Duzax Studios was a small company founded to publish “CLASH,” a card game by an independent designer. They hired me to design the layout of the cards for the game, and subsequently to make digital assets for the game’s Kickstarter campaign, which hit its $5,000 goal in a little over two weeks.

Primary skills used:

Game card design

Card games like this are, to some extent, committed to their design indefinitely. CLASH was designed to sustain expansions over time, so I wanted to make something that would last.

Narratively, the card game depicts combat similar to that of arcade fighting games: a one-on-one fight between two combatants with unique abilities and weapons. Distance is a central mechanic: all abilities that deal damage have an effective range, which makes up the middle strip of the card, separating the art from the rules text.

In the lower half of every card, the core mechanical behavior is laid out in a panel with three slots, and additional details are laid out in the space above that panel. In the lower left, any card that deals damage has a circle with an M or R in it, indicating ranged or melee attacks.

I paid particular attention to the left side of each card, trying to communicate a lot of information along the leftmost edge. CLASH is played with all 14 of a character’s cards in hand, so the more I could communicate in that band, the easier it’d be for players to find the most relevant cards to their intention by fanning them out in their hands.

Aesthetically, I aimed to evoke the angular imagery common in military science fiction, representing one major faction, using distinctive slants to shape the white space of the card. I smoothed the lines over with curves to evoke the biological engineering of the other major faction.

Promotional art

During the prep and execution of the Kickstarter campaign I designed a variety of additional materials for Duzax Studios.

I animated a series of five illustrations, which walk through the basic cycle of a turn, in Clip Studio Paint EX. They served as the bulk of the “How To Play” section of the campaign, because, like most tabletop games, CLASH is easier to learn by witnessing play than by hearing it described.

I also designed a number of other assets for the campaign, including posters for a promotional event, graphics for the Kickstarter page, and the game box, using illustrations by the game’s artist, John Shamburger.

CLASH had an excited audience, raised over $6000, and received preorders from independent game stores from around the country. But not long after fulfilling the Kickstarter rewards, Duzax Studios dissolved, and no copies after the first printing, fulfilling those orders, were ever made or sold.

I learned from this project that there are vital elements to a successful project beyond a great idea, good design, and good marketing. If the product had been launched by an experienced game company with robust management and internal infrastructure, I believe CLASH would still be selling today.