Capstone Project - Player Manual
Pages -
Using the information I had put on my paper maquette I put together an instructional manual for my game. I want my manual to be printed on an a4 piece of paper folded in half like a card, giving me 4 a5 pages to put information on. To maximize space, I opted out of having a front cover [however I could make a sleeve [another A4 piece of paper folded in the same way] that has art work on it later on?
When it came to organizing the information, I started with:
Setup and pieces [plus a bonus contextual paragraph at the very top]
Action cards, hunting and gathering, and of course, how to win.
I remember a while ago people adding a No AI generated work icon onto physical products, I really like this idea especially as I feel so strongly about the importance of human made work. This icon is a free to use asset made by Hinokodo on itch.io that you can put on your work. I also like how it kinda fits the vibe of my game too, I just thought this was a nice touch to include.
I also added in my company logo and a drawing of a dinosaur I did right at the start of this project that I never ended up finding a place for, I just thought they looked cute and I felt bad not having anywhere for them to be included.
Human made icon - https://hinokodo.itch.io/human-made
Throughout the instruction manual I made sure to Include plenty of images to help explain my points further, especially as this game has a 8+ audience, I wanted my rules to be easy to understand for all ages. Most of the artwork was taken directly from the assets I had designed, with minor additions made to clarify certain points such as the cave attributes on the how to win section.
I formatted all of this in Scribus, allowing for 3mm bleed margins [with a slight difference for the middle two pages so they can be printed next to one another on an a4 page]. I found using Scribus easier than making it on word as I could more freely place my images anywhere on the page.
Feedback -
I've never written an instruction manual before, so it was really important to me to get my work peer reviewed by others. I sent off my work to the tabletop games network discord server to have some people who were more experienced writing these sorts of things give me feedback on how things looked.
The main take aways I got from this is:
- put emphasis on certain words by using bold text
- Change my font to a standard font to make it easier to read
- Change caveman to caveperson
- Double check my bleed size is enough [I think it should be to be fair, i've used this layout to print zines before and it worked fine but ill certainly check]
This was super helpful information as I was certainly looking at this from more of an artist point of view rather than a writer, I hadn't considered the clarity of my font to others so this was really important to check, as having difficult to read instructions are useless.
I also like the comment about making my game more inclusive with the language that I use, I refer to the cavepeople in my blog as cavepeople/cavemen interchangeably, so i didn't notice i had used a gendered term.
I will make sure to implement these changes as user experience when it comes to my game is VERY important.
Edits -Here is the updated version with the feedback implemented. I think this is a lot easier to read and the bold parts make scanning through the document much quicker. I'm very glad I got this feedback as I wouldn't have considered most of these changes.
I also increased the line spacing to make the text less cramped.
Trello -
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/112wXJW27lFJjkPjQHZk7fCMT7VPCanDHE-cVP0tGDUM/edit?usp=sharing
Making the manual for my game was really important to me not just for this submission but also because the maquette I was using that contained my rules was pretty beat up, Now that I have my mechanics written down properly, its less likely that I'll forget how to play the game in a few months. Actually getting this printed will be really easy, the document is set up ready for printing so I will only have to go to the print shop and get it printed out. My next goal is to get some box art designed for my game, I aim to get this started this week, and have a final design by next week.
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