WGOAFA: A Dev-Diary of Sorts

So after my unboxing, I've been digging my claws into my board game, trying to get out the last kinks so I can finally click that check-box in the store on Gamecrafter to release it to the public. The errors I have found so far are pretty much all my fault, not the print on demand place's, so I can actually address them by going back into the graphics files and fixing them for a re-upload. Here's what I found and did so far:

Our first test game with some guys at work after hours.

The tokens must go. They are just too thin to use so I decided to make the whole thing more expensive but more playable by taking cardboard-stock for those in the final version. This will make coins, wound markers and monsters better to handle. In the same step (as you pay for sheets of printed stuff, not individual tokens, when producing the print on demand-thingies) I decided to make monster tokens and ten-gold-coins larger than the other coins and wound markers. This required a remake of some graphics in slightly higher resolution.

I had to change the text in some of the character attribute cards because they did not follow a singular pattern of naming. Annoying mistake that stemmed from me working on those graphics for like 14 hours straight.

I accidentally selected the wrong graphic for the item card Travel Ration. That's kind of bad because a) you cannot eat the gold that is shown on these cards now and b) it's the most common kind of item in the game. Easy enough to fix though as I have the entirety of the cards in one big Gimp-file. Same reason as the one above: Lack of concentration during card export.

Also caused by me being tired and just wanting to finish up: The damage charts printed on some of the trap tiles were either illegible or worse I had lightened up parts of the card graphics below them in order to make them so. Julia would probably slap me if she saw what I did to the Weapon Trap. Needed to redo these with an outlining technique that I also used on text on the tile cards.

There are some things I noticed in a next step going through every single card that I still have to do:

Some typos on some cards are just ugly and really not worthy of a professional texter (which I am, although English is not my first or work language).

Some icons on some cards need more or less transparency.

Need to make a card with a QR-Code linking to a page on this blog (which I also need to set up) where people can actually download the rules. Printing a rulebook with The Gamecrafter is too expensive for my tastes (and not strictly necessary).

Need to re-do the entire box. As I decided to go with the slightly more expensive but much more robust and pretty type of box, this also changes the aspect ratio of it. This is a problem because of the title graphics but I guess I'll make it somehow.

Before making the box however, I need professional grade pictures of the game components both spread out and in action. A buddy with a good camera will do these but we have to ask at our work place if we can use their photo studio for the shots — it is usually used for photography of technical gadgets so it is set up right for this kind of thing.

We'll see when things get ready. I'm hoping two or three weeks from now, you too can order the game. It'll not be cheap, costing somewhere in between 40 and 50 dollars. But I and many people who have play-tested it, are sure it will be worth every damn cent. WE'RE GOING ON A FUCKING ADVENTURE!