❖ Version History ❖

December, 2024
For those of you who read through our previous post on budgeting for Royal Threadcount, consider this a bit of a “Part #2”. If you had been reading my notes carefully from the previous post, you would have actually had a hint that today’s story was on the approach…

One feature that we discussed at length last time was the idea of “Expansion Kits” for Royal Threadcount. An interesting idea that had come to mind when considering the potential of an expansion was doing two completely different versions of the game during a single print run.

*Spoiler* :: I have already deduced that the entire idea of this post is actually not going to be possible due to outrageously high expenses that I had not considered to be a problem… But that doesn’t mean that the brainstorms & ideas during this moment didn’t happen! And much more importantly, even though this is not possible to afford when doing a huge print run, this doesn’t mean that we can’t expand our prototyping in this direction anyway just to see how the product might turn out!

So….
If there were to actually be two different versions of the game (rather than just an expansion kit), how would that work? What would be different about the two different boxes? Let’s dive into the differences!

#1. Similarities :: First in this discussion, we would need to identify what wouldn’t be different about the two different versions of the game. This list includes: the core mechanic of building the outfits (things like the garment & color based cards would not change at all). On this front, the dice & the parts used to play the game would not change at all either. Realistically, the rule book would likely be identical as well, with the only key difference being the names of things changed between the editions.

#2. Pattern Changes :: One of the most obvious & biggest changes to the box would be the patterns found within. It would not make sense to have more copies of the same patterns in order to expand the player count, so the only viable solution would be to increase the variety of patterns! This would mean that we would need to select an entirely unique new set of x6 patterns for the second edition of the game…. but on the positive, the values of these new patterns could still match the scheme of the base game, so the math of the game mechanics does not need to change at all.

#3. “Favoritism” Changes :: A trickier problem to consider when it comes to the concept of ‘expanding the player count of the game’ discussion is how to manage / handle the idea behind the end of the game reveal when we finally find out what the empresses preferences are & award bonus points. In this circumstance, we will not only need to change the cards for ‘favorite pattern’ between the two editions of the game, but we would need to consider all manor of other rule changes when considering the potential to “merge” the kits & play a round with 5-8 players in it. (Perhaps it is the case that the favorite color decks are shuffled & only 8 cards are pulled from the pool of 12, leading to an interesting variable of favorite colors appearing more than one when playing in an expanded format?)

#4. Box Design :: One of the more fun ideas that we would need to tackle is how the boxes look different from one another, but not different enough to make them seem like different games. In my head, right away, I was picturing the idea of Pokemon Red & Pokemon Blue edition from when I was a child. Everyone knew that they were effectively the same exact game with super small & subtle differences between the two versions…. but that didn’t matter at all, because what it was really all about was which edition of the game did you end up with in your gameboy! I happened to be a kid that grew up on Red edition, and my brother was the one who got Blue. So, how would this translate into the setting of Royal Threadcount, and what two colors would make enough sense to keep the Japanese theme in tact without directly ripping off “Red & Blue Edition”??? Well, after a little bit of thought, I landed on ‘Indigo & Sakura’, or basically, blueish & pink. Indigo is a famously Japanese blue color, and Sakura is the word for cherry blossoms, which are a beautiful pink color. I thought this was good enough & one of the easiest places to start (since I had already doodled out an image of what I thought the front of the box should look like). I jumped over to Photoshop & right away this was where my head was leaning on the first attempt at the box:

Now, I particularly fell in love with this idea, but I have to be completely honest (and of course circle back to that spoiler at the top of the post) ~ The game almost certainly cannot be published like this.

After speaking with the manufacturing liaison about this concept, I was somewhat shocked to hear that splitting our print run in half & changing the contents would not allow us to keep the same price that we had been quoted for originally. If we were to move forward with an idea like this, it would more or less be the case that each print run of the game would have to be treated as its own entire product with its own entire quote (or in simpler terms, it would mean that we would be charged double in order to make the two editions of the game, rather than splitting our existing quote into two equal parts).

But what does this mean??
In the end, it mostly means that (unless we hit it absolutely rich in our crowdfunding campaign) that making two different versions of the game is not financially logical the way that we are thinking about it right now. However. This does not mean anything about what we can do in our prototyping phase of development! While I really want this to be how we could launch the game, I accept the cost problem… but I do want to experiment with the directions we have set out on in this discussion! I think that there could be some really good game design elements to this expanded edition that we need to consider.

Here’s the (absolutely crazy) new plan of action:
For our next printed prototype of the game, we would need to effectively design both versions of the game, knowing full well that in the end we will only get to have one of them. This would be…. an unfortunate amount of extra work that may not pan out in our favor later on at all, but, it would allow us to do a wealth of very powerful experimenting, which could get us to a better version of the game at a more affordable price in the end! So… from here, we will need to select a new arrangement of patterns to implement into a second edition, we would need to redesign some of our card layouts, and we will need to pay out a huge amount of money to get this theoretical edition printed.

So, stay tuned for our next step in this chaotic plan, where we will dive deep into the conversation of how we picked out another set of x6 new patterns to use in the game, and what our plan is for getting time into the design process! And as always, thank you for reading through my silly notes & ramblings! Hopefully all of these tales of experimentation help you understand the challenges of designing a game the right way!