Digital Game-Mats

To celebrate the fact that I finaly have a decent graphics tablet, albeit one thats probably 10+ years old, todays post is going to look at some of the digital designs I have done at one time or another.

First up is a pair of designs based on the MTG concept of the red zone (battle area), an image of an adhesive explosive, some text that relates to MFM and is in a suitably Yugioh style font, and in this first image's case a breakdown of the phases that constitute a turn sequence in Yugioh. The main thing you can do digitally thats quite a bit more difficult by hand is all the fancy opacity effects, you can also go back and change things as you like as long as you have them on separate layers. the down side of course is that you have to find someone who can print the thing on the material in full colour, at a reasonable price.

Its sort of a shame that "There is no sub-step four" never became a meme, i could see that text with a little pixelated Honest being quite cool on a t-shirt.

In any case the second version moves things about a bit to feature a full set of card zones. I don't tend to do zones on non digital mats as again they would come under opacity issues and they tend to take up most of the space I would rather fill with designs. The exception to this though is when the overall design calls for them, for example when they themselves can become strong elements of the background design. Or if I was do a Cardfight mat, but even then I think you could replace the zones with other marker elements.

Sometimes I find that ideas just need to be put to paper, or in this case 0's and 1's. At the time I just felt like drawing transformers and this was one of the results. It could probably do with more background elements some sort of vista perhaps but thats the nice thing about digital you can leave things and come back to them much later to change things up or add new ideas. Incidentally I do have quite a cool idea for a new transformers design (non digital) but I have a number of other mats to get out of the way first.

Which brings us back to why I needed a decent tablet in the first place. This particular design reached a point where a mouse just wasn't cutting it (not to mention an obscene file size). Though that is another upside of non digital design, you never run out of space and you can't lose a load of work to a system crash or slowdown.