I was feeling a bit down on my project lately because I'm lacking a functioning engine and art assets (aside from characters). It's a little tough working on one knowing the other won't be there, so I spent a bunch of time today essentially drawing concept art that I probably won't be able to use, just so I have something to look at.
I started with "box art" for fictional board games that are played within my game:
...and then tried to make cards and boards that would be a part of these games. I ran into the obvious and extremely predictable problem here that actually making art for several board games and card decks is rather a lot of work, even when using public domain images. I still made some funky designs though:
...after which I came to my senses and realized that I'm going to need to stick with my strengths and design cards that can be procedurally permuted instead of relying on manual drawing / photoshopping. I then went back to programming stuff, and now finally have a method for drawing character avatars in little circles to represent game board tokens while also being able to draw them at a different size in the avatar display box that's part of the dialogue system, which brings me one step closer to having a functional game engine (I just need card rendering, board rendering, and a bunch of control widgets).
Man, I've done so much work on this, and it's not even remotely playable yet. Game dev is stressful, y'all.