Celestial Stick People

Postmortem : Celestial Stick People

As always happens with postmortems for projects with no set deadlines, it feels good to write that subject line. So on to the dissecting.

making it up as you go

It’s not like I sat down twelve years ago and said hey, I’m gonna try to draw and sell a full 78 card Tarot deck. So I can’t really evaluate this in terms of how well my final product matches my intent. However, I’ve definitely learned the importance of good planning, as there was no real planning for this product. There was an awful lot of backtracking here. Some things I should have done better:

If there’s any possibility that what I’m doing will make it into print, I should make sure my Illustrator files have print-quality raster effects. Changing the effects resolution after the artwork is mostly finalized is a huge pain.
Keep separate images in separate files. While it’s convenient to have everything in one place, Illustrator crashes frequently on my large, multipurpose files.
Keep files organized. Which is to say, I totally didn’t do that here… just finding the files I needed for any given task became rather difficult late in this process.

those jargon-free rules

Looking over my rulebook, everything feels reasonably straightforward. Unfortunately, I never really had a Tarot newbie try reading the rules and tell me if they made sense. Really should have done that.

In terms of layout, I’m not thrilled with the layout of the instructions, but given the constraints I was under (limited to three separate, unordered sheets of paper) I think it’s adequate. Not good, but adequate. Again, lots of backtracking here as I figured out what format I would need.

the ilustrations

I really can’t think of any changes I’d want to make to the illustrations, looking over them again. Maybe the backgrounds could be better, more textured. But my only real complaint is that, because I changed the contrast fairly late in the process, you can see some slight banding on the background.

(Okay, I can see slight banding. Most people probably won’t notice.)

Anyway, I do need to learn how to do color management better so I’m not changing contrast in Photoshop at the last minute.

web site

Because of some errors I made in my scripts, the web site for the product was effectively down for a few days shortly after launch. Whoops.

I made the site years ago, and barely changed it for the product launch. I briefly considered moving it to WordPress like my personal site, and in hindsight, I probably should have done that. I just don’t think it’s worth my time trying to maintain custom scripts for a web site; most of this stuff is pretty cookie cutter, and the nice thing about a third-party CMS is, a lot of people have tested it for you. It’s all standardized, and easy to get help on.

dead ends

So for a long while, I was considering getting this printed through a local professional printing press. The minimum order would have been like 100 or 200 decks, with an upfront cost of two or three grand.

While everyone I talked to at the printer was friendly and helpful, I’m really, really glad I didn’t go that route. Did you know that playing cards aren’t just colored pieces of card stock? They’re coated in plastic, and have this thin layer of graphite in the middle that gives them a lot of springiness.

I didn’t realize this until I’d shrugged off professional printing as an option and bought my own paper cutting machine and nice color printer with which to do everything myself. And I got some nice cardstock and printed out cards… and they didn’t feel like playing cards. At all. They didn’t slide against each other right, and they didn’t bend right. And while your typical Tarot cards and board game cards don’t feel nearly as nice as nice playing cards, you can still shuffle them and slide them against each other, which isn’t a guarantee at all with any random card stock.

I would have been terribly disappointed if I’d only realized this after dropped a few thousand dollars on printing a hundred of these things. So while I didn’t end up using my own equipment for this, having it and trying it out taught me a lot about printing.

So I’m happy I went with The Game Crafter, with their nonexistent upfront costs and suitable-for-games card printing. There’s no telling how cranky I would have gotten collating and packing all those boxes myself, and I’m glad I didn’t have to set up a storefront. Again, this is pretty cookie cutter web site stuff and I’d just as soon have someone else do it.

to sum up

I’m sorta surprised I got this out at all, considering how long it’s been in development. But overall, it was a good learning experience, and I’m super excited about printing an actual board game through The Game Crafter now. And making a card-reference tablet app in Unity or something.

And trying to get this in real stores. In many ways, this project is just beginning.

Celestial Stick People is Done!

For all you non-Facebook, non Google+ friends, Celestial Stick People is done! Like for real. You can even, like buy it and stuff if you really want.

Got the final prototype last night and rushed through getting photos and flipping switches on web sites as quick as I could, lest I bail. You’d think there would be less of an urge to rush, given that this project is over a decade old… but yeah, not so much.

Postmortem coming soon.

…For What You Believe In

My Celestial Stick People color test should arrive today. For those just joining in, this is a Tarot deck I’ve been working on since November 2000, and I’m agonizingly close to getting it printed finally.

As part of getting all this wrapped up, I’ve been slowly adding captions to the images in my web site galleries, which includes images from the deck, trying to give just a couple sentences’ worth of history or inspiration for each piece if I can remember it.

And then I got to the Lovers. It looks like this:

I bring this up because it used to look like this:

The Lovers is supposed to represent love overcoming obstacles. It’s about fighting for love. So very late in this whole process, I changed the characters from a boy and a girl to just two boys.

My color test is not making me nervous. The possibility that this project is simply going to disappear into the Internet upon completion does not make me nervous.

This card makes me nervous.

