I'm in the final stretch for my Escape from Tag World game! I'm working on finalizing the prints and any extra assets left to do before wrapping it all up.
While waiting for the first round of prints to ship, I started working on the rulebook. I started with a Google Doc where I wrote all of the rules and chunked it up for the final intended layout.
Then I did some quick thumbnail sketches to figure out the layouts and ensure I planned out the 20 pages properly. I had about 1 page that I could spill over if needed in the final version, which was good.
It took me awhile to actually compile it all because it's probably one of my least favorite parts of working on a physical game, but I did it! Laying things out is usually the part where I lose my motivation, and maybe part of it is because it feels a bit like work? But either way, I laid it all out and just had a few notes to go back and update, but then it was ready for print.
Then I took a break from this project for a few weeks while I waited for the print to arrive. Finally, the first round of prints came in so I was able to see how they all turned out! I had a few very minor notes that I thought could improve it, but also I didn't want to make too many drastic changes that might change and cause other things that I couldn't redo. So I decided to make the changes fairly minimal.
The only print error was that they ended up not UV coating the cards. So when I went to test out writing with a dry erase marker on the card, it didn't erase. So I reached out to their customer service and was able to get it sorted out.
After that got sorted out, I did a final pass on all of my assets. I decided to actually change the Linkship Pilot symbol in the top left because it was bothering me to be so pointy. So I rounded the corners and I think it looks a lot better! Then I officially ordered the final version of the game through TheGameCrafter.
From there, I did a final export on all of the assets and sent the final version off to print! This meant taking another few weeks to a month break from this project again. But during that time, I started to 3D print all of the Linkship pieces that I needed. It's 8 pieces per game, and because I'm making 2 copies, that means 16 pieces total. I had a couple already created that I decided I could use for my own copy of the game for the time being. I also wanted them to be blue, but I only have green filament right now, so I used some paint markers to paint the 3D prints.
Then I spent some time exporting the cards and assets out for use in Tabletop Simulator. I imported the cards in and that was pretty straightforward, so then I started to import other assets as well like the tiles.
When I started importing the 3D model of the Linkship, a lot of the faces were inside-out, so I realized the normals were flipped. This didn't affect my 3D prints, but it did affect how it displayed in TTS. I don't have a deep 3D modeling background, but I was able to figure out how to flip the normals in Blender and then fix some of the N-gons that were also causing display issues.
Then I continued to customize the TTS game with custom theme and placement of parts. Eventually, I got it all imported and set up for players to pick up! I did a playtest in TTS and made some final updates. So I uploaded it to Steam Workshop and got some in progress screenshots for the page while I was doing that playtest.
I also worked on the itchio page layout to customize it and use assets. I don't think I'll actually have anything downloadable on there, but it's kind of the landing page for this project so it basically links to everything else.
And with that, the project is getting really close to being wrapped up! I just have a few final areas to focus on when the final print arrives like making the how to play video and taking some photos. After that, it's just setting everything to be queued for final upload, then it'll be done! The next post will likely be my last post for this project.
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