The art in Conquest breathes life into the world of Arthenia. In this blog section we'll not only take an in-depth look into this art, but also the artists who created it - this world would not be the same without the amazing work of these artists.

We'd like to begin our entry into the art of Conquest with a bit of philosophy on our card design. It is our belief that each card really represents a unique aspect of Arthenia, so as much as possible each card should be a unique entity. This pushed us away from a traditional design in which much of the card consists of the same design elements as all other cards. Instead, we decided to let the true masterpiece - the artist's vision - shine as the focus of the card.

The original Conquest card design.

Although this was our destination, this is not where our journey began. The original card designs used in Conquest were much more similar to a traditional trading card game than one may expect. Nevertheless, one aspect of the card design that was clear to us from the beginning is that we wanted to have the art of the card on the bottom, and the text denoting the resource's abilities on the top. The reason for this was very simple - if we were to stack multiple cards we wanted it to be possible to read the abilities of each of the resources.

Let's take a minute to deconstruct the original card design that we were looking at (which was graciously designed for us by Richard Tran), and see how our current design developed out of it. The first thing you will notice with the old design is that it contains a long title bar on the top of the card. This title bar would house both the name of a given resource, as well as its costs. The title bar was scrapped for a handful of reasons. First, it gave the card an overall "blocky" feel, and made us feel like we really were looking at a trading card rather than a piece of art.

The other reasons for ditching the title bar were more functional than aesthetic. First, the original title bar included costs, but not sustenance costs, which are arguably much more important in Conquest. We worked with different designs that also included sustenance costs, but in the end they were quite cumbersome. Moreover, many resources in conquest have unique costs that aren't simply represented by gold or mana. For instance, "ruin an ally unit to stupefy a unit" cannot be easily represented by some symbol. We thought about having symbols such as a suicidal knight to represent these different types of costs, but fortunately we did not pursue that avenue very far. By ditching the title bar we were able to incorporate many different unique costs into the game, as well as avoid the mess of additional costs.

The final reason for ditching the title bar was flavor. In Conquest we've tried as much as possible to make the language of the game natural language one would use to talk about what they are doing. In this way, we didn't feel that actions should be things like "apocalyptic death match," but things such as "hurl a fireball." One can certainly hurl a fireball at a passing by dragon (it may not be wise), but on the other hand it's rather difficult to do an apocalyptic death match. Given all of these reasons we were strongly compelled to ditch the title bar - we hope that you feel it was a good decision as well.

Let us consider another aspect of this original card design, the vertical bar on the left. This represented a unit's inventory, which denoted which and how many items it could equip simultaneously. Initially abilities such as equipping two weapons (which all warriors now have by default) were represented in inventory. In the end, we realized that inventory was rather complicated, and didn't add a whole lot to the game, so we simply scrapped it. As such, there became no need to show a unit's inventory on the card design. One more box down!

The rest of the boxes on the card design are basically what one would expect. The small box in the middle housed a unit's strike and armor. The bottom box is essentially the bottom scroll of our current card design, and finally the gray box near the top is like the current top scroll. Although overall this card design was fairly appealing, we decided that it wasn't worth dedicating so much of each card to a border that would be the same for every card of the same alignment. Instead, we thought it would be better to give that space to our artists for each masterpiece they create.

The other aspects of our current design also try to embody this philosophy. We tried to make the scrolls as unobtrusive as possible, to try and keep the eye's attention on the art of a card. The hope is that when one looks at a Conquest card they can look around the scrolls, and as much as possible see the card simply as one large piece of art. We've also minimized the usage of flashy symbols on our cards, because we've found that they really grab one's attention, detracting from the art. In the end we conceded to using colored symbols to denote the different alignments in Conquest, but it was actually not until very late in the card design process that we finalized on that. For a long time there were absolutely no symbols in the card design.

Hopefully this provides some introduction to our card design and the philosophy that went behind it. If you have any questions, write to us and let us know.