Christopher Marques

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Quest of Honor

Project Overview

The goal of Quest of Honor was to create a tabletop game blending strategy, action, and role-playing. I focused on developing an engaging gameplay experience through concise rules, intuitive visual design, and clear player interactions. The aim was to immerse players in a medieval fantasy world where duels and tactical decisions drive the narrative.

Project Owner

Myself

Role

Game Designer & Content Developer

Timeline

October 2017 – Present

Development Platform

Tabletop

Skills Used

Game Design, UX/UI for Game Components, Instructional Content Creation, Graphic Design & Layout, Copywriting & Editing

Tools

Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign, Google Sheets, Google Docs, Trello, Notion, Unity, Autodesk Maya.

Challenges

1. Complex Mechanics, Simple Rules

The core challenge was making complex gameplay mechanics easy to learn and fun to play, ensuring that even new players could quickly grasp the rules without sacrificing depth for experienced players.

2. Creating Intuitive Visuals

Designing reference cards that quickly communicated essential information while reducing visual clutter was a key priority. Balancing aesthetics and functionality was crucial to enhance gameplay without overwhelming players.

3. Maintaining Thematic Consistency

Ensuring that all design elements (cards, tokens, icons) fit within the medieval fantasy theme while staying cohesive across game components.

The Process

1. Game Mechanics Design

  • Role & Abilities Structure: Developed mechanics for class cards, weapon cards, and action cards, ensuring balanced gameplay and meaningful choices for players.
  • Rounds & Turns: Defined the flow of combat through structured rounds, turns, and action speeds (Swift, Standard, Long).

2. User Experience Design

  • Instructional Content & Clarity: Created easy-to-understand reference cards for various game components (e.g., round flow, action points). Emphasized clear typography, iconography, and layout.
  • Player Journey Mapping: Designed flowcharts and visual diagrams to represent player progression through rounds and decision points.

3. Graphic Design & Prototyping

  • Visual Layouts for Cards: Designed clear, organized templates for each type of card (e.g., class cards, weapon cards) that balance functionality with thematic immersion.
  • Iterative Prototyping: Developed drafts of cards and conducted multiple revisions based on playtesting feedback to enhance readability and comprehension

4. Content Editing & Refinement

  • Copywriting for Rules & Guidance: Wrote concise and actionable rules for gameplay, ensuring players could quickly understand and apply them.​
  • Feedback & Revisions: Collaborated with playtesters and other designers to refine language, tone, and instructions for better player guidance.

Design System

The design system for Quest of Honor balances clarity with thematic immersion. Elegant fonts like Trajan Pro and Cinzel evoke a medieval feel, while rich, earthy colors enhance the fantasy setting. Each design choice ensures that players are visually captivated and clearly guided through gameplay.

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Cinzel

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Trajan

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Outcome & Impact

Clear & Engaging Player Experience:

Successfully created a series of reference cards and gameplay materials that enhance player understanding while maintaining immersion in the game’s world.

Immersive Visual Design:

Balanced aesthetics and functionality across game components, resulting in a visually appealing and thematic experience for players.

Adaptable & Dynamic Gameplay:

Developed a combat system that is easy to learn but provides deep strategic options, allowing for varied play styles and replayability.

Training Cards

Project Highlights

Developed Comprehensive Training Cards:

Designed cards to cover all core game mechanics, such as turn-taking, round flow, character stats, and action speeds.

Visual Game Flow Mapping:

Created intuitive diagrams that help players understand round and turn progression at a glance.

Enhanced Game Balance & Replayability:

Refined gameplay mechanics through iterative prototyping and playtesting to ensure balance and engaging decision-making.

Next Steps

Advanced Playtesting & Final Balancing:

Further refine mechanics based on playtesting feedback to ensure a polished and balanced experience for all player levels.

Rulebook & Player Guide Development:

Compile all training materials into a full player guidebook and visual rulebook for ease of reference.

