❖ Version History ❖

13th of September 2022
During our last discussion of designing the play mats for Calendra, we had left off on just receiving the absolutely beautiful first attempt prototypes (as pictured above during our session report from the night before). These had been delivered in the mail probably about 10 days earlier, and as soon as I had seen them in person, it was my instant and singular objective to get these touched up toward a more complete and final product.

I spend just about every waking second of my existence in this ten day period working very hard to achieve a better looking design. And as we go into the details of what was edited, here is a nice hi-resolution image of what some of these changes entailed:

While the mats look good up front, there are many finesse details that I personally want to touch up to make them feel more professional. What we needed to make this happen is fairly straightforward, just time consuming:

❖ The Mats had a design for the card boxes that was quickly copied and pasted, which makes them look very repetitive and… cheap. I want these boxes to look like they had more intent in how they were designed with the background texture in mind.

❖ Each mat is going to feature a season. At first they were only designed to feature the Ferric Season, but now that I have seen the potential they hold toward the gameplay, they need to be color coded for each possible player in a game.

❖ The text and logo in the top left and right corners of the mat are too dark for what I want to show. It blurs out what the user can see of the background, and makes the small text in this area hard to read, which can be easily touched up.

❖ The mats feature a white line that helps show the layout of the board and where cards can be played in the division of “Garden and Court”. This line in the original layout is very plain and boring looking. I want it to be more on theme. I had originally thought about having these lines be the Celtic knots, but I think they are better served as the Celtic Beasts.

Luckily, the mats are going to more or less be identical minus some wording, color and symbol changes. By luckily, I mean that it only takes about 3-5 hours per mat design to get these all touched up to the same quality. That might sound like a lot, but it probably took about 7-10 hours to get the first Ferric Mat made… so in the end, while it is a lot, at least we did not need to start from scratch to create each design.

One of the major challenges in creating these changes is the aspect of using an iPad with ProCreate as my platform for graphic design. It comes with a serious advantage and a serious disadvantage. The advantage is that I can use the Apple Pencil to do all of my drawing based work, which, for lines and corrective details in any aspect of the design is an absolute blessing. The disadvantage however is that designs as large as these ones need to be take up a ton of memory and space on the hard drive of the iPad. As a result, the images only allow for a very small number of layers where art can be edited. Thus, rather than doing all of the necessary work in one file, these play mat images were essentially each designed in their own file, and the content of each file needs to be translated across documents (which is very frustrating and time consuming.

But.

Luckily the results are absolutely worth the effort in the end:

Now… I only face one really tricky problem left:

I very much want to feature hi-resolution shots of these products in the introductory video that we are going to create for the opening header of the Kickstarter Story for our campaign page…. but we are only 2 weeks away from launch day as of right now… and time to get something both manufactured and shipped is going to be incredibly tight (the first mats took about 8 days to make and another week to ship)… sooooooooo

Yeah. we are going to spend a ton of money on express shipping and cross our fingers for right now. With any amount of luck I will manage to get these new prototypes in my hands before the last weekend leading into our campaign, I will manage to film the rest of our start up video, and I will somehow synthesize all of this content into one cohesive and beautiful video before we hit our deadline.

Wish me luck… and maybe pray a tiny bit for us over here. It is starting to get intense with the deadlines rapidly approaching!