Hi, I’m John Kimmel. I’ve been in the game industry off and on for about 20 years now. You can find some of my early work way back in an extremely rare hobby game ‘zine that was released in Nebraska (mostly in the Lincoln and Omaha area) in the mid-90’s called Morningstar Rising, which led to work on Deadlands: Hell on Earth from Pinnacle Entertainment. I went back to college in the early 2000’s and jumped back into doing game illustrations and graphic design around 2010.

In 2012, a long-time friend of mine and I started working together on the Battle for Sularia trading card game, which funded on Kickstarter in the summer of 2015. This prompted us to start up our own publishing company, Punch-It Entertainment. Blood, Profit, and Glory, an expansion for Battle for Sularia, was also successfully launched on Kickstarter the following year.

We were feeling pretty good with how things were going at the time and attended several conventions in 2015 and 2016. Along the way, we met an industry veteran, Jay Little, at Geekway to the West; which led to us becoming a developer for one of his and his students’ designs, titled Pompeii: Wrath of Vesuvius, in late 2016. Shortly following in early 2017, we launched another Kickstarter for Battle for Sularia, an art book, titled Chronicles of Sularia. Unfortunately, neither of those two projects funded and ended up being a pretty rough year over-all for the business.

With concerns that we lost momentum on Battle for Sularia by not releasing game content faster, we decided to launch two print-on-demand expansions in 2018, titled Reign of Terror and The Good, the Bad, and the Savage. In addition to those two expansions, we launched the Alpha and Omega program. This program was intended to get even more game content into the hands of our die-hard fans, while helping new players get into the game faster with new cards they could download and print on their own. This new program also allowed us to create two tournament formats – the Alpha and Omega formats. Locally, all this new content helped revitalize the game, but ultimately it wasn’t enough to regain the momentum we lost in other parts of the country.

After 6 years and as 2018 was coming to an end, I had basically burned out from art directing and doing the graphic design work for nearly all of the Punch-It Entertainment projects. Therefore, I decided to leave the company I help found and began freelancing again for a number of other game studios.

A project of note after Punch-It was for the new Argent Saga trading card game from Amikon Entertainment in late 2018 that lasted until the summer of 2019. I was the art director for sets one and two and expansions one and two as well as several promotional cards. I also designed the game’s logo and card layouts. Argent Saga successfully funded on Kickstarter in the summer of 2019 and I left the project around that time.

Since the summer of 2019, I decided to take a bit of a break and focus on my own creative projects. Dice Paper Miniatures is basically a result of those previous experiences and the break that followed. Ultimately, this is a venture to get back into the hobby with a fresh perspective and no longer bound by anything other than projects I feel incredibly passionate about and what I want to work on – not constrained by a partnership or some other collaboration. And for those wondering about the name, Dice Paper Miniatures – yes, the name is in reference to the classic Rock, Paper, Scissors game.