The Illustration above is the Artwork for the Map area on the Board, for the Prototype of the upcoming game Famimals. It represents a Post-Apocalyptic air view of Costa Rica in the year 2225 after several decades of almost no human occupation. The Artist who illustrated this aerial scene is one of Costa Rica’s best Artist Angela Bermudez, who has personally been in most of these locations.
The result blew our mind, since Angela had the exceedingly difficult task of placing 25 different Landmarks from Costa Rica together, organize them geographically, all with a route with the same pattern, creating a 16 squares Tile, looking as similar as the actual landmarks as possible, after an apocalypse, but also for them all to paint a nice picture together. Isn’t she amazing?
The Map is only a section of the Board, and it is currently the only Illustration that Angela customized for our prototype and/or the game; however, she also allowed for us to use some of her original Artwork as illustrations in our prototype. Her Artwork has certainly helped as inspiration, and as a good complement to our Prototype.
We are also working with Pablo Barrantes who is another Costa Rican Artist, that has worked in more conceptual art, the design for the Frames on the cards, The illustration for the Back of the cards, and some additional Terrains which are also inspired by Costa Rican Landmarks. We have chosen Costa Rica as inspiration not only for its beauty, but because it also contains nearly 6 percent of the world’s biodiversity.
Famimal has an incredibly unique and fun mechanic which is a “Customizable Board and Deck”, which means that each player needs to build or create their own Deck of cards and Board before they can play. The Pre-Custom Deck gameplay mechanic is quite common, specially in Collectible Card Games (CCG).
However, this may be the first game to offer both a Customizable Board and Deck options in one game. With this mechanic each player will have the opportunity to pre-select and bring certain amount of Tiles/Terrains to build a portion of the Map in which all players will have to travel through.
The folks that have tested Famimals usually provide very good feedback about this mechanic and enjoy it; even though, only a few have had the opportunity to take part in the building and choosing Tiles process of this mechanic. Furthermore, we are currently working to find more ways to involve folks that can Playtest this exciting part of the Game.
We have tested the game virtually mostly on TableTop Simulator at https://store.steampowered.com/app/286160/Tabletop_Simulator/ and certainly welcome anyone to playtest with us. If you don’t own this platform, we can provide you with a temporary access to play test this game with us and/or can find a different method or platform to share this fun experience with you.
If you are interested in playtesting this game please send an email to gamenews@tcgmakers.com and we will follow up to provide you with instructions and/or to coordinate the time.
Thanks again for your time and support.
TTG Makers
Peace, Love, Roll N’ Rock
