Update #18: Meet the Artist: Lee Moyer, A Note About the Art, Designer Diary: Great Expectations

Note: This is a copy of Update #18 from my Kickstarter campaign. A few updates, including this one, were written the weekend before because I was going to be camping during the last week of the campaign. I realized as I was posting these copies that the Designer Diary for this date (at the bottom) actually never got posted.

Meet the Artist: Lee Moyer

Lee Moyer is, simply put, amazing. He's been doing digital art since 1989, back when the only computer I'd used myself was an Apple II, and his portfolio includes major corporate clients, posters, comics, roleplaying games, and even a Kickstarter-funded board game called The Doom That Came to Atlantic City, which is how I first came across his work. (Yes, I'm very late to the party. Thanks for having me.) I met him in person at PAX while he was promoting The 13th Age. He's quite versatile and a look at his portfolio will show you that he's accomplished in a wide range of styles.

Above are two of Lee's pieces—on the left, a poster for the Northwest Children's Theater presentation of "Art" by Yasmina Reza; on the right, Alice in Wonderland from his 2013 Literary Pin-up Calendar.

I approached Lee about Emperor's New Clothes on a whim; I really admired his artwork and hoped that my coverage of Doom had softened him up a little bit. But I needn't have worried: Lee's an incredibly approachable guy, very friendly, and was enthusiastic about my game. We spent a few hours kicking around ideas and he gave me some great advice. Unfortunately because of time constraints we weren't able to have him design the logo but I'm still very pleased to have Lee involved in other parts of the project.

After his own Kickstarter, Lee also wrote a white paper about Kickstarter that I personally found informative and have referenced on occasion. Visit LeeMoyer.com for some samples of his work, and click the "Journal" link for his blog.

A Note About the Art

A few of you have expressed that the number of artists we've got working on the project is a little overwhelming. I know how you feel! It can be hard to get everything I need from everybody on a strict schedule, but all of these folks have been fantastic and (for the most part) on time with their submissions. That's also why I wanted to have things completed ahead of time, so that from day one you could see the results right away rather than having to wait for final artwork before you make a decision about pledging.

As you've already surmised, the cover art was a collaboration for which all of the artists contributed equally according to the specifications I sent them, and the end product didn't require too much tweaking to arrive at its final form—it's essentially the same as what appears on the game board, though of course the cover doesn't have a scoring track on it. If you take a closer look at pages 5-12 of the Print-and-Play files, you'll notice that the artist's name is included on each card for which they provided the illustration. That way if you have a favorite card you can easily tell who's responsible for what you see.

Designer Diary: Great Expectations (or, Executing the Emperor)

I have a good friend who was sick for a long time and was unable to travel or have much face-to-face interaction. So he started what he called his Hypothetical Birthday Party, where he emailed friends from near and far, asking them to attend his party by writing descriptions and sending photos of what they would bring to his party. Being hypothetical, you could bring anything you wanted, no matter how difficult to prepare or impossible to procure. Although these parties weren't "real" in the sense that you couldn't physically partake of all of the fantastic dishes and drinks contributed by all the party-goers, they've become a tradition that many of us look forward to. My friend was able to have a non-hypothetical birthday party this year, but he still held the hypothetical one too, and it was well-attended. The question that arose is whether the real could possibly live up to the imagined.

Whether it's a birthday party or board game or book or movie, there can be a difference between your expectations and the reality. In some cases the reality ends up exceeding expectations, which is always awesome. However, when you're making something, particularly something creative, there's almost always a gap: the reality falls short of your expectations.

Why is that?

Well, to put it simply: you can imagine perfection, but that's pretty dang hard to achieve. It's why people are so often disappointed in the movie after they've read the book and already pictured what everything and everyone looks like. It's why video game graphics, no matter how powerful consoles get, will never beat the resolution of a text adventure game.

Years ago I read a book called Art and Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking by David Bayles and Ted Orland. It's about creating art, mostly in the traditional sense, but I think the lessons apply to nearly any creative process. The book talks about this gap between ideas and execution, and argues that not only does the gap exist, but that it should. Because if everything you make turns out exactly the way you imagined it, then you're limiting your imagination to what you know you are already capable of. Artists and creators should be pushing the limits of what they can do. We should be testing boundaries, trying new things, taking risks. That's how you grow. And it's also how you make "mistakes" that actually lead you in new, exciting directions.

Here are just a few quotes from the book that really stuck with me:

Making art provides uncomfortably accurate feedback about the gap that inevitably exists between what you intended to do, and what you did.

Art is like beginning a sentence before you know its ending.

People who need certainly in their lives are less likely to make art that is risky, subversive, complicated, iffy, suggestive or spontaneous. What's really needed is nothing more than a broad sense of what you are looking for, some strategy of how to find it, and an overriding willingness to embrace mistakes and surprises along the way.

That moment of completion is also, inevitably, a moment of loss—the loss of all the other forms the imagined piece might have taken. The irony here is that the piece you make is always one step removed from what you imagined, or what else you can imagine, or what you're right on the edge of being able to imagine.

So that leads me back around to executing my Kickstarter project. When I first started working on Emperor's New Clothes, I had a vision of what it would look like, how it would play, even how the Kickstarter campaign itself would look. I thought about the cards, the logo, the cover art, the gameplay, the story.

Parts of it turned out the way I imagined, other parts fell short, and still others surprised me. Of course, Emperor's New Clothes is not a singular vision: I started the ball rolling, but to make it a reality I needed to share my vision with all of the other people you see listed in the credits section, the artists and designers and folks at Game Salute. But everyone pictures things a little differently—what I see in my head may not be exactly what you see. Until we all become telepathic, there will always be something lost in translation—but that also means that each person brings their own unique vision to the project and that can lead to very cool results.

And last but not least —arguably most important—is you! What is art if it is not observed? What is a game if it isn't played? What is a Kickstarter project without backers? By backing the project and giving feedback and arguing about it on Twitter and BoardGameGeek, all of you have shaped Emperor's New Clothes as well. It isn't something that popped fully formed out of my head, but something that has evolved and shifted thanks to you. Whatever the end result of the Kickstarter campaign itself, I'm grateful for that. It's been terrific (and terrifying) to see my idea take shape this month.

It's hard for me to know whether Emperor's New Clothes, in the end, will live up to your expectations. With so many different people, everyone has a slightly different vision of how things should turn out. No matter what I reveal at the end of this week, I expect that some of you will be delighted and some of you will be disappointed. But I hope you'll love it. I hope that you will be as excited about and as proud of Emperor's New Clothes as I am, because I think you and I have created something pretty magical together.

Of course, that's my expectation. What are yours?