Space Volcano
Project Overview
The Space Volcano game was originally conceived in a 2018 summer camp at UCLA, where people worked in groups of five to create a board game in roughly a week. I knew it was gonna be good when our randomized group name was the Gigantic Pigeons. Thanks to that, I had a dramatic pigeon documentary going through my head the whole time, which inspired me to have complete creative freedom over anything I do with a pigeon, since they're apparently super overpowered. I was as close as we could get to a leader, being in charge of all the enemy, item, and card designs. My group members were tasked with coloring, balancing, playable character designs, the game board, and writing the text in both the cards and rules. We all worked together on the game concept and setting, being a collapsing volcano in space. We also decided on the main goal of the game being recovering four ship parts from a crash site, similar to Pikmin, and having those parts guarded by random enemies. A few weeks after the game was finished, I went back and redesigned the card layout, as well as some of my favorite enemy designs. For the portfolio, I've included everything in the original game, the enemy planning sheet, and some of the enemy redesigns.
This was the back of all the cards. Not much more to it other than that.
Left (Above on Mobile): Blank game board with the player cards' appearances
Right (Below on Mobile): Filled-in game board with the player cards' abilities
The first draft of all the enemies in the original game. The ones that were crossed out didn't make it, as I decided that they were TOO referential of their source material. What I find funny is that Sans ("An Unneeded Reference") actually looks dissapointed that he's being crossed out. It fits his fourth wall-breaking nature quite well.
Dr. Evil would be proud. The idea of a pigeon shooting a laser out of its mouth came from the "IMMA FIRIN MA LAZOR" meme. The lasers are actually re-purposed from some unfinished art of Dark Samus, so I suppose you could say some of the inspiration came from that. For the design of the new card, I wanted to give it a feeling of "Oh frick, those lasers are everywhere!" by having some of them go through the image box.
I think I made the certain AI a bit too obvious with the portal gun reference. Anyway, the Cyborg Pigeon is my personal favorite card that I designed. I took some inspiration from the Mecha Drago boss from Mother 3, with the background coming from one of the battle backgrounds of Earthbound. Oh, and the binary actually translates to "BIRD UP!" "SQUACK!" "DUN DUN DUN!" as a reference to TerminalMontage, a great and memey animation YouTuber.
In this case, I felt like less is more. I based the concept itself on the Unspeakably Awful Indescribable Horror enemy from the card game Munchkin (I tried to emulate the tone of that game as a whole, too). What I find kind of funny is that I made the new art, then realized afterward that it's exactly the same as the death stare of Big the Cat from the Sonic series.
You may be noticing a theme here, and this was the card that kicked it off. The All-Seeing Pigeon is the most powerful card in the game, and is also one of my favorite enemies I designed. I wanted to combine the stereotypical "all-seeing" trope with something completely and utterly stupid, and a pigeon fit the bill exactly.