Anvil: War of Heroes is a collectable card game mixed with real time strategy. Inspired by Greek mythology, the game is a stylized mix of historical inspiration and fantasy gods and creatures.
Over the course of the project I worked as the UI Art Lead, setting the initial style and creating much of the assets seen in the final game. In addition to the UI art I also worked on some of the early UX wireframes, UI VFX, environment textures, and illustrations for various cards.
User Interface
The UI went through many style revisions throughout the course of development before eventually landing on a very skeuomorphic approach. Working with the Studio Art Director, my various style explorations landed us on something painterly, with a bit of grit to keep things feeling battle-worn and tactile.
Of course, for a game centered around collecting cards, we had to put a lot of thought into designing the look and feel of both our cards as well as the packs they came in. I developed the initial starter packs of cards, with special attention paid to materials to help convey rarity.
Concept
Throughout development the art style changed quite a bit, from hyper-stylized and geometric to something closer to fantasy realism with painterly textures.
The tone changed from serious, to silly and lighthearted, before landing somewhere in the middle; stylized and fun, but serious enough to reach a slightly older audience. A large part of the work I did on the game involved working on concepts for everything from characters and terrain to lighting and camera passes
Branding
To prepare for launch, I worked on the game’s branding on aspects like the logo, marketing and app store images, and a few app icon variations
