❖ Version History ❖

July 30th, 2023
Okay!
We’ve Finally done it!
Mechanics are getting hammered down, math is starting to make sense, game is sounding pretty fun…. but there is one major ingredient still missing… a game that we can actually play!

It has seriously been weeks and weeks of schematics, ideas, designs, stress-tests, & hypotheses, and it is about damn time that we get ourselves to the digital drawing board to make some of this magic come to life.

This is going to require that I get myself a few days to draw of course, but here is the itinerary of what I must create to get us to a playable prototype:

•x4 unique clothing cards
•x6 unique pattern cards
•x12 unique color cards

Doesn’t sound like too much of a task… but it will still take some time. Luckily, we have done a lot of planning to make it all work! So, let’s talk about how these designs finally come together:

Here we have the collection of x12 color cards as I first designed them. They are very important for a variety of reasons:

1. These cards function as the “base” of the 3-card stack that will be our finished document (refer to the image at the top of this post for an idea of what these three cards look like when combined). Since they lay at the back of the stack, these cards must be very vibrant to get the color to pass through the other two cards above them. These are also the only non-transparent cards that will be in the set!

2. In addition to letting color pass through correctly, these cards carry several pieces of “scoring data” that also must remain visible when other cards are stacked above them. But! Not all the data on these cards will be seen when they are stacked… Only the: color name, and the color letters on the sidelines will be seen later.

3. Some data on these cards has intentionally been designed to be hidden later as the game is played! This includes the cost of the card data shown along the bottom. These numbers will actually be hidden by other transparent cards as the stack is formed! (Just gotta trust in the process here)

But that is enough about these, let’s take a look at our pattern cards:

These are without a doubt some of the craziest looking card designs I have ever generated. They look…. so empty! But that is one of the most important aspects to capture when you are in the process of making transparent cards that stack upon one another! If each panel was completely filled with information, there would be no benefit from having other cards in the stack!

Now, as a funny detail to how these were designed, I am going to reveal something about this design process that I am not…. terrible proud of. I actually legitimately copy & pasted many of these shaped directly into my editor to capture them correctly. Since I have never had transparent cards made for me before, I was still… somewhat convinced I wasn’t going to do it right, and I didn’t want to take 10+ hours drawing up perfected designs that were not going to actually work for us later when they came in the mail. I wanted this entire draft-up design to be done quickly so that we could start learning some things… but that also meant that I would take a few unwanted short cuts this time! Don’t worry. We will be back one day to make these absolutely perfect.

Now, before we continue, I do want to note that these cards do a similar trick to the color cards (since they are the middle card in the stack of three that we are developing here). The costs on these cards are not going to be seen later. Only the Name &Score data will show through on the edges, the pattern will show through the middle, and the rest will be covered!

Then of course, we need our “clothing” cards:

I know.
They look like nothing right now!

It is hard to believe that these are even going to be cards of some sort… they are so vacant! But these are the most important cards in the stack! They are going to successfully hide all the unwanted data that we’ve been building up upon the other cards in the game design, and they are going to let the most important data pass through to complete the card design for us to enjoy!

They do look… utterly terrible how they are, so let’s take a moment to enjoy envisioning how they might look when they are finally printed & properly stacked:

Now, granted, these are digitally stacked designs… so they look so much more clean than I personally expect them to look later on when stacked (though the cards will be translucent, there will definitely be some fogginess to them in my expectations)… but even as they are right now the cards are starting to look amazing!

And one of the most amazing things is that I designed so much of this layout in a matter of about 48 hours! The only downside is that it is going to likely take about two to three weeks for this prototype to arrive in my mail box…. but! At least a playable version of the prototype is ready to go out in the mail, and we can finally anticipate some proper play-testing of the game we’ve been dreaming up this entire time thus far!

This also means however that I am completely out of content to share with you today my friends! Until the cards actually show up, I am unable to share anything more than “I hope they look like this” ideas! Now we have to put the magic into action and see what we end up with! So, until the mail shows up, that’s it for today’s episode of the Librarium Games Design Journal! I hope you enjoyed, maybe learned something new, and we will see you again soon my most wonderful friends! Stay tuned for more & as always, thank you for reading!