Beat Vortex

Beat Vortex is the working title for a rhythm game I began working on in 2018. 
I picked back up work on the project during 2020 to see how much further along I could get. 

After extensive research, I was able to implement multithreading for the song loading and analysis.  
This took load times on mobile from 7-12 minutes depending on the song to 50-90 secs. 

I later use a similar technique to improve the terrain generation, which yielded similar results. 

Tools used: Autodesk Maya, Photoshop, Unity, Visual Studio, Trello. 

Honor Lore and art

During the pandemic, I took the opportunity to freelance and work from home as a way for me to focus on finishing up one of my passion projects.  

One of the first steps along this journey was to develop more of the lore and background of the world. 

Honor Rulebook

As progress on the game began to pick up steam, I shifted focus over to refining the rulebook I had previously thrown together during the original development. 

As part of the process, visual and grammatical improvements were made to improve the flow and clarity of the rules. 

After completing the revisions of the rulebook, the project moved forward into play tests and further refinement. 

Journal App

This past year I started working on developing a productivity app. I felt that the to-do list’s or habit trackers I had tried were very narrowly focused on doing one thing well. This often left users needing multiple apps to handle simple planning and task management for their day to day. This creates a lot of opportunities for confusion,  wasted time, and more pain points than their software solves. 

The goal of the Journal App is to give every day users the same depth and control over planning of their schedules as we have for corporations with software like Jira, Trello, Monday, or Asana. 

This project has been a great test of my UI design and implementation. It has also given me a chance to further improve my workflow for loading/storing user data. 

Tools used:  Photoshop, Trello, Unity, Visual Studio. 

Tulipanov Virtual Gallery

For this project, I was asked by the painter, Igor Tulipanov, to create a virtual gallery space where he could host private exhibitions of his art. 

I used a concept image he gave me to model the exterior off of. I then designed an interior that worked well for that space and fit his unique art style. 

The final goal for the project is to be able to embed the gallery on the homepage of their site. This proved to be the main challenge of this project was setting up the ‘multiplayer’ aspect, due to it being webgl. 

 

Tools used: Autodesk Maya, Photoshop, Unity, Photon 

Pip42 - 1 : Building design

PIP42 – 1 gives players the ability to place down structures and create bases on a foreign planet. To do this required a modular building. 

I started off by building a mood board of space structures that I felt fit the aesthetic I was looking for. 
Since the game is top down, I need to design with the ability for the  roof of all the models to be removable. 

Tools used: Autodesk Maya. PureRef. 

Honor Stats Rebalancing

After the first few play tests, we found the stats for Honor needed to be rebalanced. 
Using google sheets allowed me to visualize the distributions of stats for classes, weapons, and armor. 
I was able to do this using conditional formatting, which I set to shade cell based on their value. 

The original stat calculations took a considerable amount of time to work out. 
Developing a new system cut down the time substantially. 

Tools used: Google Sheets

Honor Card Design

Over a few months, I worked to refine the card designs for my tabletop card game. Here are some iterations of the early stages. 

After not seeing much progress towards a suitable design, I decided to create a mood board to help define what I wanted to create. 

I’ve settled on a simplified look with minimal framing, allowing more room to let the art shine. 

After settling on the new design, I began implementing those concepts across the rest of the card types from the game.

Tools used: Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Pureref

Graphics by Color Group

Before
After

This was a project for a local business. They wanted their site updated to something that was more modern and fresh than their old site. 
I designed and built out the new site remotely, then swapped the site out over night to prevent downtime and users seeing a broken site. 

www.ColorGroup.com

Museum of Bops

Museum of Bops was a freelance animation project for the painter Igor Tulipanov.  

Igor wished to see the characters from his paintings come to life. 

I modeled the character, built out a museum and animated all the characters.

The video is the intro of the project where the characters enter the museum before climbing into the paintings to interact with their fellow bops

Tools used: Autodesk Maya, Photoshop, Unity, Visual Studio, Trello.