Ninja Dice: Kage Masters
Successfully Kickstarted March 2015. Release November 2015.
An expansion to the core game, Ninja Dice, by Greenbrier Games. Originally designed by Rocco Privetera, then handed off to me for the bulk of development and marketing. I handled everything from game balance to card design, from animating promotional videos to writing the Kickstarter content.
An expansion to the core game, Ninja Dice, by Greenbrier Games. Originally designed by Rocco Privetera, then handed off to me for the bulk of development and marketing. I handled everything from game balance to card design, from animating promotional videos to writing the Kickstarter content.
My Roles
Trailer
Voiceover by Julie Ahern. Script, filming, video editing, animations, and sound effects by me. While I wish I had had better equipment to improve the sound and video quality, I am proud of what I was able to accomplish with my personal camera, After Effects, and Adobe Audition.
Game Design
Below, Left: The Assassin card with rules text from the first prototype of the expansion, with my card design.
Below, Right: The Assassin card after my design upgrade. My goal was to add more ways for players to interact, and to give each character a unique feel that added to that characters' story. Each design went through rounds of playtesting to make sure the new abilities were easy to understand and well balanced.
Below, Right: The Assassin card after my design upgrade. My goal was to add more ways for players to interact, and to give each character a unique feel that added to that characters' story. Each design went through rounds of playtesting to make sure the new abilities were easy to understand and well balanced.
Iconography
I made the icons for Kage Masters as vector art in Adobe Illustrator. Iconography is always an exciting design challenge for me because I love the puzzle creating an image that conveys the right meaning. The icons for the dice are an extra challenge because they have added constraints: they must be smaller than 20mm, a single distinct color, and all the details must be thick enough to maintain their integrity when etched onto the die during manufacturing.
Card Design
I created the cards for Kage Masters using assets I created in Adobe Illustrator and layouts I made in Adobe InDesign. The designs went through several iterations as I learned more about being a graphic designer. You can see a major improvement on these cards compared to the prototypes shown in the trailer.