Daniel Solis

Howdy folks! I just got back from SPX 2016, the convention focused on independent and small press comics creators. Back in 2014 I briefly mentioned SPX as a great source for artistic talent. Last year I described the parallels between the indie comics and the tabletop game design communities . This year I'm just exhausted, so here's a link to the pinterest board of artists I met at the hall . Most of these artists said they were available for freelance assignments, so if you're a publisher or art director looking for new talent, check them out! A brief overview of my exp at the show: Fri: Toured the comics vault at Library of Congress. Saw a lovely Harrison Cady piece. Talked sci-fi movies with new friends. Then hauled boxes around the hall for set up. Sat: Line mgmt duty. Met The Adventure Zine artists. Saw the Ignatz Awards. Danced at (and evacuated from) the SPX prom. Sun: Mostly special duty. Saw @careydraws on Magical Girls panel! Then teardown, lifting, h...

Laying out a card game but your team members don't have indesign? Spreadsheets don't keep character formatting either, so that's no help. How can your team call out key words for you to style? Custom tags! Using a library of customized plain text tags makes it easy to know which words need to be styled a particular way. By setting up a few simple GREP styles in InDesign, those tags will automatically highlight and style those key words like magic. All you have to do is merge the records in DataMerge as usual and InDesign does the rest of the work for you. Hope you find this useful! Support more videos at patreon.com/danielsolis !

New goodies for all my patrons! I had a request for some wireframe card designs for different types of games, so here 's a test batch for you. These are available in EPS, JPG and an IDML file. Hope you find these useful! If you'd like to see more, please comment on the Patreon post here . Thanks!

This was a silly little product I was mulling a while back. It's too goofy for abstract players and too abstract for goofy players. So, probably just right for my sensibilities. :) It's deck of cards with 2x3 grid of spaces. Eight cards arranged as shown above would make the middle six rows of a chess board. Each player's home row is implied by the dotted lines. You'd set up a standard chess game and play on this modular board, using the special effects on the spaces shown above. This is obviously designed for chess, but could easily combo with the transparent card abstract game I posted as well. It's one of those little ideas that's not really marketable at anything but a niche scale, but I probably great for a POD product. It's been a long time since I've released any new product and the longer the hiatus, the more pressure I feel to make the next one really special. Perhaps instead I should just focus on these sorts of silly ideas. What do y...

Lately I've been thinking about designing card decks that act as supplements for a standard deck of playing cards you already have at home. The idea is that with one of these supplements and a deck of playing cards, you'd have a deep and extremely portable strategy game in your favorite genre. Auction games, area control games, etc. First up, a poker auction game. The idea here is that you could play out an auction using poker hands instead of money. I liked the idea that instead of a 1:1 ratio of dollars to bidding power, a poker hand could have an unpredictable bidding power. To get the alpha on the table as soon as possible, I just cannibalized a first edition of Sushi Go as a placeholder set of set collection cards. I also grabbed a Hocus deck since it had a convenient summary of poker hands. With the Game Designers of North Carolina, we play stormed the following game: SET UP Remove the chopsticks from the Sushi Go deck. Shuffle it together and deal out five lots...