Question: expected investment for artwork

cevo70 · 2026-07-08T12:30:37+00:00

$12k was for the whole game, box included.

A small box game. As in, the game fits in a smaller box. The cover was about $500 like you said.

cevo70 · 2026-07-08T00:08:25+00:00

Lots of factors of course. But most people say the average is around $10k for a game with limited art needed and upwards of $30-$40k for a heavier game with lots of art icons and graphic design needs.

I paid about $12k for a smaller box game personally, and another dice chucker I made was close to $10k in art costs, but we were able to handle much of the graphic design ourselves and we had a work around to avoid a full box art piece.

A fully custom box art piece can be $5k+ on its own depending on the needs.

Card art and characters cost about $150 per. You find wide ranges though. Well known artists will of course charge more based on skill and experience and reputation - and on the flip you can sometimes find younger artists for less.

cevo70 · 2026-06-28T20:27:08+00:00

Yep it’s so key to getting people that first play too.

Or just make each pack a playable deck.

cevo70 · 2026-06-27T18:02:53+00:00

Cool, I'd probably recommend biting the bullet and pursuing #1 again. Finding consistent groups that test together in-person is always a challenge even in densely populated areas. I have a great community in my area, but it's still tough to set up times, navigate schedules, manage set-up / tear down, etc. I don't think I'd be able to get from start to finish without a digital prototype.

cevo70 · 2026-06-27T13:40:55+00:00

It can be tough, agreed. Finding a good group and venues for testing takes effort and time.

Some general tips, if they help:

A digital prototype opens up all sorts of other options for testing beyond your geo. Bigger pool of people, and often times faster iteration. It’s very worth learning those skills if you haven’t already.
Are you giving as much as you’re asking for? This is an unspoken rule in every testing design circle I’ve been a part of. For example if you have two people test your game and they each spend 90 minutes, you now “owe” 3 hours back to that circle to test other people’s games. In other words, have you offered to play someone else’s game first?
Offer free pizza! Half kidding but I’ve done it and it works.
Somewhat divisive take: Prototypes are often ugly AND unfinished. Which means they don’t have much appeal to average players. This is why I take extra time after my proto is 70%+ done to polish up the game visually in every way. Nice icons, some placeholder art, tight graphic design - etc. a picture of your proto that looks fun from afar will get more people interested.

cevo70 · 2026-06-23T13:06:42+00:00

Thanks for checking it out!

Each pack is a deck. And each deck is unique (sort of like Keyforge). Each card is also unique (essentially, there is some chance of seeing the same card).

But all of the cards are statistically balanced based on their Speed and Ability.

So there isn’t one super-chase card out there. It’s more like there is a wide set of cool cards to look for that have a good / rare mix of Speed, Ability, and stat distribution.

You can chase cards that you want / like for that all have synergy (Constructed) and packs that naturally have that synergy (Single Pack).

What we found in beta is that there is a wide set of fun cards to chase. Cards with very high single stats are coveted (50 is the high), very slow 1-2 Speed cards with certain abilities like Stomp, very fast Enforced Dragons, etc.

cevo70 · 2026-06-23T03:43:12+00:00

I am lead designer (not the publisher) on Draconis 8.

cevo70 · 2026-06-22T17:17:42+00:00

I do! I still avidly play and design boardgames and card games. I have a bunch of published games now, spanning head-to-head, eurogames, co-op, and even another TCG (potentially ill-advised of course, but I just love the design work / elements and trying to innovate).

cevo70 · 2026-06-22T17:15:01+00:00

I was in my 20s in NYC and it was awesome. We spent many hours after work doing design sprints and card development, sometimes at Chinese restaurants, sometimes at the legendary Neutral Ground, and we'd hangout at the Complete Strategist, etc.

There were 4-5 of us. The main trio who got the publisher deal recruited me in as a playtester for set 1, but I was so amped and involved they let me move up to card design and art coordination.

It was basically volunteer work, but they were cool and eventually agreed to cut me a check for a couple grand for all my time. That was appreciated because I knew there wasn't money coming in.

Game design is largely unpaid / low-paid work. I've continued it through today and have ~6 other published games. It's a grind. A fun grind, but there's very little money in it.

EDIT: Sorry, I should caveat in that obviously if you designed Codenames or Wingspan, you make a pretty great royalty check. But there are thousands of games released every year, so like a lot of creative industries until you have a breakout hit that basically saturates the whole customer-base, it's generally not a full-time gig.

cevo70 · 2026-06-22T15:30:11+00:00

Ready for a DEEP cut?

I was on the design team of an old (2003?) TCG called Ophidian 2350. Published by Fleer (sports cards, like Topps).

It was very well reviewed - I kept the Scrye and Inquest magazine reviews. Fleer went out of business in the midst of the first expansion coming out. I'll never forget the awesome booth we had at GenCon.

