❖ Version History ❖

July 17th, 2023
Alright, so in the last couple of days, I’ve been… completely possessed by this crazy idea that Ben had to make a game about tending to silk moths. I think that I spent…. possibly about twelve hours in the past two days doing my own research into the wild & crazy history of Silk Moth silk productions, the culture of all this, and where I might want to take the ideas for this game.

Disclaimer: Before we even get into further discussion, I want to note that this post is going to feature about 20-30 images that I hijacked from dozens of internet searches. There will be photos used here from Google Image searches, from Pintrest searches, from various clothing websites, from historical sites, from other peoples blogs, etc. I am putting these images into this post to help showcase how I went about my visual research, but I have no intent of using these images in any of our final artistic publications. If you seek citation information, please reach out to me about it, as, I did not keep the original locations for any of these images… I just saved them all to my phone to refer back to when I was taking notes… but I also do not intend to steal anyone else’s work without credit given, so I hope this paragraph will do for now!

Back to live action:

So, after looking up the (nearly 3,000 year) history of Silk Moth silk production, something occurred to me: I know that Ben wanted to specifically feature China in his original prototype… but I personally feel like the Japanese history and (more importantly) clothing options would be a better fit for how the storytelling of this game would unfold.

I came to this decision after two key features stood out to me:

1. Japanese Clothing, specifically the Traditional Kimono, comes in a convenient 3-4 piece set:
Kimono (the robe), Hakama (the Skirt), Obi (the belt/bow), & the Sensu (a fan/accessory)

2. Japanese Silk Clothing has a long lineage of beautiful patterns in design (as seen in the featured image above & explained in the images below). These patterns would lend themselves REALLY well toward how I am picturing the mechanics of the game, which we will talk about next.

Okay, so, we have Japanese culture lining up nicely for the flavor of the game… what about the function of the game? How is this idea of competitively designing clothing for victory even going to work??

Well, one of the coolest things that I had seen recently was a new feature added on to The Game Crafter’s catalogue: “Transparent Cards”. When I first saw this, I thought back to how amazing a game “Canvas” was when it came out, and I knew that I wanted very badly to make something that utilized this type of mechanic some day into the future. However, just because I wanted to use it, didn’t mean it was going to work? How would it work exactly? I had never tried printing on this material before, so I had all sorts of crazy ideas in my head.

My first impression on how transparent cards would work, was that you could get a super low opacity color printed onto them & use them to change the color of features underneath the top color card. Unfortunately, this is not how it works. Transparent cards require 100% opacity on the print, so this concept would have to be different… and so then of course it hit me: what if the color of the card was a static color card kept at the bottom of the stack, with a transparent pattern on top of it, and a transparent clothing shape on top of that? It would be x3 cards in total to make up all the details of “x1 true card when stacked”. The idea seemed crazy, but I now had all the artillery I needed to move forward with some prototyping on my end… that is, all the artillery minus knowing what shapes & patterns I was going to try and use!

This began my epic hunt for traditional Japanese fashion. First up was sorting out what patterns I might try to use when making the middle cards. So I began a deep dive into this hunt & initially found this amazing site that shared these details:

I then also began looking up all manor of different clothing designs to try and see what might work best for our “shape pieces” that would be the top card in the stack:

The building blocks of this concept were really starting to come together in my mind, and the more I thought about the concept of this game, the more I was falling in love with it. I was starting to feel ready about making a mock-up of my own card designs… but I was still missing a lot of the “how on earth is this game going to actually function” details.

It was time to start brainstorming some scoring mechanics & card layouts… but that is a tale for our next chapter in the Design Journal. So, be sure to check back soon to see how the next day or two of my doodles came along now that I had all these cool clothing & pattern ideas on the mind! I hope you enjoyed seeing my research (I rarely show this sort of stuff!) and as always, thank you for reading!