From the last several days...

So far, I've spent hours working on the Rhino that we'll use to lasercut out the gameboard pieces. We've decided to use the stairs as the gameboard and make a drawer in the bottom front of it that with both hold our little cloth bags of Redemption Cards, Sin Cards, Bonfire Logs, & Playpieces AND double as the Ultimate Abyss of No Return. I think we've got a pretty good idea for how to do it. I keep having to change things on the Rhino template, though, because I keep making little mistakes AND we kept changing the thicknesses of potential materials (it's hard to find 1/16 inch solid red plexiglass, by the way). Oh well. Live and learn.

Luis has been a trooper trying to make all the cards consistent and change the card borders to be appropriate with the elements in the rest of our game. He's doing a great job of editing & reformatting (removing italics, hyphens, adding color swaths, rewording things, etc) the card decks. I'm a little worried that we haven't gotten very far on the instructions yet, but we're trying to get everything else done so that we can use the elements in our pictures. Either that, or we need to start drawing. I think, in our case, though, it will be most effective if our instructions have photos, even though I tend to think that photos in instructions often look cheesy and are easily dated. I prefer drawings, but that may prove pretty challenging, in this case.
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3/31

Amber looked at our rudimentary instructions and gave us advice about their layout. She also gave me a new way to think about organizing the most important parts of the instructions by entwining the actual play rules and the "turn order" list. I feel like the game isn't that hard to play, but explaining it succinctly and in a game-like tone (in other words, with FUN in mind) is pretty difficult. Technical writing isn't all that hard for me, but this is a little different; it's not completely casual, but not completely formal, either. It has to be easily followed, have easy-reference sections, and very quickly get the reader "into" the game, despite the complexities of the material. What is really interesting to me is seeing how other people read and interpret instructions that make perfect sense in my head (since I wrote them). It's a good lesson regarding making assumptions about one's own clarity! :)

We considered using plexiglass as our medium (originally it was going to be chipboard), but decided the tolerances for cutting the plexiglass weren't predictable enough (and we didn't have the time or materials to test them). We were afraid the fit would be far too loose because the lasercutter melts out a wider "gutter" in plex than it burns out of paper products, and we weren't experienced enough to know how much to alter our measurements to compensate.

We decided to stick with paper, but didn't want to use chipboard. The chipboard is ugly and would have to be covered with something label-like (to be drawn, scaled, printed, spray-mounted), and this seemed like an ineffective use of time. SO, we decided to use 1/16" matboard (since this is dimension I originally designed for). It worked pretty well. We experienced Super 77 (both the good and bad), and used 1/2 a bottle of my superglue to glue all the little joints together. I'm SOOOO glad I designed the cutting template pieces to key together. It would have been a nightmare if hadn't. I found out, though, that standard matboard is not necessarily 1/16" thick. It tends to be a little thinner, so we were worried that some of our joints would be too loose. Fortunately, they turned out pretty well.

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4/2 Class

Even though our instructions aren't quite finished (but will be soon!), I think people understood our game today much better than they did before. They were more familiar with it, the instructions we did have were better, and the game board made a lot more sense (and people said they thought it was engaging, which was really nice). It was also nice to hear that, although the game may be a bit daunting at first, it quickly becomes much easier once the players get used to it (and, I hope, more enjoyable).

Things I would change:
1) Lighter cardstock for the cards (wayyyy to stiff)
2) Better aligned cards (for some reason, some of them didn't align front to back; when cut, they are not centered at all
3) Add the numbers, the words "Purgatory" and "The Abyss" to the gameboard
4) Mention the phrase "a guilty game for recovering Catholics" somewhere
5) Experiment with wrapping the gameboards in all the fire-colored netting and ribbons I bought yesterday; tie a "title card" onto the ribbon
6) 3D printing humorous caracitures to be used as gamepieces
7) Recut a couple of the gameboard parts so that the colors are showing on the correct sides (I learned about needing to mirror certain objects, instead of just copying them, when cutting from material that has correct and incorrect sides...
8) Re-format the Penance and Bonfire Log cards
9) 3D print "Stakes" for every player
10) Use plexiglass for the gameboard instead of paper products

Over the course of this project, I found that Luis and I are similarly detail-oriented and perfectionistic. It was hard, therefore, to be under such a time crunch when I felt like we would do such an awesome job on this project if we had another week to perfect it. To that end, the short amount of time for a very complex project was my greatest frustration. Overall, , though, I'm happy with the project. I think the game concept has merit and I enjoyed working with Luis on it. He's a Good Egg, that one. :)

Amber, I learned alot - thank you

Ciao Ciao