❖ Version History ❖

10th of June 2022
As you may have gathered from the thirty posts we’ve done on Calendra by now, getting a game from the personal ‘print on demand’ prototype to the fully produced item in the professional manufacturing landscape has about 100,000 steps to it. As we have discussed in some recent posts, there is a whole phase of finding the right manufacturer… but what happens after you have decided on the correct one? Well, today, we are going to talk about the prototyping process at the professional level a bit, and what you could expect if you ever find yourself here.

When a game is completely designed, and the manufacturer has been selected, typically there is a critical prototyping phase where print tests are run. During a print test at this level of production, you do not get the typical package that you would receive from a print on demand service, you get something a lot more detailed and confusing to interpret at first. Let’s talk about the difference:

The Print on Demand Service Procedure:
With print on demand, the way that you send files in to the printer is more or less the same as submitting your files anywhere, but the print on demand service will take your files, print a sheet of your card stock, then cut and prepare these as individual cards alongside your rule book & box art and get the entire package prepped as if it were a finalized game. What they send you at the end of this process is a sealed box, coated in your artwork, with the fully finished game on the interior (generally very good quality, but not as good as a mass production style manufacturer).

The Professional Manufacturing Procedure:
At the grand level of production, when making several thousand copies of a product, there is a very different process to the prototyping. These printers do not have the luxury of making only one copy of a product very easily, as, their facility is designed to tackle making massive quantities. Singular copies of anything is just too small for the big machines. With this in mind, they create three products for you during the prototype phase: a “Wet Proof” of your artwork, an “Ozalid” print of your art, and a white box prototype. This essentially means that your production is coming through in three different parts when it arrives, rather than the one complete package. So let’s talk about the difference in these parts:

Wet Proofs:

The wet proofs are full sheets of artwork, printed exactly as they would be in the final press. These proofs appear on one gigantic piece of the card stock, generally cut down into smaller pieces to make it easier to mail (which is why there are only white edges on the bottom and right side of the image above). This card stock is the same material that the final version of the game will be made out of, but, it is not cut down to the correct size for individual cards yet. The importance of this print is to make certain that the colors look correct on the stock, and this is essentially your last chance to make corrections on the cards for grammatical purposes.

Ozalid Prints:

The Ozalid prints in this phase of prototyping are very different from the Wet Proofs. These prints are done on paper rather than the final card stock. They are printed front and back (the two images above are on the same sheet of paper). The cutting lines are printed onto the image to show where the bleed is going to be removed, and every card is individually labeled and sorted into a package that shows how they will appear when placed into the box. The purpose of these prints is to check for alignment. While wet proofs let you see something as it will appear on a certain material, the ozalids allow you to investigate how individual components will look in a “final format”, while being produced on the wrong material.

White Box Prototype:

In addition to the sheets of wet proofs & the ozalid prints, there is a white box prototype sent along to show how the game will look, feel, and weigh when made into a final production. While this rendition contains none of the artwork, it is made entirely out of the correct final production materials, so that you can check for scale and assess proper measurements of weight for purposes of shipping.

So to recap on everything here:

Wet Proofs:
❖ Show final artwork on correct material, but are left uncut.
❖ Allows you to check for color & errors across the whole set all at once.

Ozalids:
❖ Show final artwork on wrong material, but are cut to show front & back.
❖ Allows you to check for alignment & orientation for front and back.

White Box Prototype:
❖ Shows no artwork whatsoever, but is made of the correct materials.
❖ Allows you to check for scale, weight, and production before made in bulk.

I know that this is comparatively a simple and somewhat boring topic to cover in the grand scheme of everything, but it genuinely took me a long time to appreciate / understand the difference between these parts. I hope that this description helps not only make the procedure of big manufacturing make more sense to you, but also helps clarify some of these points if you happen to be a game developer reading through this journal!

Be sure to stay tuned for our next discussion too, because we will be talking about the differences in lamination on the final production materials and how this changes the look of final artwork during the proofing process!