Mixing Up the Game Design Formula: An Indie Art Studio’s Experience

One of the greatest creative surprises I’ve experienced as a designer/publisher is letting art impact my game designs. While I recall it happening first with Scythe, I’m sure it also happened before then with Euphoria, and it has certainly happened after that with Charterstone and Tapestry. Watching the art unfold during the design process is incredibly inspiring.

So I was intrigued last week when I heard from Laurens Colson of Authocracy Studios about a project they’ve been working on (Paragons: Age of Champions) that was built from the art up. Laurens offered to share their perspective on today’s blog. Thanks Laurens!

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What is Authocracy Studios?

Having spent 3 years in the illustrated books world, we recently decided it was time to make public our tabletop card game passion project.

We’re Authocracy Studios, a small team of independent artists: illustrators, animators, composers, writers, and all-purpose creatives who want to empower creatives to follow their passion and make it their life’s work. We care about that so much that we’ve baked it into our name, ‘Authocracy: Rule of the Author’.

We’ve been fortunate enough to have some really positive early feedback on our game, and Jamey has been kind enough to offer his platform to let us share our experience with you. We’ve come into the game design world from a very different space which has resulted in a very exciting (if at times a bit bumpy) ride.

I’m Laurens, the American co-founder of Authocracy (along with two Brits and a South African), and this is the story of how our game ‘Paragons: Age of Champions’ came to be. It’s probably coming from a space that will seem very different from your own, but that’s okay!

We absolutely believe that there are many paths to doing this whole game designing business well. We’re just hoping to provide a little bit of a thought-provoking shakeup: a glimpse at how an art studio might think about these things, so that maybe if you’re stuck on some part of this process, our experience might be beneficial to you.

Where ‘Paragons: Age of Champions’ Came From 

Authocracy started as a company that produced what we called ‘highly illustrated fiction’, which is to say that we published books where every double-page spread of our fantasy and sci-fi books included some form of digital art.

But our creatives all have many hands in different ideas and projects. In my case, that was the dream of a game that felt like my favorite TCGs, like Magic and Hearthstone, but didn’t cost a fortune to play. I wanted it to have that same premium feel, that same sense of prestige and depth of strategy, without the price tag and without the monetization that leaned heavily on people’s gambling and/or addictive tendencies for revenue.

We’re all very close friends at the company, so the game idea eventually came up. The team loved it, so we brought in my friend and game co-designer Tim Kuhn, and it was all hands on deck (so to speak.) We immediately started the iteration phase, and the rest is history.

So, I can imagine that you might be thinking, “well, that’s great, but I don’t see how that’s very different from how anyone starts this process, just that you’ve got a bunch of people with skill sets already amenable to doing it well.” And that’s fair, but…

Our Best Resource Was Our Work As Storytellers

Killer game art is such a special thing. I think many of us at least intuitively can acknowledge that the difference between a great game and ‘one of the greats’ is the presentation. For me, Mysterium is a tabletop game that will always stand out as particularly exceptional on account of its art. But there’s a story there: you can’t just get a product like that by commissioning the right artists. It takes a village.

That’s what our team had that I think was special. We spent 1,000 days cultivating highly immersive worlds and character narratives that were curated to draw people into the experience and live it as if it were their own. That doesn’t necessarily apply to game mechanics, but when you’re dealing with hundreds of pieces of game art: it matters.

When we painted the Arcane Bombadier, we started with a whole batch of important questions:

• This is a goblinoid alchemist who is a madman. What should he look like?
• What do goblinoids look like in this setting? We’ll be publishing a book in it eventually, might as well get it right now!
• How do we get across the tone of the world in the design of this character? It’s not quite cartoony, but very vibrant and not at all representational.

It took a while to ‘get it right’. That times 100+ unique card types and I’m sure you can imagine how complex it gets! The answer was for the creators (Tim and me) to work closely with our draft artist Ben to pinpoint the design principles for the setting, then for Ben to communicate them to the project artist Brandon through draft sketches that were very rough but highlighted (through line art, light, and color) the ‘essence’ of what needed to be captured for each card.

Okay, but What’s the Takeaway Here?

The fact of the matter is, most people aren’t in a position to be able to found their own art studio. So then what’s the value-added from this blog entry? Well, not everything we do requires that kind of expertise. Most of it doesn’t.

Instead of having to hire a draft artist, make a Pinterest account and start developing collections of visual elements for the artist you commission to reference for each asset they make for you. Now annotate them so that they know exactly what you like about them. Lots of professional studios do that, and it’s like a huge cheat sheet for the artist you’ve assigned to paint the thing.

Instead of developing whole books, maybe seek out a talented-but-undiscovered writer who can use your game mechanics as a prompt. Have them build up lore around each aspect of the game. In fact, hand that to your artist as well! There are so many gifted writers out there, and the bar for entry is so high in that field that most would leap at the opportunity to work on a project like this on your terms. And it’s your game, so you always get the final say. You’ve nothing to lose where that’s concerned.

And instead of thinking of it as a game for which you make assets, maybe think of it as a game that creates play in an imaginary space, and that the space in question may be every bit as important as the mechanics that engages it through that play. Immersion and interaction in perfect balance: that’s the way we came to view it.

But what do you think? I’ll be keeping an eye on the comment section to read and respond as best I am able.

If you’re curious about the art and design of Paragons: Age of Champions, it’s now live on Kickstarter.

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Thanks again, Laurens! I’m curious to hear how other game designers have worked with artists during the creative process and if the art has impacted the mechanisms.

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