❖ Version History ❖

2nd of December, 2020:
As we begin the holiday season my life is getting chaotic with how much I have on my plate, but my perseverance for project time never ends. By now we have a beautiful map, and a wonderful flight deck. Print tests of the new map cards had arrived in the mail the day before Thanksgiving (many thanks given), and over thanksgiving weekend I get at least a dozen additional play tests in of our newly organized crisis cards while I am awaiting the print test of the flight deck. I am having a great time exploring the possibilities of the data, but it occurs to me that we need to start developing the look & feel of the characters.

Problem #1 with the Characters: I had found these absolutely wonderful little tiny jet airplane pieces in the first weeks of designing The Great Chase (third from the left in the photo above). The problem was, the manufacturer that we were planning on using for producing the game (The Game Crafter) only had these for sale in four different colors and we have six playable characters.

So of course, we looked to the next most likely manufacturer option (Print & Play), who, had eight beautiful colors for the same jet pieces, but could not provide the other parts we needed for the game at the same price point (things like cards and dice). The result of all this was to simply buy a full array of other piece types from The Game Crafter and hope to find something else that could work as a good substitute. For the time being, the best option settled as the pawn-like “player avatars” (second from the left in the above photo).

After several discussions about it back and forth, Matt and I conclude that we need to figure out a way to make these plane pieces available at least once in this games life… so we make a serious note to include it in our Kickstarter preparation for later on.

Problem #2 with the Characters: The second issue with the characters is that I have been doing all of these play tests with increasingly more beautiful parts, but the character cards themselves have not been worked on even once since this project started, other than rearranging numbers & statistics.

Earlier this week I also received an email with the head shots that Matt had selected for how he wants his characters to look on each of their respective identification cards. With the crisis cards starting to more seriously become organized, the balancing of the character statistics have been normalizing as well.

While these ingredients of more consistent numbers and artwork come together, I prepare the character card frame and visual layout as pictured above. I build the first digital design in the likeness of how I had been doodling them on paper, but add flat matte colors to match the player pieces. I still need to come back and add textures to these and make them pop a bit more with the color, but I am targeting this first attempt toward establishing a better layout. As soon as I have it organized I send copies to Ben and Matt to see what they think of the look and locations of the data. Though compared to the map and flight deck this is only a small step, it has been a big motivation toward how these will be refined in the future development of the game.