Designing game boards

[SamusDrake]

Hello, this is my first post and I've been using Gimp over the years for small tasks such as creating alphas for images and exporting.

I've recently got back into tabletop gaming with games such as Castle Ravenloft, Frostgrave and Horizon Wars.  I've started on a project to essentially recreate two MB games from the early 1990s called Hero Quest and Space Crusade, and have been using MS Paint and Gimp to knock up simple grid print outs of game boards to match the sizes of miniature bases.  Sadly my 2D artskills are lacking(compared to my 3D skills and miniature painting), and although the boards I have made so far are good enough for gaming, I would really like to take it further and produce better looking board art.  I could just print the originals, but I actually enjoy doing it from scratch.

Would anyone know of any videos or books on this subject?

[Espermaschine]

Im familiar with these games, however i dont understand what your question is.
What exactly do you want to learn ?

Pretty sure these games werent made with computers, were they ?

Personally i would make hex based grids for printing in Inkscape.

Maybe have a look at Chris Hildenbrand's blog for making gaming assets ?
http://www.2dgameartguru.com/

You could also check out the
https://www.cartographersguild.com
they have a lot of tutorial stuff for Gimp on how to make fantasy maps.

[mholder]

I agree Cartographers Guild website has lots of stuff!  Especially the Gimp scripts written by RobA are some of the best and most useful.

I recommend using Blender to make the game boards, and then load the renders in Gimp to finish them.  As a matter of fact, I have been doing something very similar lately, although this is not typically the type of stuff I make. 



 
Any assets you make in 2d can be painted with animated brushes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7OBKTjBXhA
You can do this to place trees, chairs, whatever.  And you can set them to be random; this is extremely powerful.  They can even be floor tiles or walls if you do the grid snapping.


If you use Blender then you can output the high quality openexr format, which Gimp 2.9 can load as 16 or 32 bit float, which helps a lot when adjusting the lighting levels that don't clip above 100% in the same way that Gimp 2.8 does.  So of course I also recommend using the 2.9 version of Gimp.

IF you do choose Blender, here is a great tutorial for making modular assets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHYEQ0ePDcw
   

[SamusDrake]

Thank you both, as that has given me enough to go on.

Much obliged! ^_^