Portrait, Lettuce, and Tomato

I’m rapidly preparing to make Last Van Standing available to a larger group of players. It’s time for strangers on the Internet to tell me about the rough edges in the way only strangers on the Internet can. So I’ve been focusing on making my play materials more user friendly. Writing tutorials, finding ways to make the move templates less fiddly, and making the various cards distinguishable from one another. Also a bit prettier.

With a strong need for some card art and the determination to accept nearly anything, I was fortunate enough to stumble on a piece of software called Game Character Hub. It’s intended for use with RPG Maker, but once I found out it could randomly generate arbitrary quantities of character portraits, well … yep.gif

My ability to draw is limited, but selecting appropriate stock art is much easier. Like ordering from the kids menu easy: It’s all pictures of bland, forgettable things that will get a kid to their next meal. So where intent and skill take too much time, snap judgments win out! Generate 400 faces, thrown them on my phone, then browse at my leisure. Choose only the best!  Swipe, swipe, swipe. This is easily the weirdest Tinder clone ever*.

*: it can’t last.

My test art style, I’ve decided, will be a combination of these anime style character portraits, and line-traced versions of the character’s spirit machine in the background.

No, it’s not what I want in the finished game, but it’s evocative! Bold!  Not-so-bad looking!

Would I recommend this over, say, using photos of movie characters? Well, they fill space and I’m allowed to use them everywhere.  

Sometimes having a strong character association from a well known movie works, but I have a lot of characters, and they aren’t all high-stakes hero types. I would like some of the characters to become more distinct in your mind with play, because they failed you spectacularly or were involved in good games. Using movie heroes might create too strong a first impression. Since some of the characters are intentionally nondescript, these portraits do what I need them to.

For a discussion of whether including lots of nondescript characters in your game is a good or bad idea, well … what are blogs, if not a convenient way to publicly catalog the ways in which we have been wrong? I’m not sure if this decision holds up yet, but even a bad decision can be the right one if it gets you to the next decision!  Onward!

Tools used:

• Inkscape
• Game Character Hub
• this picture of a sandwich