The Evolution of Tridek: Cards from 2007 to 2009

Today’s blog post is the kick-off for a series of posts from Alex Widl, our resident 2D and concept artist and the “father” of Tridek. He’s been working on this game for nearly ten years now and there’s a lot of things to show you. His next posts will detail the evolution of the whole game over the last years. This is but a sneak-peek into that: behold the glory of low-res card artworks.

Hi guys, it’s time for another piece of art. Today, we’ll go back to the spring of 2007 where Tridek’s new resource system was first implemented into the game. Back then, both my graphic design skills and possibilites were still at an early age. Actually, I didn’t have Photoshop or even a graphics tablet back then, so I had to draw all the creatures by hand (which was quite normal for me at that time). Here’s some imagery from 2007’s Tridek Version.

You can see that everything’s very poorly made - but it was already fun to play. Of course, the game design was far from final back then. We removed all the unnecessarily complicated stuff like attack speed or the “rebound roints” later.

One year later, I wanted to make a second edition of cards. Now, armed with Photoshop I invented new cards, getting freaked out by all the awesome photoshop layer effects. As you can see, nearly everything has a sweet bevel and emboss filter on top. Looking good, right? ;)



Since this was four years ago and taking into account my complete lack of design-skills, I think that I performed reasonably well. It was at least sufficient for the new second edition, and that was the critical point.

In december 2008 I then asked my professor for his permission in making my bachelor thesis about Tridek. Because of this, I designed new cards (again). The other cards didn’t capture the essence of the crystals I liked so much in the game. As a result, I tried to come up with a more crystalline looking design which also a bit more stylized. Take a look at the result:



Over the course of the development of my bachelor thesis in 2009 I redesigned this approach, too.  I was not quite satisfied by the look and feel of the cards then, so I merely used the crystal shapes and created new cards - again. It was also at that time that the game design got easier and more accessible. Basically the way it is now.

My intention was to keep the game challenging and tactical but to increase both usability and speed at the same time. Some features were removed in order to implement the victory point system.  Also, I decided to give the creatures more presence in the game. They are the main actors of Tridek, so I came up with a three color split for them. This was the birth of red, blue and green cards who altogether represent the creature part of the game. Here’s what I’m talking about:

This is obviously not the end of the evolution of Tridek’s card design. You have already seen some more recent examples of our work and you can be assured that we have not reached the final quality of graphics yet.

I hope you enjoyed reading this post and that you’re looking forward to our next little excursion into the art of Tridek.

Cheers and take care,

Alex