❖ Version History ❖
5th of May, 2021
When last we checked in it was near the end of March, the rules of The Great Chase were under serious scrutiny, and many of the card designs needed to be rearranged. After that was fixed, there were enormous format changes that needed to be made to the rule book itself as well. These changes had two central goals: to reduce the wordiness of the rule book by adding many more graphics to help show things rather than describe them, and to simplify the already existing descriptors in the book under the hope of making it easier to understand and approach. With these two goals in mind, Matt and I each tackled one concept:
Matt took on the responsibility of rearranging words throughout the book:
-Make all the concepts simple and as short in description as possible-
-Align a graphic with each and every wording as much as possible-
-Work with me to find the most aesthetically pleasing layout for the format-
With these goals in mind, we worked our way through some odd 20-25 iterations of the book’s design. We tried so many different concepts, we rewrote the same sentences hundreds of times looking for the most concise outcome. Time and time again we would be satisfied, put it down, come back the next day and do it all again. Eventually, it really started to come together:
I took on the responsibility of making the graphical outlook of the book design better in as many ways as I could come up with. We improved every single document: stacking cards on top of each other to save space, showcasing every piece of art in the game as much as possible, and most importantly, I drew out graphics to help show an example game in action to pair with each description of the rules.
Building the example game graphics for The Great Chase rule book made me realize that there was something else I could be doing to aid the rules: making video content to pair with the rule book itself. This was a huge undertaking of a concept, because I had hardly ever done video editing prior to the making of this game… but I could so clearly see how the videos would come together once I started creating the graphics needed for the rule book, and all I could picture at the time was how nice it would be to have that resource.
Incidentally, I had been listening to many podcasts about game design, and a topic that had come up over and over again was how useful video content can be to the marketing and teaching of a game. Not all of these talked about having a video rule book, but having video content as simple as an an advertisement to share what your game is about was sited as a necessity toward getting more involved with the community. So, needless to say, it was decided. I needed to try and make some video footage for The Great Chase. It took me the greater portion of 4 weeks to format, build, and edit the content, but the result was the best rule book we could have possibly created:
With the video content coming along amazingly, and only a few short weeks left on our approach toward our crowdfunding campaign, it became time to look toward the next task at hand: Building an Advertising campaign for Social Media.
