It was nice to get to spend a full day on the company today. My first task was to respond to a bunch of pre-orders for Carpe Astra that resulted from yesterday's newsletter. I also had a couple of It's Alive! sales to prepare and dispatch.
Most of the morning was spent on a few changes to the website suggested by my Dad on the weekend. I had a couple of CSS bugs to fix, and I wanted to make the page a bit more resilient to font size changes in a user's browser. I've got them done, but I've not posted them yet, I'm going to have The Wife have a look at them first.
This afternoon was spent contacting distributors and shops to start the ball rolling on Carpe Astra, and also preparing the flavour text for Carpe Astra. I need some flavour text on each of the 97 cards, plus a little blurb for each of the characters to go on the player guides. I'm about halfway through the cards at the moment. The flavour text serves a dual purpose, it's there to get players into the mood of the game, but also to provide a suggested narration for the game. An optional rule is to describe how you've made the connection with the Guilds, the flavour text give you an example if you're not confident making one up. Tomorrow I hope to finish the flavour text, and come up with some example layouts to show the artist next week when I meet him. I'm going to leave the layouts with him (just pieces of card showing where I want all the components of the artwork) so that I can start laying things out up here, knowing that they'll fit the artwork.
Here's a couple of flavour text examples:
- Network card: Connect yourself with The Military, Traders and Politicians. I lobby the Senate for reduced trade tariffs for military purchases.
- Slander card: Connect an opponent with The Military and Politicians. They are using Marines to coerce Senators to vote in their favour.
- Event Card: Pirate Attacks. Get an extra credit every time you score The Military or Traders. Piracy is on the increase, freighters are vulnerable without military escorts.
Of course, you can make up a story that describes how you're taking advantage of the event to gain additional power.
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5 comments:
You know, I've been dithering about putting my pre-order in (on the grounds that I'm most likely to play the game with the publisher anyway!), but what the hell. Stick me on the list, please! :)
Done! Thanks for your order, Mal. You never know it might be ready in time for your June visit...
Cheers,
Jack
Jack, I'd suggest separating the functional or game-relevant text from the pure flavor text in some manner: a line break, larger font, a dash, italics vs. non-italics, etc. Someone scanning his cards for the first few times needs to know what's immediately relevant to the game play and what isn't.
I recently saw advance pics of a game from a relatively new publisher, and the text on each card was five or six lines long with the important bit buried or stuck at the end. No one wants to do detective work to figure out what their stuff does, but I think the company is changing the layout prior to publication to make it user-friendly. Just thought I'd point this out early...
Hiya Eric,
Thanks for the advice. I was planning to put the important information at the top of the text box, the flavour text at the bottom with a gap in between for just that reason :-)
Cheers,
Jack
It's also worth mentioning that I'll be posting the artwork / layout here for comment before it goes t the printers, so I'll get a chance to make any changes.
Cheers,
Jack
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