❖ Version History ❖

20th of December, 2020:
In the past week or so the Diplomatic Emergency Cards of the Flight Deck had all been totally compiled and designed, which was looking great, but left us with a new issue needing resolving. There are two roles of the Diplomatic Emergency Card:

1. Solving :: If a crisis were to place an emergency on the map, players must relocate that card from the time zone it is placed in to the time zone that it belongs in.

2. Movement :: If a player were to draw this flight card as their ‘movement’ for the turn, then they would instantly be moved to the time zone described in the emergency (rather than using an aircraft to select where they want to move)

Both of these roles revolve around players coordinating their character to specific places on the map, which is fine because we have numbers on each map card… but there are these lovely images and specific places on the Diplomatic Cards that are not featured on the Map in any visual way whatsoever. For a reminder of what we had up until this moment in time, this was the map as it was last edited:

Our goal now is simple in concept, but uniquely challenging in design. There are three things that we wanted to add to the map in the most clean and efficient way possible:

1. Visual Cues :: We wanted the monuments highlighted to match on both card types

2. Titles :: We want the Map to show that these locations have an unsolved Emergency!!

3. Movement :: We need to accentuate both place & movement between places

Our first idea for establishing the visual cues is to build little silhouette symbols of the buildings featured in each location card & position that symbol onto the map hovering over the area where it would genuinely be located.

As I play around with this idea, I begin to look up the actual map coordinates for these places and become inspired by the appearance of GPS logos. I begin building a custom look for a GPS tag that features the term “Diplomatic Emergency” with a little arrow pointer built into the circle that rotates as necessary to pinpoint the exact location on each Map Card, rather than the randomly hovering silhouette of a building.

I build the logo onto the twelve cards & begin filling them with the building silhouettes. Before long they look amazing… but they feel very isolated from one another. As I show Matt what I have so far, his immediate reaction is that we need to add “A flight path between the locations like the map from Indiana Jones”. Of course, I look up the scene to freshen up my memory of the original content and then begin facing my newest challenge:

How do you get a flight path that translates across 12 cards without looking horrible after the card images get trimmed in the printing process….???

Well. The answer I come up with is a bit of a cheat, but it totally works. Since the left and right sides of the cards are trimmed vertically, so long as the transition is on a perfectly horizontal line, they should always match, even when trimmed. But. We also don’t want to simply create big horizontal stripes…. we want every card to look like large sweeping angles and arcs are happening in the flight path. The Key? Make certain that at least one side of the flight line has exaggerated arcing movement, but transitions onto the next card in a perfect straight (with ideally as few straight lines as needed).

Though putting this concept to work takes several additional hours to get matched perfectly on the horizontal plane of each card, the final result comes out looking exactly how we want:

With the front facing designs of the twelve map cards looking ever better, the front facing fifty-two cards of flight deck completely finished, and the characters still being touched up, there is only one major card type that has been left out of the loop:
The Crises.