❖ Version History ❖

30th of June, 2021
In terms of Calendra’s story, it has now been nearly an entire year since any tangible progress has been made on the game’s design. During that time, the entirety of The Great Chase had to be made as quickly as possible to meet some crazy deadlines.

But… I work on as many projects as I can simultaneously handle… so, even though the journey of The Great Chase continues on for many more months from this point in the timeline, from here forward there is enough of a gap in my schedule where Calendra can come back into play as well!

There is a bit of an serendipidous reason why this is the moment when Calendra is tangled back into the design conversation though, and that is because there is something special we have learned about the production of The Great Chase now that we have hit the moment where we are conducting negotiations with the manufacturing side of things: there is the ability to add two advertisement cards to the game’s construction without any additional cost to the production!

As soon as I hear this news, I know that in the back of my head what must be done:

A special ad card must be designed to hint at Calendra!

To an extent… it is at this exact moment in time that I realize just how much more Calendra can be graphically touched up from where it presently is… and how much I wish I had been working on that at some point these past several months. But. That’s just how it goes when you are a one man art army trying to produce professionally.

In any event, there is this splendid opportunity for new artwork to exist in Calendra, and there has to be something unique about it to the gameplay… but what…? I struggle for the whole afternoon wondering what this idea is going to build up to, but I cannot concoct anything that I am happy with, so, as always tends to happen at intersections like this, I call up Ben for a fresh round of brainstorming.

We spend several hours on the phone discussing ideas and possibilities… but there are such few good ideas on the table. Then, finally, a breakthrough: “what if we could give our first game funders some sort of super power for before they begin a round in our second game if they ever come back as repeat customers?” – I sit up in my seat, attention drawn: “Ah… what if we gave these people the ability to decide what season they want to play as? It would do nothing to alter the strength of a player in the game dramatically, and it would be a cool flavor thing to have someone reveal a secret card about Calendra to anyone who might not have ever heard of The Great Chase in the future!”

We are satisfied with this power… but then we get to talking about what sort of mythological thing in Celtic lore could represent the power of affecting the minds of others? “A selkie? – No… A Spirit? …No… but much closer… what would the Irish equivalent to a spirit even be?” And then in the same moment we both get to talking about the “Will-o-Wisp”, or the hypnotic spirit fire of the woods.

-perfect-

Back to the design workshop.

Now that we have the conceptual idea in place for what our ad card is going to be, I realize something kind of crazy and important about this moment….

I only have about 3 days to make this card exist…
…and I want it to feature graphics similar to what the final product of Calendra might be.

This is a real problem, because in the year that I have cranked out the artwork for The Great Chase, I have learned a great deal of things about how to improve the art of Calendra, I just haven’t had the time to implement these ideas in any way yet. So, I take a deep breath, I look at my schedule, and I basically lock my door for the next 72 hours of my free time.

My first target objective is to make and extremely simple, but nice looking back side to the card. I decide to take all of the elements of the box layout and implement it into the format of a card (with the title, logos, and nursery style rhyme / lore of the game) This final design is done very quickly, and it is the image featured at the top of this post.

I then take a whole bunch of steps to leap the design of Calendra forward (no exaggeration, full leaps in the design process)… and I will share the narrative of what I did in plenty of detail over the course of the next six or so posts of the Design Journal here, but in short, I made a whole new prototype of how the cards will eventually look for this one-off design… and it is beautiful:

As far as things go… I am actually in disbelief how nice this card has turned out in the super short time that I had to design it… but at the same moment, I find that if it weren’t for the prototyping of Calendra, I would never have had the opportunity to improve the artwork so efficiently. Granted, making the edits that I have done here to the rest of the graphic design in the game will take me several more months to get done, but it is amazing what I have learned in this past year, and this card is the proof of that.

With what you can observe of the design above, you can immediately tell that I have altered a great many things:

❖ The Colors have been improved

❖ The Textures of the card have been altered and drastically improved

❖ The Fonts have changed

❖ The Symbols have changed

❖ There are new styles to the Shading and Highlights

…Etcetera. Almost everything is different, except for the frame and layout of information. Though it will still be some months until I can approach the game artistically full time again because of how much that must be done for the completion of The Great Chase (only about two weeks until Kickstarter Launch at this point in time), this was a truly epic moment of progress for the future of Calendra, and we will continue that discussion in our next round of The Design Journal! Stay tuned my friends!