Nay Saga Devlog 11: Finalized Game Pieces & Rulebook

This is the final dev log for the physical aspects of this game (other than the final)! I spent a lot of time finalizing the assets and sending it off for the final print.

I started by updating some game pieces based on the first TheGameCrafter print version. I started with some basic changes like updating the square number tiles and score tokens slightly. Mostly just removing borders and making them work more. I also updated the back of the card to be more cleaned up since it was a little blurry.

I decided to remove the borders from the Numbered Character Tiles and then made some color variations on the score tokens so they'd be easier to differentiate during the game.

 

I also updated the Guess card and Type Advantages card to add more textures so I could polish those up a bit more. I decided those would be back to back to save on additional cards needed and since the types aren’t needed at all for the guess game.

 

Then I started on the rulebook. I looked at a lot of my inspirations and rulebooks out there that I liked. I had previously written all of the rules in a Google Doc. I started with some really rough concepts that I doodled on my phone during a plane ride. This was mostly just stylistically how I might want to theme the pages, based on the NADs. And then coming up with a setup layout to show pieces that players would need for the components page.

But then I started to figure out fully what the layout should be. I laid out all of that information on pages with thumbnails in my sketchbook. It was a rough way to figure out how I would arrange the information in the final version.

I made a rules card to combine all of those into a contained space so it’d be easier to reference while playing the game with big reminders between games.

At first I thought about trying to re-learn InDesign to lay out these pages for the booklet, but I quickly realized I could do the same thing in Photoshop a lot faster and more efficiently so I gave up on that side path. I got the basic layout done in Photoshop and then started making pages! It ended up being pretty straightforward overall. I tried to make the layout fairly simplified to make creating it faster. I also made use of the finished asset images throughout the pages to help clarify and make elements stand out.

Along the way, I also was trying to figure out how to lay out my symbol references pages so I did some math and laid things out in Google Sheets because that was easier for me to visualize so I could fit them evenly on each page.

So I finished the rulebook! It took me a few weeks to do, but I fit everything in and was able to stylize it pretty much how I wanted. I had a few outstanding wishlist items, but I decided to just move on so I could try to wrap things up.

With more finishing polish touches, I also updated the gloss on the box to fit more around the actual character drawings.

And then my final task was to finish the cards. I did a bunch of other minor clean-up on card drawings to make sure those were polished enough. Many of these were really minor but I wanted these to be as polished as possible because they’re being printed. It took me awhile to do though because I had about ~200 drawings that I wanted to make some minor tweaks to. I was only getting through about 10-20 a night so it was quite the task to end on.

  

 

So then I finally did it! I finished it off enough to send off the final print through TheGameCrafter. I polished some of the assets and did a lot of checks to make sure that it was all ready to go. Next time I'll likely get to show what it looks like all physically printed with the final print!