Nay Saga Devlog 1: Planning & Concept Card Layouts

I'm back with another devlog series for my 2024 project: Nay Saga! It's a card game that I decided to create as my year-long project. Similar to my 2023 project, The Nays Origins, I'm writing these blog posts over a year ago but posting them now to showcase my process of the project. I'll be posting these every week to talk through the whole production. These will also be from the perspective of the time, so sometimes I'll talk about ideas and directions I'm going, but that may not reflect the final version of the game (as these are scheduled and not updated after writing them initially).

I have a massive document with all of my game ideas and it was actually in November 2023 that I was browsing through it and remembered my idea for a physical board/card game. I was talking about the idea with my roommate and I had a burst of motivation to make it for my 2024 project.

I brainstormed ideas for how the game would play and I had a few different ideas for how it could go. I figured I would test all of them after I had some paper prototypes and see which one was most fun and made most sense. My idea is to potentially include all of them as variations in the rule book so players can kind of choose which way to play it, or it'll be a series of rounds where each round plays differently. We'll find out!

Right now my idea is that it'll be a card game that involves statistics about a bunch of characters in The Nays. Back in 2014 I started this project called Nay-A-Day where I would draw a character from The Nays every day on their birthday. I continued it for awhile so actually ended up drawing a lot of the main characters and even some background ones through it. 

Back in 2019 I had this idea for a game called "NAD Saga" where it would be about all of the more background characters that I drew and I would use those drawings for it. It didn't really go anywhere, but it kind of inspired this. I decided that I wanted to use those drawings as the art for the cards! I probably won't have all 1037+ characters in this game, but I could have a lot of them and it could be something I could keep on adding to as I draw more of these!

So this inspired me to draw more of these Nay-A-Day drawings so I could have some more updated art. I just continued where I left off and, though they took a lot longer to draw, it was a great way to make new art for this card game!

Then I gathered my inspirations of card designs that I like. I knew I wanted to have some kind of statistics to really tie into the characters' personalities. So I was taking a look at how many different stats are typically displayed on cards in the games that I enjoyed playing. I deduced it's generally 4 at maximum on average (outside of the name of the card and the drawing of the character). So I decided to make 1 type (which determines the color) and then 6 "traits" that differ from character to character. By making them all just 1 category of traits, it makes it easier to keep track of and technically means I only really have 2 aspects (just a bunch of different trait icons that could match up).

So then I started to concept some ideas in my sketchbook. I started out really rough. Tiny thumbnails to get my ideas out there. I love starting this way because it means I can quickly iterate and don't spent a lot of time on them. It really helps me get my ideas out there.

I decided to trace some bicycle cards to get the actual size and dimensions of the cards so I could prototype a little bigger but still rough. I was starting to like the layout of having the traits as icons and the type being the color scheme.

Then I decided to go onto TheGameCrafter website to research the exact templates. I downloaded the Poker cards because those seemed like the most standard cards and were biggest of the three options. So I brought it into Photoshop and started to concept some ideas.

I started with one of my more recent NAD characters and arranged some elements similar to the concepts I liked from my sketchbook. I started to realize that this looked pretty good with this character, but might be awkward with more square-shaped proportioned drawings.

I took a few characters of different sizes that I had already drawn to try and find a layout that could fit for all different sizes. I moved some elements around and was starting to get somewhere.

I still wasn't sure how I felt about the characters who are much taller than wide; it just felt like a lot of empty space to me and I wasn't sure if I liked that. So I tried another layout idea that has a higher res version of them from the waist up basically and then a tiny image faded of the full body. That way it could kind of be rearranged however works.

Then I started to put together the spreadsheet so I could figure out which traits I was going to use. I was trying to come up with ones that could be universal enough to be used by multiple characters, but also specific enough to describe the character. It was challenging and I hope I don't have too many options.

I showed the concepts that I did to my friends and they gave me some feedback, like trying to turn the full body versions into more of a background or maybe swap and have the close-up in back. So I started to sketch out some new concepts on paper based on some of the ideas that they gave me.

Then I started to digitize those and come up with new ideas. I was starting to like the idea of having a straight line that all of the traits are in, to keep them organized in one row rather than pairing them up. It felt a lot cleaner to me.

From there, I got more feedback and continued to iterate new designs. I sketched out a few more tiny thumbnails to come up with ideas on how I could maybe slightly curve the line instead of it being straight. I also wanted to pull the type up next to the name since I was having trouble fitting it in other positions in my previous concepts.

So then I made a few more digital concepts based on those. I realized something I liked about my sketchbook concepts was not having a full border around the cards. I played around with that a bit and ended up liking that more.

Right now I'm leaning towards the two above, but still not 100% sold. I'm going to think on it for a bit and see how I'm feeling when I come back to them. I'm happy with the progress I've made and looking forward to coming up with final icon designs and colors!