Wildfire Game
Illustration and Game Design
Art Direction: Soonduk Krebs
Overview
Wildfire is a tabletop game inspired by my love for strategic board games and by the wildfires that destroyed wildlife in Australia at the end of 2019. For this project, I wanted to create a game that easily immersed a player into the story, as a way to introduce young players to the world of RPG tabletop games. These games, like D&D, can be daunting due to the amount of prep work required to play – with Wildfire you have the opportunity to jump right in.
Approach
Wildfire consists of 5 main components – the Nature cards, the Burn cards, the Character cards, and the Floor tiles. The tiles serve as spaces on the board that can be flipped between a “burning” and “flourishing” state, based on when Burn cards are pulled. The nature cards work to help players navigate through the game – they serve primarily a mechanical function. And the character cards, handed randomly to each player, give special abilities to each person. Along with the game comes a rulebook that tells players how to set up and play the game as well as the lore and their objective. This is vital in both gameplay and setting the scene.
Unfortunately, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I lost access to a lot of the resources that I was going to use to create a physical game. Instead, I focused on the best way to present this digitally.
Click on the cards below to see them flip over.
Expansion
I expanded the brand to a small website for the game. I felt that it was important for Wildfire to have space online since people will often google a game before purchasing it. On the website, readers can learn more about the game, how to play, and how they can help stop the spread of wildfires. Going back to the inspiration for the topic of the game, I wanted there to be a space where people could learn about how we can help save wildlife.
Design Process
One of the issues that I faced while designing this was maintaining a similar illustration style across all of the cards and decks in the game. I wanted to use a more painterly illustration style to mimic the organic nature of the forest, but this did not necessarily work for all aspects of the game. I created a color palette based off of images relating to the subject matter and used that for everything to maintain color consistency across cards. I also switched between decks as I illustrated to make sure that styles were aligning with one another.
Research
I started my research for this project by listening to The Board Game Design Lab, a podcast that discusses board game design. This was useful in understanding the importance of setting a scene and creating a story, which connects to the user experience thinking that I am interested in. As I started the project I also did visual research for illustration inspiration as well as topical research on both wildfires themselves and board games. The information about wildfires and what causes them was helpful in writing the lore for the game and the information I learned about board games was useful in being able to lay out all of the rules and components for the game.
Prototyping and Testing
After defining the mechanics and components of the game – which were inspired by those of Forbidden Island – it was time to make sure the game worked. I forced my roommate to play with me and we found that the game could actually be a little more difficult. Working through the actual game allowed me to have a better understanding of each of the pieces that I was actually designing.