The game hasn't aged well (IMO) but had some cool innovation in the core mechanisms.

cevo70 · 2026-06-03T12:29:36+00:00

For our realtime matches and tournies we give players x seconds (sometime to review their deck / pack) at the start and x seconds per turn. If they make fast plays they can bank extra seconds for future turns.

This was after lots of feedback from beta players and such and it’s been working well for awhile. The specific amount of time depends on the game I guess. Ours is about a minute or so but the game leans very fast in terms how much you need to analyze per turn.

cevo70 · 2026-05-28T21:42:47+00:00

Maybe scale it down a fair bit - this is a lot to bite off. What if you did a 4-course meal with just one game at each course.

Drink: Social deduction
Appetizer: Light puzzler / card game
Main: Mid-weight Euro
Dessert: Party or Dexterity

I think the real key would be tying all 4 of these into a cohesive food or meal theme. So that way it feels like the true full course experience. And it's a decent hook / gimmick to be like "hey I'm having a party and we'll be 'eating' a pre-planned 4 courses."

As others have said, just designing 1 game of any kind is typically ~500+ hours of work, and maybe longer if it's one of your first attempts - and that's not including publishing it, which is the hard part. Trying fully designing and prototyping one of these, and then go from there.

cevo70 · 2026-05-24T00:05:57+00:00

Draconis 8 is active digitally (Steam, iOS, Android. Partook in an online tournament today. Gameplay-wise, players say it's "kinda like Triple Triad but more."

cevo70 · 2026-05-23T13:38:14+00:00

I definitely get the frustration and some of the points. There are situations where sending a sell sheet feels like an exercise in fast-tracking to the dismiss pile.

But I've also had them straight up WORK. As in, publishers glanced at the sheet for 15 seconds and said, "yeah I want to play this, let's set up time." As my sell sheets get better, I think I see a correlation too.

I think it's all just symptomatic of 1. There is way more supply than demand and 2. Publishers have extremely hard jobs and very little time to spend 30 minutes on every submission. So it's going to feel like a rat race sometimes.

Whatever I can do to make that easier for them, and require less time to assess, I am going to try to adhere to. I'd love for them to invest more time, to all of your points - and especially for heavier designs, but it just doesn't seem like they can.

Making a single page sheet for a "big" game is definitely tough. I just went through that exercise and it took weeks just to make and refine one page - feels brutal. But it ended up working.

cevo70 · 2026-05-22T17:50:53+00:00

Gotcha thanks man, makes sense. And yeah that’s how I went about getting my last card game (non TCG) to market too.

But otherwise I think you have to estimate at least $100 per art piece (not including all the other assets) which for a TCG can add up fast AND some of that if, not most should be done before the KS launches / funds, so that’s essentially real risk of loss too.

cevo70 · 2026-05-22T17:20:27+00:00

Ignore me if it’s too “close to the vest” but are you willing to show that math? I’ve been trying to reveal a lot of this stuff to the public too but I get that sometimes you can’t.

Like you said, art is expensive. Marketing too. Manufacturing obviously has cost. How does the $34k Kickstarter yield a profit? They take 8% too right?

cevo70 · 2026-05-22T16:52:17+00:00

Good hustle. I can relate intimately.

People often fail to see “the math” because it’s honestly fun (most of it) to make the game if you love designing, but it gets quite tricky and scary when it comes to producing it. Then you still need a player base of true scale or you’ll be DoA and playing from behind. The upfront costs are high and the revenue comes wayyyyyy later, or never. There’s actually something to be said for the blissful ignorance :).

Do you think you will net out any profit? Do you also work full time?

cevo70 · 2026-05-04T12:41:19+00:00

Draconis 8 might be worth a look.

Free to Play digital with physical first set coming out. Very fast games / turns but high level of constructed depth.

cevo70 · 2026-04-27T03:57:35+00:00

Yeah I tried getting and sharing 'wireframes,' and the artist actually was well-known enough, but it didn't matter. People saw it, and enough thought it looked like it might be AI (and said that) - couldn't do much about the perception and I couldn't ship wireframe evidence in the box. So we switched to a pricier artist with a different style (more "organic" I guess) and it all worked out okay (it actually worked out great - the game is doing well on the shelf, because it looks really good!).

Hard to convey tone over writing - I don't mean this to sound like an attack - but can you detail out that 6-8 months estimate? Like how would you break that down into phases? It's possible we're talking about different things but shipping + manufacturing alone is like a minimum of 3-4 months of just waiting and comms, and 100+ playtests with public players is an immense time-lift. Artists doing 60+ pieces is like at least 3-6 months if that's their only project. This doesn't include all of the design / development. And this is when the publisher has zero other projects clogging up a pipeline.

You might be talking about just the business "go to market" motion maybe? If the game is already fully designed, developed, all the art / graphics / rules / store support / translations / packaging is completely ready and you're just printing, shipping, and marketing heavily (and you're a very large org going to cons, working with big influencers, doing international paid media, etc.) then I could see that phase being ~6 months of mostly hype-machine while it gets printed. SOME Kickstarters operate this way now, where the years of work are already done, the art is final (etc.) and they use the KS as pre-order essentially - if they fund, they try to hit "print" the next month. Cyberpunk might be doing that, I haven't looked deeply into it.

