It has been roughly a week since the last episode, number 001. Since now, I simply wrote what came to my mind, a kind of introduction telling you how I felt with the decision to begin designing my 'baby' and a brief, but likely confusing overview over my vision for the project. This episode will be a bit different.
Care to read from the start? Here it is!
You can find the last episode (001) here.
First off a tip: Do not ask what others can do for you. Instead ask what you can do for them!
Currently this blog is only accessible via bgdf.com, a website for upcoming and real board game designers, a place suited to discuss mechanics, artwork and everything concerned making board games. There are maybe two new forum threads per day and perhaps ten to twenty in discussion per day. The number of contributing members per day is somewhere between 5 and 15. From these numbers you can deduce that this forum is a rather small, committed community in comparison to e.g. Board Game Geek. If you look for a broad audience, this is not the place for it. If you look for favours, you likely will not get them out of the blue. Rather, you should offer something of worth to the members. While this is a wise approach for almost all situations in life, it is especially true in such a sworn-in group of people. This is the approach I took on BGDF, and it has paid off already. People are (mostly) not sitting here waiting to give advice for your design. They want the same thing in return. So if you are new to BGDF, please take the time and browse the latest discussions. Maybe you can contribute with your experience as a gamer and/or designer?
The outcome of such behaviour will sooner or later be the reactions you wanted in the first place: criticism of your work, discussions in threads you start.
Okay, enough about social behaviour, let us talk a bit about what tools I used in the last week. Currently I need my ideas written down. I noticed this while writing my second blog episode, in which I tried to explain the main mechanisms of my game. In my opinion, it is quite a horrible read, and if even the author says so, it usually really is.
Writing down what mechanics you have made up in your mind is actually harder than it sounds. I started to use FreeMind, a mindmapping tool that is freeware, to organize the categories and subcategories of action cards my game is going to use. Then I tried to make an overall mindmap of the mechanics. This is not organized enough for me to find understandable words describing the gameplay, but I am sure it will once I busy myself with it some more. A mind map is in any case a good tool to structure information about the design and I am sure it will help me further as the designing process goes on.
Apart from FreeMind used to bring order to concepts, I also think visualization will help. For this, I tend to use InkScape. Inkscape is a vector graphics programme and it is also freeware. I admit, it took some time getting used to the limitations and quirks it has, but for a free programme it is good enough in my opinion. Just one advice here: Do not try to use Inkscape for image editing, this is a pure vector graphics programme.
In case you do not know the difference between vector graphics and other image formats, let me clarify this: if you scale a normal picture (.bmp, .jpg, .png ...) up enough, you will see single pixels and the image will not get any sharper. In these formats, pixels are essentially stored one by one with their three color values (red, green and blue; cyan, magenta, yellow or whatever system you have). That means that inbetween two neighbour pixels, there is no more information to be presented, and this is why you can scale up to seeing single pixels.
A vector graphic however does not store single pixels. Instead, every line, dot, circle etc. is stored as exactly this: as a geometric structure on a 2-dimensional plane. Their information is carried via the functions that define them. As a result you can scale up as long as you want, you will never come to the 'single pixels' level. This is really practical as you can scale all your graphics (symbols etc) to whichever size you want and it will still look smooth.
Apart from that, my text editor for this blog is Libre Office Writer, which is essentially the Open Source variant of Microsoft Office Word, for calculations I use Libre Office Calc (the Excel analogy) and if I ever present something, I will likely use Libre Office's Impress (the PowerPoint equivalent).
You see, I tend to work with OpenSource software, and as long as there is one that satisfies my need, I likely always will.
A 'real world' tool of mine to brainstorm is a white board, an excellent resource, because even as an IT guy you will not always have your computer running when ideas kick in. Else I use pen and paper, but this tends to get unorganized (even as I write the date on each sheet of paper used), so except for iconography scribbles I try to avoid that.
What kind of tools do you use for designing? nanDeck or equivalents seem to be quite good and I am sure I will check it out as soon as I am at a stage where I want to design cards. But for now, just tell me and the other interested readers how you get your concepts in an orderly fashion.
Next episode I'll try to describe my game properly, using some graphics to make clear what it hopefully will one day look like.
Until then, keep calm and design on!
Josh 'Dagar'
