Steven Universe

Release Date: March 2016
Set Size: 11 Buttons
Designers: Jota
Artist: Rebecca Sugar

The Steven Universe set is a Fan Set made by Jota inspired by the Stephen Universe series produced by Cartoon Network. Preliminary work on the set began around March 2016.^[1]

According to Jota:

I had been thinking it might be nice to have another set that did something interesting with Reserve Dice, and since most buttons using them so far were considered "Anime-style", it made sense for it to be another cartoon. And I like button sets to have some kind of thematic pattern across most of the buttons in them; doing "four regular dice plus four Reserve dice with some signature skill for that button" seemed like a good pattern that would let them both be recognizably similar and also distinct from each other.
I tried to choose a signature skill for each button that would fit the character in question. E.g., Amethyst has Trip dice because A) she wields a whip as a weapon, and B) she's smaller than most other characters, not unlike the Lunch Money girls. And I gave Garnet Twin Dice because she's a fusion of two different gems. I used the Reserve Dice pattern for all the characters who were straight-up gems, and the more traditional four-dice-plus-X-swing pattern for predominantly human characters.
Also, since Steven himself is the son of a human and a gem, I gave him both an (X)! from his father (Greg) and an M(10) from his mother (Rose) to represent that.
When I designed the original draft of the recipes, I wanted them to be balanced with other sets, but I decided that for playtesting, I would only worry about balancing them within the set. I asked blackshadowshade to upload my first draft to a dev site, then went to the forum to ask people help test a bunch of games between the different buttons in the set. After looking at the results, I tweaked hem to make the stronger ones a bit weaker and the weaker ones a bit stronger, and repeated the process a couple of times until I was OK with the result. Random chance tends to cloud things a lot with such a small sample size. It was my hope that the fact that they were Reserve Dice would temper the effect of some of the stronger skills, but in the end, they are what they are.
The original artwork was all official promo art created for the television show that had been made available on the Internet. Kaori did the work of adapting it into button format (with direction from me). I don't recall the original source for the background -- it was probably just some CC-licensed image I found in a search that looked suitable.^[2]