Hello everyone,
In preparation for our upcoming Kickstarter campaign, we are excited to announce that our first Goatfish video is live. Please check out our explainer video and let us know what you think!
Goatfish Explainer Video
Goatfish is coming to Portland
PDXAGE May 5th - 7th
We will be attending the PDXAGE annual tabletop gaming event in Portland, Oregon on May 5th, 6th, and 7th. If you are a fan of tabletop games and are in the area you should come check it out!
Goatfish will be on display and available for play at our developer booth so please stop by and play a round with us.
More details available on the PDXAGE website.
We hope to see you there but if you can't make it, there will be other opportunities to see us at some conventions in Seattle later this Spring and Summer.
Progress Update and New Goatfish Rulebook
Goatfish central is super busy lately with preparations for several upcoming tabletop gaming expos and preparing for our Kickstarter campaign. We are really excited to share the new content with everyone in the coming weeks. A few of the things we are working on:
- Kickstarter video
- How to play animated video
- Various marketing materials and convention giveaways
- Goatfish rulebook
We will be sharing the videos as soon as they are complete.
I am excited to announce that the new Goatfish rulebook is available now, check it out: download. Please let us know what you think!
Goatfish Card Design: Making of Maremma
Welcome to a new installment of the Goatfish Card Design series! Today we will look at the evolution of another "Defend" card, the Maremma. The Maremma sheepdog originated in Italy where it is used to guard sheep from wolves. Today, the Maremma is used in other parts of the world to protect a variety of livestock (including goats) from predators and thieves.
When choosing our various characters for Goatfish, we endeavored to stay true to real animals, breeds, and uses as much as possible. We of course took artistic license in our designs to achieve the right humorous tone for the game; you don't see many llamas sporting sunglasses and badges in the real world!
We chose to use the Maremma because the dogs are faithful, fearless, and outright handsome!
Maremma sheepdog. Image by MGerety, via Wikimedia Commons
Once we picked the character, Lillian put together the original illustration.
After playtesting to make sure we liked the character, we worked with our illustrator, Hank, to get sketches. After a few rounds of edits we moved on to the stages of digital inking and coloring for the final card design.
We hope you like the Maremma, he is your best friend when it comes to protecting your goat herds!
Goatfish Inspiration: LaMancha Goat
Today we will explore the inspiration for one of our characters in Goatfish, the dashing "LaMancha Goat". While the LaMancha goat is an American dairy goat, we couldn't pass up using the famous character Don Quixote de la Mancha as inspiration. The character of Don Quixote is from the novel by Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra.
We explored different reference images of sculptures, paintings, and drawings from a variety of artists. Representations of Don Quixote often depict him wearing his stylish "helmet", which is actually a barber's basin, seen below. Not only is it functional, it looks great!
Don Quixote is a fun and exciting character and has been the subject of other artists including one of my favorites by Pablo Picasso:
As you can see, we are in good company! The trick then was to draw inspiration from existing sources while putting our own unique "Goatfish" twist on the design. We ended up with a proud goat in armor wearing his signature helmet. A windmill in the background completes the image.
Those of you who know goat breeds will notice that we took some artistic liberties. For example, LaMancha goats don't have mustaches.
Thank you for reading, stay tuned for more Goatfish news!
Goatfish Card Design: Security Llama
Hello Everyone!
Today we are taking a look at the design evolution of one of our characters, a personal favorite of mine: "Security Llama". Once we had our cast of characters and assigned to each of them their unique role in the game, we put together our original deck of cards for play testing. We added text and art to blank card stock. As seen on the left, Lillian provided the original illustrations for these cards (sadly that is my handwriting).
We played lots of games with these original cards as we tuned the game. Next we worked with our illustrator, Hank, to come up with the final art. Some cards required several sketches before we were happy with the design. Above, you can see a couple of these sketches for "Security Llama."
Lastly, Hank put the final touches on the art by pulling it in to Illustrator, cleaning up the line work and adding the color.
It was really fun to watch the evolution of the art from Lillian's original drawings to Hank's fully polished designs.
Thank you for reading and watch this space for more Goatfish news!
New gameplay page
Some of the goat herds found in Goatfish
Howdy Folks!
We just added a new page to the website describing the basics of Goatfish gameplay. It includes lots of "never-before-seen" pictures of some of the Goatfish cards. Check it out: Goatfish gameplay. I hope you like it!
Website launch
Hello Everyone,
We are officially launching the new Goatfish website today in preparation for our upcoming Kickstarter campaign. I hope you will check out the new content where I talk about why and how Lillian and I created the card game Goatfish: Origin Story.
Lillian working on the original card illustrations.