"Your future is bright, you’re full of potential, and you’re bound to succeed!! However, you soon discover that you must fight against brutal campus bureaucracy and trample over your peers to claw to the top of your class for graduation." Savant Nouveau (working title) is a strategy board game inspired by the college experience. In August 2016, during BFA year at SJSU, seven visual development students paid homage to their days of struggle through an elegant art nouveau game with competitive resource gathering, invention crafting, and hilariously relatable undertones. Together they founded the prestigious Academy, where many youthful Savant Nouveau come to learn. Our game will have two editions: Standard and Deluxe. Both come with the basic game assets of:
Economical marble player pieces will be included in both Standard and Deluxe edition packs. For those of us not in deep student debt, we will have these fancy metal collector's pieces available via our Kickstarter. ;) Pre-Production AssetsAt the moment, our team has completed the initial ideation stage of our visual development and finished several prototyping run-throughs. However, aside from our Academy Cards, we have yet to settle on an aesthetic style. We will be sharing the fruits of our style test in a future post. For now, we've made progress on characters, materials, inventions, weather, and event (academy) artwork. I. CharactersThere will be seven "Savant Nouveau" (New Science) students that players can inhabit. Each come with their own unique inventions, materials, and unique backstories. And the characters that represent each major were inspired by some of our personal attributes. For example... "Camille Noir, the biological engineering major, is a proud aristocrat, reflecting the vampiric side of founder Elizabeth Li who never sleeps. They aim to surpass their family’s name by sinking their teeth into the biology community. Rumor has it they modified their body to work beyond human capacity. Though handsome, they are very petty, and challenged their professors to a duel of wits. As a result, they may be expelled." "Marron, from civil engineering portrays the enigmatic side of founder Kelly Nguyen, who is always plotting things at the back of the room. She literally blends into the buildings, and knows everything about everyone. They say at the Academy, the walls have ears, and Marron hears all. She has a stoic, deadpan nature that makes her a mystery to her peers." I. Material CardsOur major-specific materials are strongly tied to the personalities of their representative student. It's important to us to create materials that are deeply unique and add to the lore of our world. They are inspired by realism, but by no means grounded by it. For example, in our world, our Meteorology character (Rouge) can use "Star Fragments" to create satellites! II.Academy CardsOur Academy Cards inspired by silly (and horribly serious) things that happen to us on campus. They're aesthetically inspired by Andrew Jackson's alligator doodle. The idea is that these are the little doodles that our characters do in the margins of their class notes. Our team's personal favorite is the "All Nighter." We know that one all too well... Hoard resources, get hot dates (only to backstab them later), and survive the brutal ordeals of academy daily life. III. Weather CardsWeather at the Academy is kind of like...Texas...except with Hellfire, sometimes.
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BloggersWelcome to Savant Nouveau's development blog! Entries are written by Elizabeth Li and Pamela Yeung.
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