❖ Version History ❖

11th- 20th of July 2022
So let’s take a quick step back and assess where we are in the process of designing Calendra at this point in time. So far, we have:

❖ Created the Game over 2.5 years, relentlessly play testing the mechanics & numbers
❖ Gone through at least 5 iterations of artwork & drafting of designs for cards & box
❖ Written 3-6 iterations of Rule Book & tested them in several communities to refine
❖ Prototyped the full package design with print on demand manufacturers
❖ Finalized all files for official small batch production
❖ Negotiated a production schedule, timeline, and price for our first publication
❖ Designed alternate products to pair with the original content
❖ Scheduled peer-review & marketing campaigns

This is a pretty hefty wealth of progress. But there is still more that must be done. While the game itself is coming together nicely & has almost nothing left that we can do to improve upon it at the moment (especially because we are already through the proofing phase of manufacturing), there is still plenty of supplemental work that can be done to make the experience of the product better for the user.

As a starting place for progressing Calendra forward, we need to concentrate the energy at the web design. I understand that this sounds… almost silly. Web design? for a board game? Why do you need to have a better digital presence for an analogue experience? Well… in all honesty, there is no avoiding it. What is the first thing you do when you want to know more about something in this day and age? – Take out your cell phone and start Googling things, that’s what.

In the modern world of Board Games, if you do not have digital supplementary materials available for your customer base, you are losing the battle immediately. You absolutely (at minimum) must have these elements available somewhere in the digital space:

❖ Shop:
In the lovely world of the 2020’s there is no such thing as going to a physical store anymore. People, especially younger people, exclusively shop for things online (and at vintage thrifty stores). If you want your game to sell, certainly do what you can to get a presence in a brick and mortar store, but be prepared to operate online storefronts also.

❖ About Page:
This page acts as the home page and hub world of your game product. It should tell the tale of your game, showcase as much artwork and information as possible in the most simple ways you can, and it should come across as an organized location for accessing other information (like the Shop, FAQ, Rule Book, or Review Content).

❖ Frequently Asked Questions:
This page acts as a supplemental resource to the concept of the Rule Book. It doesn’t need to cover explaining how to play the game, it simply needs to answer very specific questions that come up about the game (while players learn the rules and encounter special issues that might come up during a first interpretation of the rules).

❖ Peer Reviews:
This page acts as another hub for lots of information. A game should have many reviewers to showcase how different types of players might enjoy the game & interpret the fun or fairness of a game. All of these reviews should be accessible in one place if possible, and these reviews should be paired with art, images, or videos to give strangers a better chance of seeing something they like about the game from a stranger’s perspective.

❖ Rule Book:
And then of course, the reason why we are here today: the Rule Book. Online, a rule book has infinite potential to help a new player in ways that a simple paper version could never hope to achieve. Here you can add graphics, deeper discussions on certain points, animated examples, and most importantly: Video Footage.

But how do you film rules? Well… my process for this (though probably imperfect) is to consider the rule book that comes with a game to be essentially a “Quick Start” guide, planning to have video materials made to pair with these pages individually. To get these videos prepped, the first step is finding a good space to get the video filmed, and for that process this time around I had this as my setup:

After several hours of setting the game up in various ways upon the table pictured above and talking to myself in an empty room, reciting a book of rules I wrote, about a game I made up… well, we have a huge pile of raw footage that must then be brought into a video editor and put through the process of post-production:

The magic of editing the video content is that you can go through and make special cuts to the footage that strings everything together in a very cohesive and short way (they are not joking when they say that every hour of filming yields 1 minute of good footage).

Once I put in some additional hours of editing the clips together, it is fairly simple to have the video software (in my case Adobe Premiere) compile & render the final production into one neat file. This final file can then be brought into YouTube, and at long last you end up with something like this:

Now, while I one day hope to have more of my own studio to work with (so that I can get better sound, lighting, and table presence for the videography), I am very happy with the results of this content.

It is a bit longer than I would like across the series of videos (about 15 minutes of video footage in total over the 7 clips), but the premise here is that you might only need to watch a specific part of the rules to understand or interpret the concept that you are trying to learn, and this breakdown is set up for exactly that concept once I have all the videos made and embedded into the Librarium website:

After the small lifetime of work that it is to put this whole video series together… there is really only one element that must be done to consider the process officially complete: Adding in Annotations and embedding them within the video.

While I would like to think that everyone and anyone could just listen to my voice to interpret things, this is not always the case, and I find it especially proper to get good annotations done to aid people who prefer to read, or cannot listen… but the process is not quick, so we will talk about that another day my friends!

Thank you for tuning in!