Development Diary #10

A Coat of Arms Fit for a Hive Queen

In between formatting, playtesting, and art direction, I have been working on the crests or coat of arms for the various kingdoms. I started this process a while back ago, and I even completed the Xizek and almost finished the Ethereal crests, but I didn't like the way they were coming out. It's not as though they were bad, it was just I knew I could make something with a little more pop with Illustrator. Below was my first crest for the Xizeks.

I think contrast was my primary frustration with this design, and I knew I could get more from my workflow in Illustrator. Also, I wasn't feeling the sludge being contained in a glass bottle. Thus, I redrew all the kingdom's crests and started off with a new direction. Below is the redone Xizek crest.

The new crest definitely keeps the spirit of the original, but it feels a little more thematic and telling of the Xizeks as a race. Plus it helped me determine the direction for the Xizeks that are more bug-like and not humanoids. I liked the purple, but my Xizeks have always been green, so I feel that in my attempt to mix it up a bit, I mixed it up with the wrong asset. Also, I like the yellow eyes. Xizeks have yellow eyes, and the black eyes were too literal.

So now that the crest is done, what's its purpose? Well I would call it a world-building asset. It's not ephemera or chrome, its purpose is to immerse the player in the world of Immacus, and you do that I feel by creating images, stories, assets to help the player fill in the blanks of the world. The crests will be used on the Kickstarter page, the website, and the rulebook, so they will see some use, and hopefully it'll create a little pride and light-hearted superficial tribalism in the kingdoms people choose and become partial to.

Kingdoms of Immacus is my baby, and it's very important to me that if I have the ability and opportunity to flesh out the world in any way, I need to do it. There are so many franchises and IPs vying for people's attention that I feel if you want anyone's attention, even a few seconds of it, you have to do everything you can to show others why they should care about something you are emotionally attached to. So here is another little nugget from my world, and I hope people like it.