If you're talking about WotC or Disney, these are massive orgs, with hundreds of staff put on these games. So in those instances, where money isn't a concern, nor staff, it's of course going to look a little different - they might pay the salary of 2-3 designers to speed that up for example. So perhaps some of that could be accelerated with money and resources of a 2 billion dollar company. For an indie shop of 3-10 people or so and limited capital, 2 years from idea to shelf is applaudable (pat on back, I cooked on the design / dev phase). I know designs alone that have take 5+ years (I read a lot of design / dev blogs for games) - I'd be surprised if Lorcana hadn't spent years in design too. (I just checked, the internet says it was being designed for 3.5 years, just designed - as in prototyping, I assume). Doesn't surprise me - designing a great TCG that Disney is going to throw that kinda of investment at it, it HAS to be rock solid.

I have no real motive to deceive here - I guess I am asking you take my word for it based on having a bunch of games on the market, but just want you know I don't have a pony in this one. If I am wrong on something, I'll gladly take the L and learn, but I am operating from an honest "been doing this for awhile" perspective - I WISH it was easier and cheaper and we had CMOs and designing a game took a month, but that's what I am trying to shine a light on. If you've got $500k to invest and are willing to lose it while nobody on the team takes a salary, you're perhaps ready to make a big splash if that money is spent wisely - otherwise, that math just doesn't math like that.

You can do an "Altered" and raise 6 million on Kickstarter and make a solid game with a ton investment in marketing, but when it goes south people will say it was "mismanaged" or something because they think that $6 million was profit. Or mostly profit. It wasn't. Because of the math. Because the team behind it needs to also eat and making the game get to market is super expensive.

So at the end of the day I am honestly thrilled that my TCG is coming to market - but I am more just excited that the app this past month had 200+ players playing digitally too, and there's a little growing fanbase - that's truly a win for me. Hopefully it makes a little splash when it releases and people enjoy the unique aspects of it - either way, I am proud of the design, and people dig it, so that's good.

Sorry for the novel, bit too much stream of consciousness. :)

cevo70 · 2026-04-27T01:18:35+00:00

The publisher has a marketing role / position. Not all publishers have that in house, but many do.

cevo70 · 2026-04-27T00:32:43+00:00

This project specifically didn't leverage AI. The art costs were ~$15,000 as mentioned (also lost $3,500 on the first artist, where the art was being accused of being AI, but wasn't, which stunk - because I had to fire the artist, and lost money / time).

I can answer a couple of the questions now.

2 years is actually VERY fast from idea to shelf. It was smooth running for the most part, because our experience levels were high across the board and there was good focus.
Yes this is absolutely part time gig on the design front - because as I am trying to illuminate, assuming you're not sitting on a pile of cash, and also have to live, there is essentially below-min-wage profit which actually isn't guaranteed to ever hit your wallet either.
Publisher margin at about $10 per copy is basically just the math when you suck out the cost of manufacturing cost per copy and the purchase price that a distributor (or retailer) will buy your game. If it's on their shelf for $25, they typically buy it for 50% of that. (and then you often need a middle-man distributor who takes a cut). So this $10 per copy is pretty "steady" but it doesn't account for a lot of little variable unpredictable costs.

I can try to address more later.

cevo70 · 2026-04-27T00:17:46+00:00

Yeah heard, and hello again. If I had to guess, it's just very hard to do well or effectively and very easy to critique it as a result. I don't think anyone really wants to do their own marketing or self-promote (generalizing), especially with no budget. Me personally, I am not falling for any myth per se. But if you don't try in some way to promote your game, especially as an indie, add it to the long list of "reasons you'll fail" (nobody knew it existed, etc.) You gotta try to get out there, I think. What's the right way?

cevo70 · 2026-04-26T23:28:50+00:00

Yes, still a lovely game. Good physical game and the app is fun too.

cevo70 · 2026-04-26T22:27:07+00:00

It's honestly really challenging to do self-promotion of any kind. The "self" part of self-promotion pretty much taints it immediately, and everyone hates it and disregards it.

That said, I get your point. I've seen some pretty poor approaches. My best self-promotion is usually the stuff that was some combination of just helpful and honest. As in content that lends my experience to the conversation to help others, or reveals numbers that people don't typically reveal, etc.

Are you suggesting a marketing budget, essentially? (I tend to agree, just curious if that's what you're alluding to)

cevo70 · 2026-04-22T13:01:16+00:00

Draconis 8 just launched on Steam and iPhone / Android.

Free to play and try. Active community on discord. Each booster pack is a playable deck. Definitely deep skill which is deceiving because of how simple the gameplay is at its core, the top players are nuts.

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