The Game Makers
In the summer of 2025 I interned with a board game publishing company called Bezier Games. During my internship I got to work on The Game Makers a medium weight engine building game about making board games featuring 200+ popular board games.
I was privileged to design the rulebook, reference sheet, scoresheet, kickstarter page, and more for this project. Below is a sampling of my work on the project with brief descriptions of my process and timeline.
The image to the right is used in the game to display completed game objectives in the form of cards with real world board games. The design of the 3d components was an iterative process that was finalized after 2-weeks of me working on it.
All the 3d components were created in Illustrator making it easy to copy and edit them into other projects as you will see below.
The Rulebook
I originally received the rulebook from another designer who organized it in a condensed textbook like layout without any of the images in place. Following the layout I finished the first iteration of the rulebook in 2-weeks to be used at Origins board game convention.
The team agreed that the rulebook needed more breathing room to give a fun and engaging feel fit for a medium weight game. In order to achieve this I sketched out a full redesign that would take the page count from 20 to 32 pages with decorative elements and a panda Meeple character guiding the reader through the pages.
Below are the rough sketches I used to map out the rulebook before I started putting everything in place.
I created a 3d rendering of the “Warehouse” that is the center piece of the game that all players interact with simultaneously. The pages below include this 3d rendering.
To fill out the spreads in engaging ways I illustrated backgrounds in the style of the artist who created the art for the player boards. These illustrations were created using Illustrator making them scalable and easy to edit.
After an 8-week long collaborative process of adjusting wording and fine tuning all of the images to read clearly we finally landed on the finished layout below.
The reference sheet
The Game Makers is pretty straight forward once you get the hang of it but if you’re anything like me it’s always good to have a reminder about specific rules of the game.
The design process of the reference sheet was similar to that of the rulebook in that it was an iterative process with the rest of the team providing feedback.
The Kickstarter Page
The goal for The Game Makers was to sell the majority of units through kickstarter and to help achieve that goal I created over 60 JPEGs and 18 animated GIFs for the page. The team at Bezier were able to use the page to reach 300k in the first 24hrs.
Below is a sampling of the graphics for kickstarter. to view the page click the link below.
The Panda Headers
The problem that needed to be solved was to create a page that both felt organized and energetic keeping in mind that Kickstarters background color is limited to white. I recommended that to keep people engaged will working within the limitations of a Kickstarter page, animated headers could be used to uniquely differentiate sections of the page. Here is what I came up with.
Even More Animation
In addition to the 13 header animations I created 5 more animations that help explain some of the mechanics of the game in a satisfying way. These 2d animations are meant to appear 3d in order to show off the components of the game while keeping a quick render time. This process enabled adjustments to be made more efficiently and file sizes to be kept under 10MB for faster loading times. Here is what I came up with in 1 week.
The Graphics
The goal for the Kickstarter graphics was to overwhelm the viewer with the value of the higher pledge level. This called for a change in my usual design thinking. Where a typically like to give breathing room and simplify images my approach for these images was to pack them full of color and energy to convey the feeling of getting a confetti canon to the face.
I achieved this by contrasting the graphics with the white background with a caution tape pattern brush border I created in illustrator. I then used exploding elements to brake the border to make it feel like everything is flying at the viewer. Then to add even more color I put an outer glowing effect on all of the important elements to help them stand out and to add vibrance to the image.
Below are a few of the graphics created for The Game Makers Kickstarter for more click the before mentioned link.
The Meeple Designs
In The Game Makers there are three types of wooden workers: Level 1, Level 2, and Level 3. The higher the level Meeple the darker the color. The Level 2 Meeple is in reference to an older Bezier game and the Level 3 Meeple is in reference to Panda Game Manufacturing.
My task for the design of the Level 1 Meeple was to match the style of the previous two Meeples, use a lighter color scheme than the Level 2 Meeple, and make it none gender or ethnically specific. After several iterations we landed on a design influenced by the dozers from Fraggle Rock because all roads lead to Jim Henson.
With the great reception of the Level 1 Meeple I was further tasked to create 6 more Meeples for the kickstarter in the theme of space and Halloween.
