❖ Version History ❖

July 19th, 2023
Alrighty, so, we’ve done a TON of research into clothing culture, we are getting our fundamental building blocks for the design of this game together, but now we need to starter hammering down some Game Mechanics.

When Ben brought the prototype to me, there were three core details that I loved, but how they interacted & what they did for the game needed dramatic amounts of love to become the game that I was starting to envision. Here are the three core features of the original design that really brought me into the project:

1. Clothing Design that utilized a mix of: Shape / Color / Pattern.
This concept of developing one piece of clothing using a mix of cards that each represent one of these features very much caught my attention, because this is when I started picturing transparent card design.

2. Using a Dice to Determine Color.
As a quick tangent from the previous point, in our very first play test of the game, we had the colors of dye available to get… but we didn’t have a means of getting them. We landed on using a D4 to help us with the prototype, and this got me thinking a lot about a custom dice design that highlights color rather than number, which I loved the idea of.

3. A Collaborative Tic-Tac-Toe Board.
While we didn’t have a good mechanic for retrieving the color until the D4 conversation, Ben did come to the first play test with a brilliant idea of using a 3×3 grid with a pair of D10’s that worked like a Tic-Tac-Toe board that each player interacted with in between turns.

Now, each of these points is a huge conversation of design, so we are definitely not going to go through every detail of these in this post. Instead, we are going to treat each of these points as their own post, and we will do them in order. So, for today, we will go over the initial complexity of conceptually putting together a multi-layer card design using all aspects of shape/color/pattern & scoring!

So, where do we even begin here?
Well, for me, the most concerning piece of the equation was “How on Earth will these different cards each have their impact on the gameplay?”. This is a very important question, because in the end here, each card has to matter… If each card does not matter, then there is no reason to include it. But… will they simply matter because: “Points”? How will that work with “Colors”? ~ There were a lot of questions going on in my mind, and this is where the image at the top of this post came from!

If you haven’t taken the time to dissect what that image of my notes was trying to say, here is the base concept:

1. “Shape Cards”
(The top-card of the 3-card concept, featuring the actual outline of the clothing pieces such as the: Kimono / Hakama / Obi / Sensu). These cards are each worth static points that are only earned if the Color & Pattern are added to them, and they accumulate up to 10 total points at the end of the game.

2. “Pattern Cards”
(The middle-card of the 3-card concept, featuring the pattern added to the clothes). These cards are worth base points depending on their cost (i.e. spend 2-silk, get 2-points). These cards also have a modifier for “matching patterns” that pays out in multiplication rather than addition (i.e. having two matching 2-silk cards = (2+2)*2 for 8-points rather than 4-points).

3. “Color Cards”
(The bottom-card of the 3-card concept, featuring the color that shows through the two translucent cards above it). These cards do not add points to the “Clothing Score”, but rather, there will be an interesting mechanic of some sort for the “Empresses Favorite Color”, which is how bonus points will be awarded for the color cards you choose throughout the game (and adds a bit of mystery to who wins at the end).

Now I needed to start putting together some ideas for how these cards would look when placed on top of each other (Which is basically the same concept as designing one card that we will dissect into separate parts later on when making the cards digitally). The night before this post, I spent much of my time at work doodling out ideas for what these cards might look like when stacked, all the while trying to determine what is the most efficient & most clear design:

This process is challenging, because so much information is trying to be on the card… and the layering would be so challenging to build. But, in the end, the layout all the way to the right of the options above is the one I really liked.

It basically works like a card design inside of a card design. On the outer area, there are all the pieces of data that show through the cards for scoring purposes, on the inner area there is the “artistic outcome” of what you have been building in the gameplay (creating both art and math as separate but conjoined operations!)

Once I had this layout in mind, I started working with it a lot, and I ended up doing a full page of doodle art the next day (today) just to really showcase how the three cards would be different & stacked before I embarked on the idea of bringing this to the digital platform (as an interesting irony, there is actually no way for me to even make a “hand made prototype” of this game, my first prototype would have to be printed on the transparent cards (or made on tracing paper, but that would barely work and be waayyyy to fragile to play with). This was my next layer of schematic layouts:

Once I got to this step of the process, I was feeling pretty confident in what I wanted to do next (but doing a digital card design would take some time, and I still had some other things to consider). So, for the moment, this is the checkpoint that we were looking for on clothing design. Next up (on the same day in fact) is the layout of the dice design… but we are going to talk about that as the next chapter in the Librarium Games Design Journal! So be sure to check back soon for more fun & exciting updates, and as always, thank you for reading!