❖ Version History ❖

1st of May, 2022
Through most of March and April there were two distinct things going on in the design of Calendra: an astronomical amount of work has been going into hunting for manufacturing opportunities (which we will cover soon), and the entire design of the box had been redone up to modern specs. As we are now entering into May, both the hunt for a manufacturer is concluding and so is the checklist of graphical design needs for the game.

At this point, the card faces (front and back) are designed, the box is totally done up to a better standard, and all that remains in continuing to refine the rules. As we dive back into this conversation, take a moment to check out the progress of the cover pages as it transforms from where it was before and where we end up after this round of edits:

As you can immediately see, there are a great deal of changes that we are bringing to the table in this edit. Just on a raw observation of the two images above, you can tell where we might have been having some issues. So let’s talk about what was and wasn’t working with the old design as we take this cool chance to witness the evolution happen.

Some issues with the original design that had been brought up by various play testers:

❖ The pages are too dark to clearly identify the text ❖

❖ The font used in the title is hard to read in paragraph form ❖

❖ The color of the pages is too bland ❖

❖ Not enough imagery ❖

❖ No QR code link to the website ❖

❖ Text is squeezed into too small of an area ❖

❖ Entire book is too wordy ❖

❖ “The last page is totally black…? Is this intentional”? ❖

❖ The pages aren’t numbered ❖

❖ Images used are not clear as to what they are describing ❖

As you can see… there is a lot that must still be done. As someone who had been quite proud of the design before, it was tough to get so much criticism. It is very challenging and defeating to actually make a cohesive rule book. I think that in part it is because inevitably, there is always going to be someone who is upset about something… but in another similar part, it is also almost impossible to make a rule book that works perfectly for everyone.

People bring a wide variety of learning techniques with them when they approach a game for the first time. Some of those people are language learners, who love to read through text to find the exact answer they want. Some people are visual learners, who simply want to look at diagrams to assess how to play while skimming through the text. And some people are aural learners, and need someone to explain the rules to them so that they can consider the elements of gameplay while it is described and they have the luxury of looking at examples in action. The perfect rule book must cater to all of these learners somehow… but how?

Well, the easiest thing to do is listen to the people. The complaints are all listed very clearly up above, and we need to accommodate these issues as best as we can.

Some of these are conceptually easy: “Too wordy / not enough pictures / colors are bland / last page blank” are all sort of saying the same thing: simplify the text of the book by cutting off as much fat as you can and add some better imagery to help balance the outcome for the learners (in this sense, for the visual learners).

In a similar sense: “The font is hard to read / there’s no QR code / the pages are dark / the area of the information is too squished” are also all saying the same thing: give alternate options on the description path and additional resources for those who need them (in this sense, for the aural/learn by example learners).

Right off the bat we have some easy things that should be considered:

❖ We should spread the walls of the artwork out as far as they can go and make the Celtic knot designs smaller so as to accommodate as much space as possible for rules.

❖ We should definitely add a QR code to the book cover in exactly the same way that we had for The Great Chase in order to give players a landing page on the webpage with video content to help get past the learning of the game.

❖ We need to bring up the text size and probably change the font in the exact same way that we had done for the card designs when we faced the same complaints.

❖ It would benefit us greatly to make a brighter color for the background.

❖ And to tidy things up we should make more diagrams to help conceptually see what is being described rather than only offering this information through text blocks.

Taking this entire checklist into consideration, I do a major rewrite of the rules and then spend about a week or so incorporating all of the changes in to the page frame change. After some serious work, we get to a good new checkpoint:

One interesting advantage to this process is that there were in fact an entire page on the first iteration of the rule book that was just totally black (because at that point in time I had no content to fill that space with).

With that extra space now available, I broke the elements of the first page from the old design into two different pages when making the new design to help lend more space to pictures and charts. As a result, the book itself isn’t exactly a 1 to 1 translation from the old design, and a few aspects have been shifted around in that process of us adding entirely new pages to the process.

In any event, here’s the second iteration second page:

As you can see from the examples up above, the book has been improved by an incalculable amount. I really and truly tried to meet everyone’s needs in the process of developing this second iteration.

Though I really and truly love it, I feel as if it could still be improved. I have a sample made for me to see how it would look and there are still a wealth of elements that I think should be better than they are in even this example of the progress… but sometimes that’s just how these things go. Every once in a while you get lucky making something that just works right off the bat, and sometimes it takes 200 hours of editing.

For the time being I must go back to my thinking for the overall layout. It’s possible that I am going to want to add more pages to the book in the end just to cover some additional elements that I could not make space for in this version of the document… So check back in on the Librarium Games Design Journal soon to see what we end up with once we come back to the design for a third time.