❖ Version History ❖

26th of October, 2020:
in our previous entry to the Design Journal we were creating the frame and initial appearance of the Map cards. Now we are currently in need of building the framework and graphic design for the Flight Deck, which will feature all of the aircraft images & statistics for players to interact with in the game. This process has several moving parts to it, and all of it happens as a discussion between Matt and I:

1. Firstly, we are negotiating the color pallets, textures, and placement of the data on the cards.

2. Secondly, we have four different suits and need to discuss how our decisions on color & layout will affect each of these suits.

4. Thirdly, we have a discussion on the terminology that will be used for the game moving forward, which results in our suit titles now looking like:
– Combat Aircraft (Instead of “Jets”)
– Transport Aircraft (Term Unchanged from Prototype)
– Rotorcraft (Instead of “Helicopters”)
– Diplomatic Emergency (Term Unchanged from Prototype)

3. And Finally, of the four suits we have, the diplomatic emergency cards will feature places rather than vehicles, so Matt & I share some dialogue about how we will compensate for this, but conclusively decide to table the topic for the time being.

Beyond just the scope of where we place data on the cards, there is also a large discussion about the importance of “Real-world” flight data and “Game-World” flight data. As a game designer, I have had little to no experience trying to identify how far an aircraft might actually be able to fly, or what kind of realistic carrying capacity it would possess. These are all details that I imagined up in the making of the prototype, and as you may remember if you have been reading along, I make up numbers as placeholders to test interactive experiences then refine them later toward the gameplay & theme. Matt on the other hand is comparatively an expert on the matter of how far aircraft travel and what the carrying capacity might be (as well as several other features of data that I would never have thought to look up).

When we discussed the numbers I had used to develop the game, Matt genuinely desired to make the aircraft numbers for time zone movement and passenger count more authentic to the real data of the aircraft. Unfortunately after reviewing what we had for numbers, we quickly came to find that this was an effort that we might not be able to support… but we were not ready to give up.

Instead of feuding over real -or- fake numbers, we decided to include real -and- fake numbers, so that as a player you had a simple system of statistics to look at, and as an aviation fanatic you had a crunchy pile of numbers to brag about as you fly your favorite jet around the world.

After about a week of this discussion, several prototype designs, the addition of textures, colors, and data, we finally had a pretty epic looking design coming together.