The campaign is now live on Kickstarter, be part of it here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/villain-games/cy-co-the-western-cyberpunk-board-game

Play-view of the boardgame Cy-Co

Since about 10 months now I was working on a game project which is now going into a critical phase: it has to be funded. To get an idea what I am talking about in this post, have a look at this page, maybe you want to be part of this project, or if you are a boardgame-geek, this place is for you: https://www.cy-co.com/kickstarter/

For my artist friends; no this was not spec-work and I got paid for my time and effort, which is very rare for independent publishers wanting to pitch on crowdfunding. "Villain Games" approached me with this project and did not shy away from the cost that such a big project bears.

Creating all the original assets for this game was a lot of work, actually more than I ever did on a project before. So, regardless of the Kickstarter outcome, for me this was a huge learning experience in terms of managing tasks and my schedule around conventions and other clients.

What was your task you might ask?

95% of the design and illustrations for the game so far, was done by yours truly!

The website (created by Villain-Games) for Cy-Co is online already, check it out here https://www.cy-co.com/ for more information.

Below you see the (so far) final cover of the game that will go on the box.



Below you see some preliminary sketches and concepts that show a fraction of the development that went into this project. When the kickstarter campaign goes live, you'll see a lot more of the actual work.

cover sketch

In this version the western / cyborg mix slowly comes to life.

cover sketch rough

The initial new sketch shows a lot more movement and "tech" stuff we wanted to see.

preliminary, unused cover concept

As you can see above, the cover went astray with that first preliminary sketch you see above. The reason was that it fulfilled a lot of clichés but many we did not want to portrait. Also the color-scheme was not working so I cancelled working on it further from my end, not because of the client.

Sometimes it is important to go one route and see how it works.

promotional poster art (sketch)

An idea of my own was to make a simplistic poster available on the campaign. Silhouette designs are not that much work and I had fun working on this. You can see the final design on the campaign and on my booth at conventions.
One of the (Non-playable) character-designs had to be a female outlaw that is based on a given photographic reference. Since the backers of this campaign can "become" an outlaw or civilian, I had to find a way to make them recognizable and yet cool enough for the game ;)




Crime evil, which is one of the main figures was a lot fun to do. He had to be archaic and evil. That is always a fun combination. The difficult aspect was to get the mix between western and cyborg believable. We agreed on a rather "steampunk" look for him because that is not too far off and archaic enough to make this evil creature work.

Gameboard renderings by M. Cieschinger.

Another big part of the project for me, was to design the buildings. On the website you see some articles about how these were developed.

I hope you got thirsty for some awesome retro western - cyberpunk tabletop game fun and can't wait to see the campaign go live on Kickstarter.

The campaign will be live on Kickstarter starting from May 15th.