One Year Designing Kravestorm

A year has passed since I officially started making Kravestorm, and it’s kind of crazy to look back at how much time I’ve already put into this thing. I’ve printed and cut several thousand card prototypes, spent thousands of hours working on the game, hundreds of hours illustrating it (and learning how to do it, with a lot of wasted work along the way), and playtested it for hundreds of hours. For many months, this stopped feeling like just a hobby and became pretty much a second job. Actually, considering the amount of hours, sometimes a proper full-time job.

If two years ago someone had told me that I would end up illustrating cards, I would have thought they were crazy. The only reason I ever picked up an Apple Pencil and started drawing on an iPad was because I needed to bring this game to life. I had no background in drawing, illustration or visual arts since probably elementary school, and it was something I had never even considered doing. What surprised me is that I actually started enjoying it. I only wanted to make a game, but somehow I ended up learning how to create the world around it too, with my own characters, visuals and ideas.

The best part of this whole process has definitely been the playtest sessions, which at some point became pretty much sacred weekly meetings with friends. We’ve scrapped a ridiculous amount of ideas, changed rules over and over again, destroyed broken cards and sometimes completely changed the gameplay from one week to the next. But every session made one thing even clearer to me: the social part of the game is probably the biggest reason why I enjoy making it so much.

Kravestorm became an excuse for gatherings that otherwise would probably happen much less often. As the game became more and more competitive, trying to outsmart each other started adding real stakes to the table, even though there was obviously nothing actually at stake. That’s one of the things I like the most about competitive games. You can be completely invested in winning, lose, and then life just continues normally five minutes later. While you’re playing, however, it definitely doesn’t feel that way.

Looking back at this first year, I’ve learned a lot of things I never thought I would need to learn. Game design, illustration, Excel, manual crafting, programming, time and resource management, writing, even just understanding games better in general. I’m definitely not an expert at any of those things, but I’m much better at all of them than I would have been if I had never started making Kravestorm.

As for Kravestorm itself, I honestly feel like this is still just the beginning.

Reed Arsenhorn