John's cat-astrophe

Timeline:

8 weeks (Feb 12 - April 7)

What is this project?

A board game group project for IAT 313 - Narrative and New Media, which story is based on 'John's cat-astrophe', a script written by our classmates Elizabeth Duong-Thai Victoria Lo, which is a story of an obsessed, introverted workaholic at an experimental cat food company who accidentally switched lives with his house cat after eating an experimental pebble embedded hamburger, and found the true meaning to life on the journey to switch back to his original body.

Fun fact - one of the writers of the script bought the hardcopy of our project during the final project showcase!

Team:

Copywriters: Brendan Chow and Grace Lo

Game mechanics and graphic designer, Assisting illustrator: Alyssa N. Umbal

Main Illustrator: Angela Lee

Software involved

Illustration: Procreate

Compiling texts and illustrations(Draft): Google Docs

Compiling texts and illustrations into card layout: Figma

an image showing the physical version of the card game

Ideation process (week 1-6)

On the start of my ideation process, after receiving a children's book-style storyboard from my groupmates, I originally went with a cartoonish look because of the comedic and unserious nature of the script, with a heavy emphasis on John's expressions in character design for comedic effect. After some peer review sessions, we decided to change the art direction to an japanese anime 'chibi' style which is similar to the style of the Japanese TRPG game we took inspiration from, while sticking to the principle to make John a 'silly looking man', I designed the visuals for personalities of John with references to internet memes and cliche anime styles, while his cat form leans more towards the traditional Tom and Jerry style. Sadly, a majority of these were discarded with the major change right before the final iteration.

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The very first ideation draft (top left: the storyboard, bottom left: my discord message to my groupmates)

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Sketches for human and cat form of John

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The artstyle for the first two iterations of the same card

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Final design (week 7-8)

We soon discovered that our game mechanics and the contents needs changing, meaning we need a start over for the illustrations. At this point, I was contacted by my co-illustrator and realised she couldn't immitate the artstyle I was used to, therefore this time me and the co-illustrator worked together to find a style we can truly work together with and re-used some of my older designes, so that we can finish in a short period of time, leading to the new silhouette style in the third iteration, which is a style that we can truly say it is a product of teamwork. The main reason for the silhoutte style is becaues that we don't have much time to finish another iteration before the deadline, therefore my co-illustrator suggested this style to minimise the time needed for coloring or making the sketch look finished. Other than that, I polished the cards representing different personalities of John while she worked on the character cards.

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The illustrations I did for the final iteration

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My illustrations with card layout

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Some re-used composition from previous iterations

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The final arts of 5 personalities of John

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The 3 iterations of illustrations

At first we were planning to make our game to follow the linear narrative structure of the script from the first two iterations, however we received feedbacks that the game lacks replayability and freedom for players to decide their fate, therefore we remade all the cards to be random events the players can encounter when following the main events on rulebook without following a linear narrative, which makes our final product similar to a cat version of dungeon and dragons. On the first iteration the artstyle looks quite unconsistent and takes too long to polish, on the second iteration I chose a style much more faster for me to draw but later realised my co-illustrator can't draw in this style, which led to the final iteration.

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The illustrastions of first iteration

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The illustrastions of second iteration

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The illustrastions of final iteration

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Reflection

Because this was the first group project where I played a major role in illustration, I was initially too eager to prove my skills to the team, I went ahead and created numerous illustrations assuming my co-illustrator could easily adapt to my style, which taught me an important lesson of when working with multiple artists, it's crucial to confirm details with my partners before starting, rather than doing a lot of work only to scrap it later. I also learnt that in the process of creating, never be too attached to what I created because there is always space for improvements as seen in my process of 3 iterations of illustrations. Additionally, my focus on making the cards look good led to inconsistencies in the illustrations, making them less believable as assets for the same game, which can also lead to a lot of re-doing afterwards.

image showing our groups reaction of having to redo everything after peer reviews but as cats