The illustrated character creation and world building activity book that comes to life with the roll of a die!
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Hi everyone!
I hope the new year is treating everyone well so far.
Things are going well on the Roll For Your Life front! We are in the thick of illustrating the chapters: Conor Nolan is doing an absolutely incredible job bringing the creatures, characters, and locations of this book to life.
Each chapter has a ton of original full color art, and these pieces take time. Conor is moving through these assets at a great clip but there’s still a good ways to go. We will make sure to update you on things as they roll out!
Here’s a sneak peak at some recently completed mutants and detectives:
Also, the custom Roll For Your Life dice have arrived! Our limited edition dice from Q-workshop have arrived and they look incredible. The numbers match the font in the book! Check ‘em out:
We love the look and feel of these dice and can’t wait for you to start rolling up some characters with them.
For those interested, here’s a little more in-depth look at the art development side of things.
The artwork of Roll For Your Life is a big part of the experience. The swampy wizard towers and regal alien monarchs invite you to explore each page more closely and consider all the ways your imagination could take flight. Not only does it complement the text and provide inspiration, it also helps show the reader the specific version of each chapter’s "world” that we held in our minds while creating it.
Roll For Your Life is here to send you to the far reaches of your imagination, but when it comes to the art direction we tend to want to focus in and choose one “look” for the chapter's subject. For example, for Alien Species, there are a ton of different alien aesthetics in fiction. We could go with something cold, dark, and biomorphic like the Xenomorphs from Alien or something a bit retro and cartoonish like the invaders from Mars Attacks, but for this chapter we were specifically inspired by the sentient non-human people of Star Wars and Star Trek, and we wanted to capture that lively, diverse space opera feel for this chapter.
We start thinking about the art before the first word is on the page, we can’t help it, but things really come together once we’ve completed all of the text. We comb through each category, determine which outcomes we’d love to see brought to life in vivid detail, and begin to stockpile a long list of prompts and ideas.
When putting together our list of assets we need to consider the three classifications that the art assets fall under.
This isn’t an exact science and there’s wiggle room between each of these categories, but this gives you an idea of our art hierarchy.
With the chapter fully formed in our mind we roughly block out each page, considering where each block of text will go and how much space will be allotted for illustrations. There’s usually between 8 to 12 assets per chapter. Sometimes an idea we have for an illustration will dictate where the text blocks go, other times we need to figure out how to fit art around the text.
Once that preliminary layout has been produced we pass it along to Tom Howey (our layout designer) with all the text from the chapter and all our notes about art. Tom formalizes everything, provides invaluable feedback and, once we’ve tinkered a bit more, creates the final layout, which will serve as a blueprint for Conor’s artwork.
Once we have all the layouts prepared and art prompts written, Conor takes over.
He jumps in for the first pass and sends sketches back to us for review.
Once we’re all happy with the sketch Conor moves onto inking and coloring the assets.
Once all of the artwork is completed it’s uploaded to our shared server where Tom downloads it and puts together the final version of the chapter and voilà, that’s a chapter completed!
Conor Nolan’s style perfectly embodies the look we always envisioned, and in our opinion elevates Roll For Your Life from an approachable and replayable creative activity to a gorgeous artbook worthy of the place of honor on any display shelf or coffee table!
Alright, that's it for now, thanks for tuning in! Excited to share more news about our progress in the coming months.
Onward!
–Dakota
This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.
This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.
Hi everyone,
It’s come to my attention that our PDF files weren’t set up correctly. That issue should now be resolved.
If you’ve already downloaded your two PDF chapters and experienced any issues (funky file names, trouble opening your PDFs, or a low-res cover on the Alien Species chapter) then please follow this link to re-download your chapters:
Hopefully that clears things up. If not, please reach out to us. Thank you for you patience and understanding while we figured that out.
Onward!
--Dakota