First Look at "The BMO Files" (Patreon)

Hey everyone,
I'll be back in a couple of days with the Beta Release of BMO TV V0.5.4, but before that, I have another post for you that was supposed to be a poll. You'll see later why I decided against that.

Today I want to let you know about a new little side project that has been going on for a few weeks. I've discussed it a bit on Discord before, so if you want to know what's happening earlier, consider joining the server.

Before I started working on BMO TV and founded Rel.Pink, I already was an indie game developer. Together with a friend I met at university, we founded a company that we were successful with, be it only at making games that the critics loved. We got substantial monetary prizes, and the funding offices loved us and gave us enough money for prototype projects to survive for a couple of years. In the end, the pandemic made us give up the company. Not enough people were buying the games. This led to me revisiting the long-abandoned prototype of BMO TV and trying to make an actual game out of it. You already know that one went pretty well. So far, at least.

But there was one prototype that I always felt like was such a waste to just give up on - a multiplayer TCG card game that we spent almost a whole year working on. Recently I reached out to my colleague, and he gave me permission to rebrand this card game for Rel.Pink!

Take a look at what the game looked like two years ago when the prototype for the funding bureau was finished.

I don't want to go into much detail on how the game works, but I'm going to say it's a mix of Magic and Hearthstone. It's multiplayer first, but there already is a system in place to create Singleplayer AI fights with dialogs and such.

The idea for the rebranding is to incorporate it into the BMO universe by making it a sequel to BMO TV. You'll meet June Tesla and follow her through her research with the nanites. The cards will become programs to influence the nanites in the body to produce specific results. When the player attacks with a card successfully enough, its effect will be applied to the opponent's character model, which we'll take over from BMO TV.

While Femdemic was a whole new project from scratch, remember that in this case, a lot of the programming was already done, and it took almost a whole year to create a solid foundation. So there's quite a bit of substance already there. On the other hand, card games are much more complex than clicker games, of course, so it isn't just going to be done immediately. This was just a prototype, not really ready for release, but it can be played already, which is an upside. Then again, several systems need to be reworked a bit to fit the new theming.

One of the most obvious things is that all the cards need new illustrations to fit the new BMO theme. To start and to get an idea of the card collection, I've used Novel AI to create a new base identity for all the cards.

And here is where the idea for a Patreon poll comes in. I sent out the proposal for making three example cards to different artists on Fiverr and then was planning on letting you all decide on what artist to give the job to, considering their respective quality and price. However, only two artists sent back results. Looking at the library above, you might notice that each illustration's primary color was supposed to be tied to its color identity in gameplay. Let's take a look.

Let's start with the AI-generated illustrations.

Notice that there are only two; if you peek down, you'll see that the artists had to deliver three illustrations. That's because I gave them two "creature" cards (themed as AI programs) and one "spell" card (themed as nanite maneuver cards). The AI could not produce results that even remotely resembled nanites working in the body, so I didn't include these illustrations here.
But overall, I was pleasantly surprised by the result. I'm not sure I'd want to really release a game with these, but they are working really well as placeholders.

Artist #1 took only like four days to send in their illustrations. They very closely resemble the reference photos I sent in. I had to tell them to make the characters look "more adult" because the original illustrations were very young looking. These are improved versions, but I'm still not sure I'd feel comfortable using these in an adult game. They look too young for my taste, although I guess that's a case of interpretation. But the nanites are kind of recognizable, and the orders were followed. At US$40 per illustration, these were relatively cheap, though. Making all cards of the initial 100-card set would therefore cost around US$ 4000.

Arist #2 then sent back their illustrations today, and that's when I immediately gave up on the idea of making a Patreon poll. These are clearly superior to the other artist's work, and they cost the same at US$40 per illustration. The level of detail is higher, and they didn't just use the reference image to make an exact copy but came up with different poses, and the nanites look really great as well. Oh yeah, when talking about Artist #1, I forgot to mention that the color identities were way off, and I had to adjust them by hand. Like the pink card was red, and the purple one was pink. Not so with Artist #2, who understood the assignment perfectly. That trans pride flag in the back also gets extra points from me.

So... sorry that you couldn't have a say in the matter in the end, but I'm pretty sure that almost everybody would have chosen Artist #2 to do the job anyways, right???

There's one more thing I want to say about the illustrations, though. I'm a big fan of the tg/tf community, so I also considered reaching out to known community members to do card illustrations, but after talking to just a few, it became clear that the amount of work to do over 100 cards was just a little too much to ask. So my idea was to find an artist to do the base set myself and then offer community artists the ability to do micro-sets after release. Basically, their own collection of something like 20 cards, where we can see the art style of the artists we all love. Big players like Magic always do it and name the artists on the card, so maybe we can do it, too, if enough artists are interested. Depends on the success of the game in the end, I guess.

Now, I want everybody to understand that this game will not be out soon. I might do a playtest weekend soon-ish for just multiplayer-only AI art premade deck fights, but all the extra features and a solid server structure will need a while to develop.  For the illustrations, the artist said that around September should be a good time to finish all the base set cards. I'm also getting a new 3D game board done. Since September is always my vacation month, I plan on getting an early version with more functionality done by then. However, I do not promise anything yet, since BMO TV will remain my main focus. This will be something to work on in my spare time, e.g., when I'm waiting for bug reports or can't continue because of art pipeline issues. Same as Femdemic was last year.

So, what do you think about this little side project? I'm looking forward to actually getting it into your hands, and I'm particularly happy about Artist #2's illustrations. Or do you think I should have picked someone else or just stuck with the AI art? Let me know your thoughts in the comments or on Discord.

Best,
Rel