❖ Version History ❖
18th of October, 2020:
In the two weeks that followed our previous discussion, Matt and I are aggressively chasing the next steps in this design process:
Matt’s first major project is upon him: he has had me design a game that will eventually feature thirty-nine different aircraft… now he has to decide from the infinite wealth of options out there which aircraft he wants in the hanger.
As Matt is puzzling over this, I am also busy dealing with a tricky artistic puzzle: I had pretty confidently convinced Matt how we should design the map to look in theory… but now I am stuck trying to figure out how to:
1. Design a World Map on cards with a ratio of 1 card tall and 12 cards wide
2. Somehow translate 24 total time zones onto these maps visually & numerically.
I am especially eager to get the map designs organized and finished as my first digital goal. It is my hope to draw these designs from scratch, because I want them to be extremely high quality in detail, color, precision and aesthetics. The goal being to create an eye captivating game board unlike anything I have seen in a game before. These cards will require a healthy amount of time to create, and additionally, the map has very little game data on it for testing purposes, so getting these done early will leave them as an easy item checked off of the list to improve upon later. To begin the process, I take several images of time zone maps, study them, and digitally cut them apart to prepare my digital prototype designs. This helps me get the scale accurate across all of the cards, and gives me a good platform to roughly ‘trace over’ later while I study other much larger maps to get the land masses and islands perfectly accurate. It takes me about a week to get the initial concept organized and the first two card ideas designed, but the ability to do the artwork in super fine pixel detail leaves the prototypes looking nice before textures are even added.
After getting through this first drawing phase I end up having an issue deciding on coloring. Are the cards looking better with time zones only being colored across land masses? Or is is better to have the time zone coloring go throughout the water as well?
Discussion of this topic got bounced off of Matt, My Family, My Play Testers, my Co-workers, and of course everyone had a totally different opinion and reasoning behind their opinion for how it all should look in the end. After several rounds of discussion, we finally conclude to go with the color pallet on the right (featuring the time zones across the water and the land).
As I reach this checkpoint in the map design, my email is beginning to get flooded with image files from Matt. He has successfully decided upon his thirty-nine aircraft, and he has done some initial Photoshopping to get them properly shrunken down to card size with a neat Posterization effect on them to create the look and feel of an old-timey newspaper clipping. Before I come back to work on the map further, I begin transition into a phase of designing the Flight Deck.
