The Board
And so we come to this.
The hideous visage of what was once going to be the centrepiece of my great ambitions now laid bare for all to see. The board is, in a word 'ugly' and in three 'really fucking ugly'. This thing somehow fails to convey effectively the theme, tone, overall aesthetic or even where to put all the f'in cards. It is both cluttered and empty. It's vacant of any value beyond its small accomplishment of having evenly spaced tiles for the players to move around. The obstacle markers are unclear at best. The 'rooms' are not rooms they are unaligned, sickeningly bordered copies of the tiles that convey nothing of their nature past what colour card you are meant to draw from and the victory markers are so barely there that I almost forgot to mention them. Overall this board is a 3/10, it's just functional enough so as to no make me physically sick but not so functional that I would call it good enough.
Illustrator my nemesis. Originally I created the concepts for the board in photoshop these came out well I felt as they had both functional and artist value. I did feel that the hand-drawn nature of them, although charming in its own way was somewhat confusing in to look at for the purpose of determining the harsh boundaries of the board i.e the tiles and obstacles. The kind of clarity I wanted for at least these elements would be easily achieved in Adobe Illustrator I thought, the fool. little did I know the twitching, finicky, obtuse hell I had ahead of me. For the first few blissful moments, it all seemed to be going well. I created a circle to be the outside of the board, this was simple enough then I created another to act as the inner circle to form the outer tiles. This was a little fiddly, lining up the two circles but I did it in a reasonable amount of time. Then came the troubles. Created the line that could form the separator between the tiles proved to be the biggest pain in my behind hither too know to mankind. It would not act as it was supposed to, at every attempt, it found a new way to move that was simultaneously baffling and exactly what I expected. The line moved in increments in 'a' direction, never the one I wanted but it did move in the right manner at least to start with...
*Editors note*
It is at this point this tale of Brooke V Illustrator degrades into what is little more than whining about her inability to make nice with whichever elder god is unfortunate enough to have adobe in their domain, so I shall cut us straight to what she learned from this harrowing experience.
Lessons I learned.
Leason the first, Test early and test often, I waited until far to close to the deadline to try THE PROGRAM and because of this had an incredibly skewed view of the time it would take for me to accomplish my goal.
Leason the second, Sunk cost is a fallacy for a reason, I really should have cut my loses somewhere around the hairpulling part and moved back into photoshop. Doing so would have meant that while the line clarity I was chasing like some twisted evil white rabbit, would have been lost I would have gain literally everything else I wanted.
Leason the third, Clarity isn't worth the vision, more information about the theme, the tone and the other mechanics could have been included if I hadn't focused so doggedly on trying to get the board lines to be clear. The reality is that clarity was never the most important part of the board design and my making it so to the detriment of all other aspects has hindered those aspects far more than if I had used a board that needed to be stared at a bit to be understood.
As I watch this project ride off into the sunset never to return (at least until I create 'A few board games more') I simply hope that the lessons I learned here can be of some help to me in my future projects.
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