Con Art!

Wait so, if I'm making art for cons, does that make me a con artist?

Yes?

Thanks. I had hoped so.

Anyway, Austin Game Conference and the Boston Festival of Indie Games are fast approaching, and that means that we need a lot of stuff designed that's not going into the game. Decor for our booths, t-shirts, business cards, all that fun stuff. And I've been peeling off into the world of CMYK for a while to get a lot of that done.

First, if we want to be rollin' up lookin' fly at the conferences, we need a big color-y thing to serve as a visual anchor for our booths. That thing turned out to be a large printed background banner:

Fun fact: I've been working is Photoshop for just about 20 years now, and working on that banner was the first time I got the error message, "Cannot save file because file is too large."

We also got some business cards! The back of the card is an illustration, and then on the front, each team member got a customized hero next to their info:

This is how I want you to remember me, internet.

The banner art and business card art will also be good to have for other marketing purposes. Our current blog banner with the cliff & heroes has done its share of heavy lifting, and soon we'll be able to use more finished pieces of art in place of it.

Every legit company's gotta have a t-shirt too:

I was all set to just stick the logo on a black shirt and be done with it in five minutes, but Nate was all, "We can do better." And I'm like, "Really? 'Cause... I could just, you know, be done in five minutes." And he's like, "I believe in you." And now we have a better shirt than we would have otherwise!

Then to fill out the booth, Nate's making a couple of kiosks out of wood, on top of which we'll have laptops to demo the game (the kiosks will look sweet, we'll photograph them when they're done), AND we sprang for a big old gorgon cut out of foam-board to keep us company:

Cheaper than you might think for a 6-foot tall Gorgon.

She/he/it will just be joining us in Austin, since there's not really a good way to get a large-but-kinda-fragile cutout halfway across the country overnight. The booth banner and kiosks should actually be pretty portable though. We'll be scrambling to get straight from AGC to BFIG the next day, but at least it's a "Oh man this is going to suck" scramble and not a "We literally have no idea how we're going to pull this off" scramble.

It feels weird to be working on this stuff instead of the actual game, but a lot of it we'll be able to use at future conferences as we get closer to launch. And having a cool game doesn't mean a lot if no one knows it exists, so marketing and getting the game "out there" is a necessary part of this whole process.

LIvin' la vida lista

We've talked a bit in the past about game organization and our schedule for the future. As we move forward the game gets ever more impressive, more real, and more fun as we put in the things we've planned.

But let's not talk about the awesome and impressive parts of the game that gets everyone all pumped up. Let's talk about something that only very particular people find exciting. Let's talk about lists. YEAH, LISTS!!!!!!IdputinaninterrobangifIcouldfigureouthow!!!!!!

A list is sort of an atomic unit of organization. All it really does is help you remember things—offload a bit of brain power so your neurons can be freed up to be creative. Since we're a remote team, our lists had to be accessible and editable by everyone. Thank goodness we live in the future and there are many online options.

The tool we're using is Trello. This allows us lists in the form of information cards. I think it's designed to be a sort of Kanban system, although our small team size means that we don't actually have to track tasks all that much. It's just nice to be able to pick something from the task list and, y'know, decide to do it.

We've got a few different categories of lists—called boards in the Trello lingo—to cover major conceptual areas of the game. Within each, we've got categories of backlog of ideas, things we're working on now, and what is complete.

 

The hardest part is actually narrowing down the to work on. There are so many good ideas! We wanna do 'em all! But if we tried to do everything, we'd never finish the game . . . so instead we keep track of the ideas by writing them down on a virtual-space list. After major milestones, we can review the list of all the great ideas and decide which set of great ones we'll tackle next.

Our system evolved a bit over time. We started with the different boards for different game categories. Unfortunately that didn't let us see the unifying theme we were working toward for the next milestone, and also got a bit confusing when trying to pick what to do next. So now we still have all those categories of boards, but we also have a main list that says what we're going to do for the next milestone.

Some folks have also started to use the Trello boards/lists to keep track of their work at a very specific and granular level. Probably means that lists are doing their job helping people work. Or maybe there are just more list aficionados than I thought.