← War Dungeon

War Dungeon — Design Brief

DBWD1 Design Brief War Dungeon

Register

War Dungeon’s visual register is Steampunk + Old-West / saloon — a weird-western / gaslamp-frontier hybrid. The brand commits fully to this register and never hedges toward generic Warhammer-store aesthetics (dark + neon, dramatic angles, “epic” hero compositions). Four operative principles:

  1. Simple is the name of the game. Generous whitespace, larger base font size, comfortable vertical rhythm. No information-dense walls.
  2. Industrial, not glassy. Every surface looks etched, plated, or pressed — never glossy, glowing, or gradient-lit. Line-only depth.
  3. Earthy and atmospheric. Warm browns, dark woods, oxbloods, brass. No cool neutrals, no neon, no Material-3 saturated primaries.
  4. Curated, not gridded. Top and mid-level category pages are mini-homepages with editorial content. Only leaf-level categories render as product grids.

Three evolutions

This brief drives three styleguides — SWD1 Frontier, SWD2 Gaslamp, SWD3 Apothecary — each producing its own homepage mockup off the same Build Brief. The evolutions share the palette + typography baseline below; only the named deltas vary.

Palette (baseline v1 carry-over)

Gaslamp adds: brass #B08D57 and copper #A35F3A. Used on CTAs, rivets, dividers, and section ornaments.

Apothecary tilts the polarity: liquourice / cowboy dominate large surfaces; rodeo and rodeo–light are reserved for cards, panels, text-blocks, and raised surfaces.

Typography

Section rhythm

Surface accents

Material character

Density and whitespace

Comfortable to generous. Big vertical gaps between sections. Heroes breathe. Cards have internal padding that does not pack tight. The base font size is deliberately larger than CamCom default.

No mobile simplification. Rivets, gear dividers, and etched ornament stay on mobile. Imagery payload is the price of the look — performance stack (Object Cache Pro, WP Rocket, ShortPixel WebP) carries it.

Imagery

Voice

TBC — Lily to propose. Operating intent: Old-West saloon-shopkeeper register — earthy, knowledgeable, atmospheric. Knows the games inside-out, talks to players like equals, never markets at them. Not jokey; not corporate.

Logo

Operator-uploaded to camcom.dev’s media library. The brand has its own wordmark / mark — not the Nerdworks placeholder currently appearing on wardungeon.com.

Header and footer

Header inherits the universal Nerdworks-pattern global header from camcom-v2 — only colour and typography vary per brand. Includes a pre-header announcement bar (rotating campaigns + cross-brand loyalty reminders).

Footer is the cross-brand standard shape: four columns plus a newsletter strip plus a baseline utility strip. Columns: Shop (top-level product categories), Discover (Tools, Learn, Creators, Community), Help (Contact, Shipping, Returns, FAQ, Track Order), Brand & Loyalty (About, Sister Brands cross-redemption, Loyalty programme, Affiliate). Baseline strip carries payment icons, social icons, copyright, policies, and the “A Nerdworks Brand” badge.

Components

Standard: hero, product card, content card, carousel, modal, accordion, tabs, CTA button, testimonial, newsletter form, breadcrumb.

War Dungeon additions: creator card (avatar, name, game tags, content-stream link), how-to / tutorial card (cover image, difficulty, time, CTA), curated content block (the building unit for category mini-homepages — image, heading, body, CTA), category banner / billboard, tool teaser block (sim and builder previews on homepage and landings), loyalty cross-brand strip (sister-brand redemption), painting / UGC showcase tile.

Hero shape: single bold cinematic composition with one clear value proposition + CTA. Not a slick rotating multi-slide carousel — Steampunk fits a single bold composition. Filters on shop archive open in a modal sheet, not a sidebar; sidebars are not used anywhere in the brand.

Interactions

Bans