2021 Camp Osum Diary

Oh hey it’s October again, time to bust out this old project. Last year I did some work on the things I’d need for Camp Osum, and this year, I’d like to push it along a little more. But! Something I’m doing this year that I didn’t do last year is I’m going to tweet about it a bit. This means this post might feel a bit like a supercut of twitter posts.

Oh and uh, content warning? Gore and guts and knives and like, horror stuff?

1. October 1st

Oh hey, it’s October First. Why not do a little work on it, as a treat.

What I did today was first, create the file in the right proportions. I started with my normal image size, and then scaled it down until it made the pixel assets I had look ‘big.’ From there I started moving around my pixel art assets at their ‘proper’ size to see how they worked.

Mistake I already learned here: My current working file is 295×401, which is to say it does not have a clean centre line or clean middle point. Nerts! I don’t think I’ll have to work too hard on fixing this – it’s not going to matter when the work is upsized to print scale – but it is worth remembering.

Today, I wanted to get some of my basics laid out. So I set up card faces and card backs. Presented here are two of each. The base moon back is the default look for a card back, the red moon is a slasher card ,which will get put back into the deck flipped over, representing getting caught by the villain.

The other two faces are meant to be setup for other items. I think I’m going to put positive items on the bare tree stump, and twists on the bloody tree stump.

There’s no need for text on these boxes as they are; they won’t get text until all the graphical assets are fixed, and I’ve upsized them so I can use pixel-looking properly scaled fonts.

2. October 8th

It’s a pretty busy week coming up and next, so I let myself be considered ‘done’ if I could just lock down some other elements. Specifically, in this case, what I wanted to do was set up the card faces so I could set up the rest of the cards as other pixel assets.

In order to clearly communicate, I’ve made a type bar, so the card face has a place to explicitly denote its type. We have five card types — Hope, Plot, Haunt, Twist and Doom. No Doom yet – the Doom cards are all going to have a simple face and want to look really different to the other types.

Again, no text on these cards until I’ve finalised the design and want to scale them up.

I like these, because each of them give a space to centralise the ‘point’ of the card. A thing can float over the altar, to represent the Haunt; a thing can be found in the circle of stones. The two treestumps mirroring each other mean that the Plot and Twist cards can juxtapose one another just fine.

Pretty happy with this.

Though now I look at it, I need to give the panels a drop shadow.

Oh and that top right circle, up in the title bar, that circle is there to give the card its numeric value in a place that stands aside.

3. October 15

Things got busy this week, so this is just what I did on the Friday. But it’s okay because now I have some momentum, where I can look at what I did last week and just go ‘oh, here’s what this needs.’

There are only three ‘Haunt’ cards in the game – multiple copies of each. These give the ghosts of dead players things to do. In this case, they’re increasing severity — the lowest tier let you block a row from being investigated, the second highest let you block a single stack, and the third let you force a survivor to pick from that stack. Notice as well the way the backgrounds increase – you start with the altar, then the altar and the totem, then the altar, totem and skull.

And you know what, if I can get that set done, I can probably belt out the 9 item-based cards for the Hope slots.

Yes, one of those is literally just a brick.

Something here that I am thinking about is that for the Plot and Twist cards, I don’t necessarily need the wooden slats on. Those cards aren’t going to need rules text, so maybe I can make the wooden frame only necessary for rules text. I could make it so that the plot/twist cards have instead, like, text boxes for characters on the cards to converse.

Then I need three faces that represent the Doom cards. I kind of think of those cards as cards where the villain is reaching out of the card, or maybe just a raised knife, depending on how hard that is to represent. Or, maybe, I can leave them blank, and have instead bloody text indicating the mechanic you have to do.

4. October 22

Now we’re onto the last major grouping: Twists and Plot cards. These are cards that are meant to build the story about why you, the character, are going to survive, and I have an idea here: Characters sitting around the fireplace, talking to one another about their past, their backstories. They don’t need room for mechanical text: They just need a number, and some narrative.

Okay, this is something I like. What I’m going to do for these nine images is layer over them text boxes of varying sizes suggesting people talking to one another. These are hope cards, they give positive points. Then there’s a dark parallel to these, using the bleak woods.

5. October 29

Okay, so those mockups for the Plot cards got me a component I needed. First, there’s the well of light, which looks good, and the circle of characters. So these plot cards are for moments when all the characters are gathered together and have some means of communicating, right? Well, the twist cards need to be shocking moments, where something terrible is revealed, or something creepy is set up.

Okay, now we have a range of gory images that can now have text bubbles overlaid. The only mechanical information necessary to add to these cards is the title and a number, and the rest gets to be ‘flavour.’

Cool!

This means that all I need to do in this coming week is the Doom card and then I can resize these cards up and start putting text into them. Neat

Oh wait.

Originally, I was thinking that this face needed to look really distinct, and was going to need some new graphical asset. I was thinking about maybe trying to draw hands reaching out from a black space, but then I realised something: The Doom card is going to be presented in the deck, face up and face down, which means that the edges of the card need to be as close to identical as possible. Given these decks are getting shuffled, it kinda stands to reason that the card faces being distinctly different at the edges might make things difficult, and not everyone is as comfortable not looking at their hands as they shuffle as I am, the Doom cards need to have a face that’s very similar to the card backs. This simplifies our card face options and means that at this point I’m… kind of done?

I just need to gussy up a Doom face a little:

And that’s kinda it?

I think I may want to go back and redo the hope faces to give them a pool of light, like the Plot and Twist cards, but make it a bit less severe, same as with the Haunt cards… but I think this is it. I think, based on these components, I have all the graphical assets for this build of Camp Osum done. All that I need to do now is resize them up to full print size, and add text with a proper pixel font.

At this point I’m pressing the schedule button on this post. Maybe I’ll come back to this before the final Friday date (which you may note is uh, real close to when this post goes up) and there may even be a print-and-play link here. On the other hand, I have marking to do, so, like… nnnno? Maybe not?

Ooo, don’t that look cool?