Spent some of the day crashing up against the impenetrable fastness of InDesign for the first time. It’s not terrible! But it’s weird, relative to what I already know (Corel products). It’s weird that I can’t just ctrl-i and get italics. I have no idea how to set up a template to just pour stuff into. Lots to learn, high walls, and I’m the gentle waves.
It’s slowly dawning on me just how much frigging text there is to my game. Funny how it’s not really obvious until it becomes a physical artifact that someone might have to use, you know?
We restarted our Epyllion game a couple days ago, and I was marveling at both the generous white space on everything, and the extremely compact move set of the game. Maybe the most compact of all the PbtA games I’ve seen? Maybe. Everything is like one sentence (with conditionals and bullets), and there are only nine moves. So that’s pretty much a whole game’s procedures described in nine. Frigging. Sentences.
One of the first things I always do in InDesign documents is to make a Text Style for Italics. Every single time.
Paul Beakley you know I’ll gladly talk with you about it, from my lofty “hair more than beginner” vantage.
I’m now mulling over the interaction between available space and a game’s ultimate design. Like, imagine if the primary game design/playtesting artifact was a single reference sheet, and the game book expanded and clarified – as opposed to starting out with a book and trying to consolidate later in reference sheets.
Yeah making an emphasis character style early will save headaches. I usually have a separate one for publication names since I might decide emphasis won’t be italics after all. Or maybe not my body typeface’s italic.
Brad Murray, I was just about to say something similar. I always create character styles: Emphasis, Citation, Callout. The first two are usually italic, the last is usually bold. But the point is the same as the tags in HTML: make the thing for its purpose, not its expression. “Citation” means something, “italics” means something else.
Styles for everything and also styles, learn it before you develop bad habits, and also use styles