Cardboard Love

I completed Cardboard Citizens last week and emailed them to the playtesters. I decided to give them that (and the game rules when those are done) as thanks for helping test the game. As I said before, I’m going to be doing cardboard walls and floors also. Yesterday I came across this funny cartoon on the Penny Arcade site. If you haven’t read them before and you play computer games (or just have a dark and sometimes violent sense of humor) check them out. It’s hilarious.

I’ve been working on renders for the game for the last week, but in most case it’s been a painless experience. Last night, however, it was a pain in the ass. I was originally doing a render of a woman casting an ice psionic so I could add it to the Abilities chapter for, you guessed it, ice psionics. I started messing around with it, including adding an eery blue light and a frosty FX prop (which I also colored blue). Well, I got about 30 minutes into it and realized it totally sucked. The blue looked more like the woman had chewed some forbidden gum at the Willy Wonka Chocolate Factory. So, I decided to make a radical change: I changed both her hair and her dress to red and removed the blue FX prop, replacing it with an orange one and -- voila! -- I had a woman casting a fire psionic! I put it all together in photoshop with a black background. I’m happy with the result, and I think it’s in keeping with the previous psionic render. However, it took me over an hour to do the whole thing. Since I have a lot of these renders to do, I hope the rest won’t be as time consuming.