Jaipur in a day
How my Saturday started, what I expected of the day, and how it ended up, were so completely different than expected. It was a regular weekend morning, nothing much scheduled, my morning coffee sitting next to me, and I was going through adobe stock images, you know, as you do. And I came across this image below. Simple as it is, my day changed at that moment, and my redesign of Jaipur began.
I had been loosely thinking about my desire to redesign Jaipur for a while. Not because I think it needed it, especially with the new version that's out now, but more because I like the idea of redesigning all my favorite games and plan to tackle them all someday, and yesterday with the find of that image, it just happened to be Jaipur that got the treatment. It also helps that Jaipur is relatively simple component wise, there are 55 cards, and 57 tokens (that in my case were going to be half size cards), making it a doable goal to design the whole game in a day.
To preface my design process, I'm not an illustrator, so for me designing a new game requires a little leg work in the form of finding art to use as a base. With the above image sourced, I decided to go down a path to make these cards look like playing cards, and design them with a minimal look. This led to me starting to play with the gem shapes in illustrator, which almost immediately veered away from the minimal look, and into something a bit more complex.
I thought this was starting to look interesting, especially those blue diamonds and how it started clustered, and then became more spaced out with distance, but at that point I still didn’t know where I was going. After playing with the above shapes for a while, I started working with the shapes I was planning to use for the more basic resources in the game, and this is where everything came into focus. Space! Astroids fields! Mining and trading space resources! Perfect. Done.
After finding a space image to use as the background, everything really came together. I decided to keep the name the same, but to go with a futuristic design for the logo, and at 2am, after listening to many hours of Spotify, and some of Neal Stephenson Anathem audiobook, the design was done!
You can see the full design here. Which is also where you can find a link to the high resolution files if you want to make a copy yourself. If you decided to do that, let me know, I’m curious!
