❖ Version History ❖

15th of February – 15th of March 2022
With the success of getting The Great Chase through the manufacturing contract in China and finally traversing across the ocean there were still a few loose ends that needed to get tidied up on the graphic design side. As we’ve already discussed in the previous entries of the Design Journal, I had been working on redesigning map cards for promotional release with the final product that showcases both my original rendition of the map as an accessory to the map that comes in the game with the altered images by Chinese artists. But this was not all that needed to be done since the conclusion of the Kickstarter campaign, for we still had stretch goals to fulfill.

Of all the work that needed to be done, one stretch goal in particular got the sidebar for a long time while we finished out the immediately needed details, and this reward was:

The Custom Player Cards.

For those who had been our leading investors in The Great Chase, we had promised that there would be a custom card designed after any person they wanted. There are eight people who invested at this level in the campaign, and so the first challenge for us was to get ahold of these eight people personally and convince them to provide a headshot photograph of the person they desired on the card face.

Of course, as you might guess, this took far more effort than expected, and it wasn’t until about 3 weeks of asking that we finally got each of the needed headshots (and as you may have also guessed, not all of the photos were the best… or even people in some cases!).

While we had been waiting for these photographs, I had been hard at work preparing the base layout of the cards. We needed them to be a color that was different from the main game so that they wouldn’t be confused with the other playable characters… but we also needed to be able to provide a matching color of dice and little airplane to go with these cards. With these parameters in mind, and a quick review of the Game Crafter options, it seemed that our only available solution would be to go with white as the color. But this worked out better than I had anticipated for a few reasons:

❖ Firstly, the color is noticeably different from the others and adds a nice look to the mix

❖ Secondly, the cards being white allowed me to add the slightest tinge of color to the background rather than the foreground, and since no other character had been white up until this point, I made the colors of the American flag in the background shine through a slight bit more clearly. This adds a nice color splash without changing the look or design.

After getting the frame lined up for how the cards would be, it occurred to me that I would also need to develop some sort of stats for these custom characters that not only made sense, but also functionally fit into the format of the game. There are some tricky elements do doing this though… because I don’t want the custom character to be stronger than the main characters, but I don’t want them to be so bad that they are considered useless either.

With these parameters in my head, I decide to give the custom player the same numbers as Jeremy Trahn’s character… because he is set up to be a basic, balanced character on the number side of things.

As for the superpower of the custom character though?
I thought long and hard about this…

After much debate and some trials, I concluded a power the custom player should have would be to act as the perfect observed assist character to anyone on the team. To accomplish this in a one-sentence description, I gave each custom card the ability:

“Once per turn, [Custom Character Name Here] can mimic the Character Traits (special powers) of another investigator in play”

Then of course, I needed to test how this all looked on a finished card… and since I STILL didn’t have any other headshots from the investors, I made some placeholders using Matt and I as the subjects for fun:

Satisfied with the overall look of the cards, I ran some play tests of the game to try out the mechanic and found it a particularly interesting way to get just a little bit more out of the experience without losing anything in the transaction. Luckily, within a few weeks we managed to get everyone’s headshots, including my mother who decided to use the family dog. We shipped them out to get printed and had these also sent to the distribution center, getting our third of four total puzzle pieces from all over the world coordinated to one spot.

To hear the conclusion of this long narrative, be sure to check back in next time on the Design Journal, when we discuss the process of finally getting everything out the door and into the hands of the people!!!