❖ Version History ❖
12th of December, 2020:
These early weeks of December are an absolute flurry of different projects that are happening simultaneously. In the previous seven days of working on The Great Chase, I am constantly switching between sitting down for a quick play test or getting a bit of drawing done. As smaller scale projects like the six character cards are getting touched up toward perfection in the background, I receive several emails from Matt containing his artwork selections for creating the Diplomatic Emergency cards featured in the Flight Deck. Each of these cards is to feature an iconic place within the time zones highlighted by the map cards and Matt is the one who selected not only the locations, but the images to pair with those places, as he had similarly done for the various vehicles in the Flight Deck. My responsibility was to turn these base images into part of the game, both in function and in aesthetics.
When originally designing the other thirty-nine cards in the flight deck, one of our primary concerns was figuring out how to make the location based diplomatic emergency cards appear as interesting as their beautifully isolated aircraft counterparts. Our goal became striving toward making the images of these cards appear like postcards with all sorts of information about the place described on the card. In order to achieve this correctly, the base frame of the Flight Card design had to be shuffled around a little bit to accommodate for the new logo (the scroll), and a nice black border to close the edges of the photo into the design.
The next major challenge came with the choice of ‘flavorful data’ that we were to place in the bottom half of the box, and how it was to be formatted. When building the aircraft cards we had access to an easy wealth of at least 5 different ‘real-world’ statistics to fill that bottom space with. In this scenario with the locations, we more or less had a choice between: Telling stories about that place, or describing in great detail how that place has been titled by people.
In the end, we decided to go with the idea of the ‘place data’ over ‘travel stories’. The conclusive format turned out looking like this:
❖ Location Title ❖
•Latitude & Longitude•
•Country & City•
With at least another 3-5 days of sitting down to work on it, the Diplomatic Cards finally start coming together, as you can see in the featured image of this post . Though there are still many small features that could be added, altered, or touched up, these diplomatic cards are considered more or less finished finished for the time being. The one major step still outstanding on all flight and map cards up until this point in time are the back of the card designs, but we will be coming back to that later.
