San, Ni, Ichi is a light battle card game for 3-6 players. The game has elements of trick-taking, logical reasoning, and card-counting.
San, Ni, Ichi is the first game published by my company, Ironmark Games. The game features fast and intriguing game-play, stylish illustrations, and clean graphic design. This box render highlights the game's sparse aesthetic and clean design.
For this project, I performed a number of roles related to the development of the art and graphic design. I worked as the game's illustrator, graphic designer, and pre-production designer.
From start to finish, working on this project was a master class in product design and development. The final piece is work that I will always be proud of.
The character illustrations for the game were designed to have the look and feel of a sumi-e painting.
All of the figures are designed to have a degree of distortion and foreshortening. This technique creates a rhythm in the drawing that really pulls the figure in space and implies movement and power.
Here are other illustrations from this project.
Graphic design for table-top games has a a requirement of being highly informative and aesthetically pleasing. For this game, I wanted to highlight the sumi-e-style illustrations and convey the elemental nature of the each of the cards.
I wanted to draw the eye of the player to the illustration of the card, but allow them to move away from the image once they got used to the game. In this way, the graphic design of the cards are laid out so that the main elements necessary to play the are entirely viewable once the cards are fanned.