Fairway’s Design Tips: Where do I get “free” art? An on-going list.

It’s common when trying to make polished prototypes to go in search of free art to flesh out that idea.  New designers, not yet ready to sink lots of money in their game, often struggle to find good art, photographs, or illustrations to use. And more importantly, some times, high resolution images. This list is meant to help you find those locations. This post originally ran on Fairway’s personal site.

Fight or Flight in Game Design: Or All About Knowing When to Grapple With a Design and When to Run From It

Steven returns from the Indie Jungle to answer the perennial question: do I stay or do I go. Steven hopes to help guide you in figuring out which design or ideas to stick with or to leave behind. His current design Sprawlopolis, mentioned in the post, is killing it on Kickstarter.

Fairway’s Design Tips: 3 Easy Ways to Make Public Domain Art Better

There are lots of free sources of high resolution, public-domain images out there. Many of the best pieces to use are illustrations from old books or oil paintings.  And lots of new designers try to use those in their games.  There’s usually one problem: just slapping them onto a card usually looks terrible. And while the following might not work for a retail version of the game, this will provide cleaner prototypes. In this quick tutorial, I offer three tips for “doing it better” using Gimp. This post originally ran on Fairway’s personal site.

Component Studio: A designer’s best friend

Today, Fairway is taking a look at a brand new service from the folks at The Game Crafter that lets you “automagically” create and maintain cards and other component images with templates and a spreadsheet: Component Studio. This new service will make the lives of anyone creating or maintaining large numbers of game components lives much easier.

Fairway Thoughts: How to get the best possible review

Fairway regularly hangs out in the chat on The Game Crafter. A very common question from new designers is how to get your new game reviewed. It’s a common question on game design groups on Facebook too.  Those discussion often answer the “who” question, which quickly devolves to linking to this list of reviewers. What doesn’t really get answered is: how to get the “best” review of your new game or your upcoming, crowd-funded game.