Royal Cards

Second entry for the #Ponies-For-Everypony group's royalty contest.

This one took a while. Multiple characters, card design and re-imagining cast members from the first Hearth's Warming Eve was a good deal of work!

So here we have my take on Clover the Clever, Smart Cookie, Princess Platinum and Commander Hurricane. Private Pansy and Chancellor Puddinghead didn't make it, as I wasn't satisfied with their character designs yet. If they did, Pansy might have been another jack or ace, and the Chancellor would, of course, be the joker.

With my first entry being a JRPG tribute, I wanted to continue that theme and originally meant to use these as character icons in a first-person dungeon crawl RPG mockup, but couldn't come up with a good design for the UI. Another idea was to go with a "character select" screen typical of classic beat-em-up arcade games. In the end, replaying Alice: Madness Returns at the time gave me the idea about royal ranks in playing cards.