❖ Version History ❖

1st of February, 2021:
In Last week’s Design Journal happenings, we faced a serious redesign of the entire rule system for The Great Chase. While discovering these new arrangements for the rules it quickly became apparent that many of the already completed card designs were going to need some fresh proofing & fixes to wording. My goal here is to get these fixes done as quickly as possible, because as soon as these are finished we will be in a position to order our first full prototype of the game.

I began this process by ripping through the fixes needed in the Flight Deck. All that needed to happen for this was a quick change to the frame and an edit to the wording of the 39 cards in the set that were affected (diplomatic emergency cards were not impacted by this change). Once I got these finished, I immediately uploaded the completed designed to The Game Crafter web interface, where they would need to be for our test kit to be ordered and printed.

After getting the Flight Deck up to date and off of my mind, my next stop was to tidy up the Mission Cards, which seemed like the next easiest piece of progess that could be made. No changes to the frame needed to happen, this edit was simply a matter of making the terminology on all cards consistent. I get these changes done fast, and it is a breeze… until I attempt to upload these cards to The Game Crafter. As I transition the completed designs from my tablet to my desktop, I discover something horrible:

– The scale & aspect ratio of these designs are completely incorrect –

At first I am in disbelief. I have no idea what has happened. I review the document over and over again from my tablet (I keep recordings of my key strokes so that I can watch time lapse replays of my work from start to finish as I get projects completed). It turns out that something went wrong in the very first interactions of this particular design. When I originally uploaded my scaling document to the art space it had imported incorrectly, and there was no indication of this ever happening from my point of view, so for the last several weeks I just designed as if everything was normal, and the whole time it was scaled an entire half an inch short on all sides.

I take a moment. Close the laptop. Walk away. Try not to cry…. Cry a bit.

What was already an overwhelming amount of work to get done just nearly doubled in size as I now realize that I need to redo the designs for this deck from scratch. But. I try to take this in a positive light and look at it with the idea that this is my chance to make the designs even better.

Though I find this task to be completely tedious and repetitive for what I want to be doing with my time, I am really happy to get the image quality fixed in time to get a better looking prototype for the game. Additionally, the clarity of the text looks nicer on the new designs, and I am especially happy with the new frame design on the Mission Deck. I get the fresh designs uploaded and begin looking toward the next tasks.

Also… In the background of these happenings within The Great Chase, there is one other piece of exciting information: This week I purchase the domain name for Librarium Games and begin the long road of learning web design. From here forward, I am building this website, the blog you are actively reading, and managing all of these edits to the game design simultaneously!