MATILHA - Board Game Project

Matilha" (Pack) was our very first project for the Multidisciplinary and Extensionist Integrator Project (PIME) course during our first semester at Belas Artes College in São Paulo. The brief was to develop an analog game designed to help an institution tackle a real-world issue.
We reached out to several organizations, but the one that showed the most interest was Fundação Casa, an institution responsible for the socio-educational care of juvenile offenders. From the start, we knew that creating a game centered around such a sensitive and complex theme would be a massive challenge, but we decided to face it head-on. It took hundreds of hours of brainstorming, conceptualization, and filtering through endless ideas before we finally landed on our final concept: a game about resource allocation featuring dogs.
Since I was the only artist in the group, the entire visual development fell entirely on my shoulders (along with quite a few other responsibilities). Was it painful? Yes. Did I pull multiple all-nighters? Absolutely. Was it worth it? 100%.
I’ve always considered myself TERRIBLE at drawing cute things, so finding out we were making a game about adorable dogs felt like a massive personal challenge. I knew next to nothing about dogs, let alone different breeds, so this project actually forced me to learn a bit more lol.
These images are a selection of the final art, sketches, and design assets I created for the game. I also put together a complete artbook containing EVERYTHING I worked on. It is currently only available in Portuguese, but if you'd like to check out the full visual breakdown anyway, you can read it here:https://online.fliphtml5.com/fv0rt3xdd/Matilha---Artbook-mBNm/#p=1