blind folks), putting at-a-glance info on the sides and corners of cards since they’re typically held fanned out in your hand, and also making sure layouts are consistent, fonts are legible, and type isn’t too small. These basic requirements, along with keeping text and pertinent design elements within the proper margins, were my guides in getting the designs started. I also had the benefit of having a well-defined brand to work with, which uses eye-catching, bold, primary colors (they also have their own font!).

It’s a thrill to see how this project evolved. I commend my contact at Google immensely for being such a great communicator. She was very organized and thoughtful with feedback (both her own and what she compiled and filtered down to me from the rest of the team), and I feel the feedback and changes they suggested really furthered the design immensely. Looking back on some of my round 1 and 2 ideas makes the excellence of their input and insight so clear as you compare it to our final product. I absolutely love when a project comes together in such a way.

So I started with a relatively blank canvas. The scratch deck they had created had a rough card layout with a solid bar of color on the left side with text on the blank space adjacent. It wasn’t a bad starting point, since the majority of the cards would be hand-held, and having that left bar for at-a-glance icons turned out to the basis for the final design of most of the cards in the deck.

Sample of Tech Cards

So, a brief synopsis, there are Tech Cards, Event Cards, Launch Cards, as well as penalty/bonus cards, in addition to 4 “Tech Stack Base” cards.

Basic Game Layout, Tech Stack Base cards “F0,” “A0,” “S0,” and “T0” in the center, Tech draw pile on the left, Launch cards below that, Event cards bottom right, and then penalty/bonus cards available as needed.

Tech cards are split into Tech Stack cards (labeled with F, A, S, or T and numbered 1-7) that will get piled on top of one of the 4 coordinating stacks on the game area. Each color is assigned a color and shape (blue/square, red/circle, yellow/4-pointed star or green/triangle).

Additionally, there are “One-Shot” Tech cards that do not get stacked on the base piles, but are instead used one time and then discarded and are black with no attached symbol.

Other cards in the deck are not held in-hand such as the Tech Stack Base cards, Penalty/Bonus Cards, Launches, and Events.

Penalty and Bonus Cards

Penalty Cards will either get placed on top of a Stack, or in front of a Player.

Launch Cards are the basis of how you earn points in the game, by earning Users.

Launch Cards

All the Launch cards were cleverly designed as one of Google’s April Fool jokes (aka, products that were not real and were also far-fetched and hilarious). Examples such as Scratch and Sniff Google Searches, Locate a nearby kitten, Google Translate for Animals, etc.

I created the art for these based on the graphics or videos that still remain on Google’s April Fool websites and YouTube, keeping it as close to the originals as an Illustrator working with vectors can (only raster images that remain are the Google Maps 8-bit logo and the $20 bill coming out of Google Mobile ATM).

The thing I found most illuminating now that I’ve had a little break from working on the project and can now sit back and see the final product against the many revisions we worked through to get there, are the Event cards.

Event Cards

These guys really went through some transformations.

Event Card Proposed Design, Phase 1

Event Card Proposed Design, Phase 2

Event Card Proposed Design, Phase 3

Event Card Proposed Design, Phase 4, with 4 options for layout

Event Card Proposed Design, Phase 5 – getting close, but not quite right.

Event Card Proposed Design, Phase 6 – with 4 options for treatment.

I really enjoy how the eventually turned out, and find the process in getting to that point so valuable and interesting.

This is a culmination of roughly 70 hours of work for me over the course of 10 months including a folded page with instructions (not including the Visually Impaired version we augmented the layout for). I loved every minute and it inspired me to want to design and create the art for my own games (it’s really hard, btw). I really loved brainstorming with a team of super smart people to realize what I believe is a really thoughtfully designed game. I will jump on any chance to do it again.

For you Board Game Geeks, here’s a link to the game on BGG.

October 1, 2013

Google Datacenter Manager: The Game

I was very pleased to work on this little side project that a Google employee requested design assistance on. He had in the past create a few Google fan/Google employee exclusive projects like t-shirts, and had the great idea to put Google into a card game that he and his fellow Google/Game enthusiasts could play during their lunch break.

We used the base of a game called Palastgefluster, a German card game that is apparently not as obscure as it sounds (even though I don’t think even my nerdiest of board game geeks I know have ever heard of it). But, my client knew it well and thought the structure would work really well to make a Google parody of it.

I’ll walk you through it and how we adapted it for Google, which by the way I should mention, this game is not sponsored by, condoned by, or paid for by Google, but they did give us our blessing on the proof which ensures that all the logos and colors were up to their specifications.

PalastActions

Anyway, the cards we were working off of were in a medieval/knight/castle style with lots of textures and shading. I figured that wasn’t quite right for Google, so cleaned up the background, and stuck to the bright solid colors that Google uses in its logo. We had to add an additional color to the palette, so chose an equally bright and vibrant purple, and have a neutral gray as well.

Our plan with the Google version was to pair Apps with actions (seen above, the actions are a little cryptic in their native German – but each character you see actually represents a specific action you can take on your turn). In order to know which action each card represents, you can either piece together the illustration at the top of the card, or follow a cheat sheet that you keep beside you at all times. It’s easier when the actions are described as verbs instead of character names (also being in English is helpful, for those of us who are a little rusty on our German).

The game designer/redesigner, Richard, paired up the actions with corresponding Google Apps that seemed appropriate for what action they represented. Maps = Show, YouTube = Discard/Draw, Android = Return to Hand, Gmail = Trade, Chrome = Swap, Search = well, Search, obviously, and Labs = No action. I thought it was quite clever.

So each player is associated with a color (above is the green set of the cards). There are 5 players with 7 sets of action cards, yellow, red, green, blue, purple, and 2 sets of neutral grey. Each player gets a set of score keeping cards and the above mentioned reference cards that explain exactly what each action means. You place your reference card on top of the score card and slide it down as you earn points.

The action cards are meant to be held uni-directionally, unlike playing cards where you can flip them any which way. But, each corner is marked with a few helpful codes to make it easier to play when fanned out in your hand. 1st, we have a shape associated with each color for anyone with color blindness issues (these shapes are also present on the score cards, top left). 2nd, we have a symbol associated with that action, which is repeated on the reference cards for an easy key as well.

Ok, then we also have SRE cards (stands for Site Reliability Engineering which apparently is responsible for keeping the Apps afloat on google.com. In game terms, these are the cards that when put into play disable certain functions, making the corresponding action card in your hand unplayable. The backs of those cards is a patch that Google Engineers get when they’ve gone through the SRE program – a little insider info.

You can see on the SRE cards that we named them based on where there are major Google hubs around the globe, so I popped in little google map images (hard to believe these images are already outdated since Google updated their maps graphics since we finalized this project!). The Mission control map is centered over Houston, which was my own funny idea about where “Mission Control” is (not really Google related, but who could disagree).

The only cards left are the rules, which honestly sound a little daunting, but once you play a round or two, it becomes very clear how to play. The game is relatively quick; a great lunch-time option. Minimum of 3 players is needed to play, and typically you play best of 3 rounds to determine a winner. I won’t go into the rules of how to play exactly, but you’re welcome to come and play with me some time if you’re that curious.

Anyway, I had a lot of fun working on this and am really happy with how it turned out. Looking forward to playing my first round!