I’m usually not real vocal about my political or social views. I’m generally not one to post righteously indignat rants; I don’t re-post articles or images on Facebook with statistics or quotes or jokes about causes I care about. I would prefer to express my convictions through the actions I take and the work I do.

This slight rearranging of blue lines, this removal of one yellow blob and one green blob — this is me, taking a stand.

Within my own group of friends, the change to this card was met with nothing but support. However, if my more conservative relatives see this deck and this image — and it’s likely they will; they may even see this post — it could add a bit of tension to some relationships that could already stand to be a lot better, that I would very much like to be better.

Just thinking about this is making my pulse go up a bit.

But I’m not about to change my mind on this. I’m firmly of the opinion that this shouldn’t even be an issue; that, hopefully, most people won’t even notice or care that my two Lovers are presumably the same sex. It’s not a particularly loud statement I’ve got here, my two kissing stick figures, but my feeling is that whispers can have more of an effect on people than shouts.

The End is Near

Over the weekend Marie and I finished up the text for the Celestial Stick People book. We worked while on a date, and also while I was on the elliptical — whenever we could squeeze this in. Got a sudden surge of motivation here.

I procrastinate much less when I know the exact steps necessary to get something done, and I’ve been trying to figure those steps out here.

So, here’s what’s left to do:

In addition to the text, I need to know how far off my colors will be when printing — I tend to make everything too dark. So last night I ordered a funny prototype deck through The Game Crafter, who will be doing my final printing. The prototype will have a real box, and folded-up instructions, and 78 cards, but the cards won’t be real cards. It will be 5 sets of 13 different sample cards, each set containing different color adjustments. I’ll pick the set that looks the best, then adjust all my cards with those color adjustments for the final product. Also, I can see if I need changes to the box and instructions at that time.

The Game Crafter says you usually get your stuff in 7-10 days. So worst case, the color-testing deck arrives on the 23rd. I spend that weekend doing final prep work with better colored-cards and order a new prototype with proper colors and a full set of real cards.

Again, worst case, the second prototype arrives the 6th of April. I’d be surprised if any changes come out of that; it’s mostly final verification. The deck I get on the 6th will probably be the deck that people can order for real. I spend the weekend of the 6th getting my store page and product web site in place, with real pictures of the product, and then I’m done.

My biggest worry right now is the quality of the instructions. It will be three sheets of 8.5 x 11 paper, stapled in one corner, and folded in half. And folded in half again, and again, and again, and you’ll get a 2.125 x 2.75 crumpled up thing 48 pieces of paper thick. Not ideal, obviously, but I’m just shooting for adequate here. Part of the point of the web site is to have an easily navigable card reference.

Speaking of which, in the future I might want to think about making a free, lightweight card reference app for phones & tablets to supplement the deck. I might even want to explore an actual paid interactive reading app, as an alternate version of the product… but right now, I just want to get this thing printed.

Little White Book, now with 10% more littleness

Spent much of today working on my Celestial Stick People book, trying to get it from a 30 page 5.5 x 8.5 doc into a 6 page 8.5 x 11 doc that The Game Crafter can support.

That was not pleasant. But it think it’s looking passable. Not great; not, perhaps, good, even; just passable.

https://www.oogby.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/game-crafter-book-12-november-2011.pdf

(If you don’t see it above, you can go here to download it.)

I’ve actually had to cut very little; just a sentence here and there, and my one-page introduction. Mostly, it’s just a much more compressed layout than my other design. I miss my wide margins and copious amounts of whitespace, but I’m actually fairly happy that I could do this at all without too many cuts.

I guess if it’s stapled together and stuck in to a card box, people will be more forgiving of really compressed text.

Gonna do more cleanup, bug Marie for the Diamonds card text when she’s back from Indiana, and get it off to The Game Crafter as soon as I can.

Totally Backburnered Stuff Update

Since work has been really busy, I’ve been doing very little in my free time besides keep Tinselfly alive. But here’s the state of some of my other stuff, which I’m posting largely so I don’t forget about them all:

Electric Tea

I finally figured out some more details for turn-by-turn game mechanics and how they tie in with the overall mystery. Still having trouble getting the non-violent bootlegging theme to work; I’l still thinking of everything in terms of gang warfare.

Also got this book which is an actual diary of someone doing bootlegging last century. Hopefully that will give me some ideas.

Celestial Stick People
Made some test boxes for a different project a while ago, and they turned out ok. Not amazing, but adequate. I think the plan right now it to do the boxes and books by hand and have the cards professionally printed, once I have the time and budget to get that moving again.

Super Lilly
Not much movement here. Marie and I have talked about it a bit, but I still need to figure out how to quickly do art for it.

The Itty Bitty Galaxy
Not much movement here either. I need to get the Android development tools set up on my new computer.

Other
Despite the whole being swamped thing, I’ve been following the art & design message board on this board game community, and jumping on any opportunity to make art for other people’s pet projects. Got one bite so far.

I miss freelancing, but kind of despised working with web sites, so I wonder if I can do some freelance illustration. Not for the money; just because I miss working with people. And I’d like some good portfolio pieces out there, with the goal of eventually doing art for a professionally published game some time in my life.

Brian Crick

Category: Celestial Stick People