❖ Version History ❖

December, 2024
Okay…..
Welcome to our new and outrageous journey to develop the official prototype of Royal Threadcount in a direction that it may not be published in! If you have not read our previous post or two, you might want to go back to Part#14 to catch up a little bit on what is happening, but in case you do not want to go through all that, here is a quick synopsis of our last two posts:

This all began while discussing budgeting options for this game so that we might have a more clear image in our head regarding if the mechanics & components that we plan to use are making sense financially. This lead us down a bit of a weird rabbit hole of considering variations of the publication & inevitably the possibility of different versions of the game as a whole. Concretely, we more or less discovered that this path of creating multiple versions of the game is not financially viable… but… in the process of deducing this conclusion, we’ve realized that it might be important to make the prototype for multiple versions of the game anyway to see what we might be missing in terms of improving the game’s designs and functions. This brings us to today’s post, which (as we said at the start) is going to continue the journey of experimenting down this potentially useless rabbit hole!

For today’s topic of discussion, we are going to do a deep dive on the ‘fashion’ aspect of the game. We have already done a lot of work on this front (going all the way back to Part #2 of the Royal Threadcount design journal) to discover which six patterns we wanted to use in the initial design of the game. Now we are going back to that quest, and expanding our search…. a lot.

So, now our quest is to delve back into the rich topic of Japanese Fashion, and start sifting through the patterns that are commonly used for fabric production throughout history. We are both looking for good repeating patters, and ideally designs that are a bit more classic to fit the historic setting.

We also need to find a series of styles that fit the aesthetics of the card design, which means that they need to be clearly visible, not too large (or small), and they need to suffice in pure black & white. This can be quite challenging, because some styles and patterns of clothing only truly work because of their overlapping colors (picture plaid… it can work in black and white…. but it is not as suited for this as it is when paired with a color to help let the pattern stand out… and the features that make the plaid work as a design are very very fine, which would cause trouble in the card design).

Not only do we want to cover these aspects of history/design/ & aesthetics, we also want to capture the love of our audience as best as we can. In this way, we are interested in getting recognizable designs on the table. To help exemplify that concept, here are some good examples of Japanese pattern that have appeared in popular cultural anime throughout the years:

In the pictures you see above (from top left reading across to bottom right) we have:

1. Sesshomaru from Inuyasha, who features a red ‘kikko’ pattern near his neck on the kimono
2. Rin, also from Inuyasha, features a whole kimono with the ‘ichimatsu’ pattern.
3. Tanjiro, from Demon Slayer, has an almost identical kimono to Rin, featuring ‘ichimatsu’
4. Zenitsu, from Demon Slayer, has a kimono with a variation of the ‘uroko’ design
5. Nezuko, from Demon Slayer, has a kimono with the ‘asanoha’ design (and an ‘ichimatsu’ obi!)
6. Urokodaki, from Demon Slayer, wears a kimono featuring the ‘kumo’ design style

While this is only a small sample size of styles from different popular media, it is very clear that there are many recognizable patterns & designs to be found in this culture. The more we can bring our audience in from both our creative side & the culture that they already recognize, the more we can bring up the hype of playing this game! (let’s be real, how exciting is it to be able to recreate similar, but different versions of Nezuko’s Kimono, or Sesshomaru’s kimono while playing the game?). It truly helps makes the ‘foreign’ experience feel a bit more approachable, which is something we strive to offer.

Expanding our search to a more historically accurate environment, here are some genuine Japanese patterns in silk weaving history:

Now that we have expanded our collection of designs to these twelve recognizable patterns, we need to format them to suit our needs for the card designs. This is the… somewhat tricky part. I need to recreate these patterns myself, with no color, and in a good enough size to make the card designs work. This will require that I individually draw these patterns the way that I need them to be so that I can keep the quality of the art very refined (the cleaner the pixels of the design, the cleaner looking the final cards when processed onto the clear pvc style cardstock… any and all unwanted ‘artifacts’ in the pixels will show up as pure white spots).

After a significant effort to redraw these designs, I also took some time to develop new frames for the cards (this is in an effort to accommodate the changes we needed from Part #10 of the Royal Threadcount Design Journal). I also created an entirely new card design layout to accommodate for the Empresses ‘favorite pattern’ bonus. After importing my pattern designs into these ‘favorite’ cards I got them formatted for print & ended up with this beautiful batch of card designs (with our all new number layout for scoring, yay!):

As you can see, the patterns are in the exact same style as they appear in the research, but they have had to be specifically (and very carefully) redesigned to fit the formatting we need to make the cards work.

As you may also have noticed, I separated the style of the card borders to accommodate for the difference in ‘indigo’ vs. ‘sakura’ editions of the prototype! This will help tremendously in organizing the cards later on.

Now I need to make these patterns into the ‘PVC’ style designs for our middle cards in the set, but otherwise, we are heading very rapidly toward the completion of our next prototype-ready-to-print objective! Once we can get a couple other card designs finished, we will be ready to make that order… but the completion of the other card designs will take some time and we have another huge aspect of this game’s design that we need to bring back into the forefront of the conversation: The Custom D4 dice…. So much has been happening in the background of this project, and it is definitely time to return to that chat! Be sure to tune in soon to hear the exciting updates on that, and hopefully you enjoyed our discussion for today! Thank you as always for reading!