Tweaking the EP2 Graphic Design
This is a dual post on Adam's personal Patreon http://patreon.com/adamjury and the Posthuman Studios Patreon http://patreon.com/posthumanstudios
I was in Chicago last weekend, spending four days with Sprite working on Eclipse Phase Second Edition. We're in the crunchy stages: figuring out which last-minute rules suggestions are the best, tweaking stats, writing extra text to fill out some space and cutting other text to fit things in.
Changes at this stage are generally complex even when they're small — you've probably noticed that a lot of games have Sample Characters that aren't fully rules compliant. Why? At one point they were rules compliant. They were probably created a couple years ago for playtesting purposes, and then revised about six months ago when "final" edits were made to the draft, and then ... HOPEFULLY updated to the final rules as little tweaks were made in those last few months.
I've rarely worked on a game where every single character was perfectly edited to match the newest version of the rules. I'm planning for Eclipse Phase Second Edition to be the most accurate characters to rules game I've ever worked on, and I'm hoping for 100% accuracy, but some of that depends not on me, but on Rob's keen editing eye and EXTREMELY INTIMATE knowledge of the game rules.
That's another reason why stuff is sometimes not perfect: the developer of a game goes through multiple versions of the rules and sometimes don't remember that a particular small rule changed, or all the ramifications of a change. Most of this stuff gets caught in playtesting and proofing, but it doesn't always.
We've been taking careful notes as we make changes and talking them over to try and minimize those issues.
Guess what? Writing about rules changes was totally not what I intended to write about when I sat down this morning. What I wanted to talk about was VISUAL CHANGES.
A two page spread in the setting chapter, Before:
I made a joke on twitter that I had touched 416 of EP2's 432 pages over the weekend, and it's basically true. I was approaching the end of my work day on Sunday, and I was flipping through the document, a bit tired and aimless at that point. I'd already done a bunch of tweaking to the bottom folios, gong with larger page numbers and making little cut-outs in the white bottom-border to let some texture peek through.
And I wondered: "What happens if I grab this Augmented Reality Graphic and make it extend all the way to the edge of the graphic that runs down the side of the verso pages." — and it looked pretty neat. But it ended up creating too much contrast between the verso side graphic (derived from the texture that's also used for regular sidebars) and the AR graphic.
So I quickly slopped the AR graphic into the verso side graphic shape, and I thought it looked pretty OK, but there wasn't _continuity_ between the AR graphic and verso graphic I wanted it to look like part of one seamless interface, the augmented reality graphic sliding out from the edge.
This required going back to the Augmented Reality graphic, which was currently 16x14" in size — so it needed to be made wider, so no matter where it is placed on a two page spread, it would be in the "correct" place lined up with the verso side graphic. A few minutes in Photoshop to re-wrangle the texture to 17.5x14", and I now had something that could take up an entire two page spread if necessary.
Two pages, just covered with AR:
After that, a little bit of math and trial and error, and boom, the verso side graphic now lined up perfectly with augmented reality overlays. Once I had the proof of concept finished, I pushed the final (final_final2_june_final.psd) graphic to the Creative Cloud Library that I use to manage EP2 resources.
That left the recto page feeling a bit stark, and without something to tether Augmented Reality windows to. So I quickly created a recto side graphic — simpler and smaller than the verso page. From there, I slid a copy of the chapter indicator on top of it, and added the chapter name in fine text. These navigation aids will help people using the digital version, especially.
A two page spread in the setting chapter, After:
I've never made a book that was perfect in my eyes, in the sense of what came off the press exactly matched my mind's eye vision of the book. There have always been compromises. In this case, I think I'm getting pretty damned close to my mind's eye, and that's very pleasing. I hope you think so, too!