❖ Version History ❖
Needless to say, this has been a rather brutal week. My beautiful prototype has gone through a lot, and clearly has further to go.
19th of March, 2021
Today, it is my hope to speak with Matt about the state of problems that has resulted from my play testing data (as described in the previous post). There are a lot of fixes we need to talk about, and there is an overhaul to the game mechanics system that I need to make in order to allow the game to be more approachable by the general public. This is such an important task to hit perfectly because Matt & many of his reader fan base are likely not the type of people who tend to play board games, and these are the people we are marketing toward. I text him to tell him that we need to have a chat and fire up my iPad in preparation of our incoming Zoom Call.
~This phone call goes on for 9 straight hours~
Our discussion begins at 8:00 a.m…. and though we take a short 45 minute lunch break, we come back and continue onward all the way until 5:00 p.m. In this discussion, we cover everything. We rewrite the rule book from scratch, we change the plans for how the cards are designed, we alter the movement mechanics, and we basically take our prototype to a whole new level.
The changes that must be made to the rule book are essentially a project that Matt must start on his own while using my notes before we can take a look at it any further. While he is taking the time to repair these pages, I revert back to fixing the Flight Deck cards for now a third major overhaul since this project began. To understand what is going on a little bit better, lets look at each rendition and recap on how we have changed things since the start. To begin, observe the original f86 Sabrejet flight deck design:
Rendition #1 of the Flight Deck Card has three statistics: Movement, Solving, & Crew data. In the original setup of the game, these three numbers covered four roles, as the movement number was shared with one of the solving mechanics in the game. Early on this concept proved to be too confusing for some, so we collaborated on our second rendition of the data, which specifically showcased the difference between moving & solving statistics by adding the fourth term into the card design:
Rendition #2 of the design has all of the mechanical language on it to help clarify meaning, but the shrinking of the numbers & changing of the frame was not anywhere near as aesthetically pleasing as the original setup of the card. This second rendition of the card design was also the most current format of the design when the previous story about the rule-breakdown had occurred, revealing exactly how far we were from the functional needs for new player understanding.
Fixing rendition #2 required a far more clever solution than swapping numbers and words around, a new layout of the mechanics was needed. The result is that we removed the movement statistics from the flight deck and left them solely on the character cards to dramatically simplify how many numbers were on each card / affecting the game at once. After making these changes, the flight deck card ended up looking like this:
Rendition #3 :: The final format of the flight deck card. This one showcases the original frame design with some simplification: down to two statistics, with only two numbers, and no movement information. In tandem with the more simple approach to the rules, this design approach ended up making the game far more accessible to those who were new to table top gaming and got great reviews from all who were previously involved in the testing of these dynamics.
Once an agreement was made on the new look of rules & designs, I now have to go back and edit the other 38 cards from the flight deck that possess these numbers. This takes me about a week to get done with everything else going on in my schedule. As I am busy getting this done Matt is reformatting the rule book, and my next project becomes the new design approach for the rule book graphics.
