Demo night at Family Game Store on April 18

If you're in the DC area, come demo Norsaga with its creators! On Saturday, April 18th 2015, from 6pm to midnight we'll be at the Family Game Store in Savage Mill, MD.

http://www.familygamestore.net/

If you haven't made up your mind about backing our Kickstarter, and don't want to cut a bunch of paper for the free Print & Play version, this will be your chance to try the real thing!

The demo will be during their regularly scheduled Saturday game night, so you'll also have a chance to check out all the other great games they stock. Years ago Kevin got a copy of the awesome out-of-print game Gheos from them! (Try finding that online.) So either way, you'll be happy you came by.

Norsaga Art Design, Part 1

process YY1

This is the first in a series of articles tracing the creation of Norsaga’s artwork. To see where it ends up, check out the gallery on the main site.

If you browse back through these blog posts you'll notice Kevin's gone into quite a bit of depth on the design of Norsaga's gameplay. Now it's my turn to cover how the artwork came to be, starting with the look of the yellow Faith heroes.

Yellow was actually the last color to be concepted, and the most difficult. While the body types for the other three colors are fairly exaggerated and based off of distinctive shapes, the yellow silhouette is a square. Their feel revolved around defense and large shields, things which generally obscure the little character details being emphasized in Norsaga.

concept_Y1

Here's Kevin's early mockup of the stylistic elements for yellow; this was before the triangle silhouette was traded to red. We initially gave yellow dominion over large hats and helmets, an idea we later rejected because it hid heroes' faces. Below you can see what elements we finally settled on.

parts_of_a_YY

The yellow/yellow Champions show off every possible yellow design element, and most prominently feature the defensive theme with their large shields. While I was doing all of the drawing at this point, I was lucky to have a bunch of great concept sketches from Kevin that gave me piles of little details to draw from.

concept_Y2

Whenever I needed a pouch, or a trinket, or a shield detail, I'd start by pulling out these pages full of reference doodles, and expand from there. In some cases I liked Kevin's sketches so much I copied his designs exactly (notice the totem in the middle, which went to Finn Sigilsworn).

Having established what made a hero yellow, I then mixed in identifying traits from the other colors to show the varying recessives. See the yellow/green healer below, showing a bunch of green's minor traits.

parts_of_a_YG

This was another aspect that Kevin went over thoroughly with me before I started drawing, and it's thanks to him there are so many iconic features for each color. In the end, you can glance at any hero in the game and figure out what their dominant and recessive traits are from the artwork.

I'll be covering the other heroes and sagas in future updates. For anyone currently backing our Kickstarter at the LEGEND, MYTH, or ETERNAL levels, you should soon have a clear idea of what colors you want your custom hero to be!

-Matthew

Kickstarter Stories #1

We've collected some neat stories in the last year as we worked to bring Norsaga to Kickstarter. This is one of them, and time permitting I'd like to cover some others, so it's optimistically named #1.

As soon as we decided to take Norsaga to Gen Con 2014, my brother and I knew Kickstarter was a possibility. Everything I read in my research, and all the advice we got at Gen Con,  was that you need to make people excited about your project before it ever becomes tangible. That's not an easy thing to do. Getting people to lay hands on our prototype at the convention was great, but there were 6 months between then and our Kickstarter launch during which we had to look for ways to spread awareness of the game.

I live in a relatively out-of-the-way area of Maryland but  we're still fortunate to have a few local game stores. So my roommate and I packed up a prototype back in November and swung by their weekly game night. The 4 regulars seemed a little leery of us crashing in and delaying their plans to play Munchkin Loot Letter, but they let us demo Norsaga for them. It was a quick intro game (no advanced cards), and by the end they were enjoying themselves. We headed out and hoped maybe they'd remember us.

Fast forward 4 months. The day before launching the Kickstarter, I was scouring Google for any mention of our game and a new set of keywords pointed me toward a podcast I'd never heard of. Norsaga was one of the tags for that episode, but nary another mention on the page. So I hit play.

Sure enough, about a minute in and the host starts talking about random dudes showing up and forcing him and his group to play Norsaga. I listened to it twice, trying to figure out which of our prototypes might have slipped into the wild and been demoed to him, before I realized it was myself and my roommate he was talking about. There was no mention that the podcast was based in Maryland, or mention of the store's name, or anything else, but it was definitely that incident.

I wouldn't have tried to guess the odds that one of the 4 people who demoed in November would have their own gaming podcast and that we'd make that much of an impression, but it was really cool. I dropped by their game night again tonight to demo it to the same gentleman and share this story with him.

His name is Chris Renshaw, the podcast is called Obsessive Comics Disorder, and you can listen to the episode in question here.

- Matthew

Norsaga is now live on Kickstarter!

You can pledge $20 for your copy today and show your support:

http://norsaga.meromorph.com/kickstarter

Shipping is only $1 to the US, Canada, and EU, $5 to the rest of the world. For international backers, the shipped game will be below VAT and duty thresholds so you won't get hit with those fees.

If you want to do even more to help us fund this campaign and maybe unlock some exciting stretch goals, you can share the announcement on facebook and twitter.