CORAL COVE: ANALYZING THE HEARTHSTONE CARD

I have done some fantasy / sci-fi work on digital cards before. Here is one that was rejected by Spells of Genesis (SOG).

The artwork with the servers and dragon is mine. The frame is SOG's.

It fit the puzzle I was working on - for an entity which shall not be named - , but the designers at SOG said it didn't fit their style.

When I mention the word asset, I refer to the card art. My old friends who are world class video game character designers would call game art asset because it brought value to the game, but also had the potential to create multiple streams of revenue for itself.

One nice thing about making a brand new game is that I get to determine when an asset is done. If I see that making 5 -10 assets is an effective way to figure out the best 2 assets, then that is what I'll do. Spending hours on one asset (like I did with the server dragon image) just to get rejected definitely cut off my inspiration.

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Todo List:

• Research Inspiration / Intro to Hearthstone
• Analyzing the Hearthstone Card Frame + Recreating Hearthstone-esque art (this post)
• Research successful Hearthstone fan submissions + Design a card to be submitted to Hearthstone
• Use the lessons learned, to finish Coral Cove.
• Try out Coral Cove in a post

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This is the part I love doing. Taking a close look at art that gives me feelings of home, ectasy, and belonging, and slicing it up to understand its source of power.

I will begin by analyzing the 6 mana Hearthstone card called the Ivory Knight.

It is important to note that everything except the asset art is a frame that is reused. The top layer of the frame changes several times, but the gestault remains and is never lost across the hundreds of cards in Hearthstone.

Here is my analysis of the same card.

If I count all the elements that make up this gorgeous card I get the number 22. In the back of my head, I know when I use GIMP to draw, I will most likely not use more than 22 layers.

Redux

At this point, I need to figure out what to remove, before I get knee deep in my own game. This decision will also help me focus my design time / practice on aspects I know will show up in my game.

I think the concept of mana will initially not be necessary so it will get tossed. I want to play this game in a few Steemit posts with Steemians and I'll just ask them to choose a limited number of their cards.

I also want to replace health with something that symbolizes oxygen. I may make the blood blue to reflect blue blood.

I will not give cards a rarity.

Design

I have chosen to do the initial design in Inkscape, which will give me accuracy and scalability. If I want to make a poster of a whale card, then I can make it the size of a business card or a 16' x 12' poster and still have the same crisp image.

If I only did this asset in vector, I may loose some of the worn and tattered feeling Hearthstone artists are able to achieve. I will have to revisit the art after the vector is complete to see how close I can get to the original design in vectors.

Card Frame Analysis

I want to use this analysis to get a first draft of the coral cove card frame. This will surround any asset art I make or other artists make. Some details may be generated by a script to get a consistently random feel (eg. ocean waves, sand, rocks). But for now everything will be done manually.

Oxygen Tank

In my mind, there will be a section of the card to show Oxygen and another section to show Attack. Over a few days, I realized that I want an oxygen tank to represent the oxygen value, and Poseidon's trident to represent the attack value.

Using google search I am able to review several styles of oxygen tanks.

The paint in this image is distinctly reflective and creates crisp color lanes I can replicate.

I left the color white, because choosing to draw reflections and shades in the next steps allows me to make a oxygen container whatever color I want. It will even allow me to fade colors.

Trident / Attack Value

I start the trident by reviewing google search results.

There isn't one trident that stands out, which means I will borrow concepts from two or three images.

The horizontal symmetry in the spear means only half of the design is necessary and can be copied to make the other half.

Here is the final spear.

Layer 6: Kelp

In my imagination Layer 6 for Coral Cove would be a floating layer of dark kelp.

Google search yielded the following options:

This kelp caught my eye.

You'll see how I used this kelp in the next few images.

Combine

I had a burst of energy and a bit of time and just quickly got a version out for the rest of the elements in the card.

Layers 1-4 just required me doing a sloppy copy, a loose and lazy trace of some object, of the original card. I found a nice feature called linked offset in Inkscape that would allow me to drag a note to grow a dynamic outline around a target shape.

I will use this sheet to see how everything looks together and how each individual piece looks. It is closer to what I am looking for, but the remaining work will be to subtract from this clean look. I could make this more gritty, or more like it has fallen on the bottom of a shallow tide pool. We'll see what happens!

Subtract

Everything from here on in will be done using GIMP, which is an open source version of Photoshop. Here we will use various brushes, highlights, darkening techniques, and anything else I can think of.

I spent 30 minutes or so really messing up the image and adding darks and lights of various brushes. Here is the end result.

Making the Mighty Minnow

All that is left is to make that first character. I chose a minnow, or more specifically Mighty Minnow, because that will be a card with a lot of power due to the amount of minnows summoned at once.

Here are my google search results.

The one that stands out is the one with the most color. Hearthstone cards typically have an interesting color play and contrast happening on each card. I will use the colorful minnow and make sure that the accent color shows up in the background as well.

I am using this minnow to create the color palette for the illustrated minnow I will create.

Here is my first draft.

With a version of the minnow complete, I now have to work on making bubbles. A google search shows these fine bubbles.

There is something very refreshing about these bubbles. I also love how some bubbles are blurred to get a feeling of depth.

In inkscape you can create an image and use that as on-the-fly brush. I did that with one bubble I made and was able to make this image.

When I swap in the bubble background and bring in the minnow on a separate layer so it can float above the card a bit, I get this image of the first card.

At this point, I was so happy to be done! It was almost midnight and I was tired. But I remembered I didn't finish the attack and oxygen parts of the card.

There! That is a decent stopping point.