Wednesday, April 26, 2017

Behind the Scenes (part 3)


Happy Accidents! I had been intending to place the Union Guard “UG” logo at the upper left of the page near the “Agent Profile” title, but when I imported the logo, it was huge and almost covered the entire page. I looked at it, and thought, “Wait a minute, that's actually pretty cool!” I changed the opacity of the giant UG logo and it “faded” underneath the details of the character sheet, appearing in the background, like a giant Union Guard watermark. People at the con and friends I emailed my prototype page to really liked the look with the logo. As I continued to work on the design, I recalled that over the years, there were a few areas on the sheet that no one ever used, so I scrubbed those spots entirely. Another problem with the original sheet was the confusion around how the attribute dice and skills worked. In my redesign, I pushed everything over to the far, far left, with the boxes on the left column plus a vertical line separating them from the skill list. I also grouped Ranged and Melee Dodge with skills, because even though you can't add ranks to them like other skills, they are still affected by wound penalties just like all other skills. Seeing them positioned there was to remind players: yes, your Dodge is still a skill, so when you are wounded, you'll be less...dodgy. At JohnCon, the gamers totally got it, and one gamer also had a great suggestion—she said that the order of the attributes at the top of the page made her feel like the skills should be ordered in a manner similar to the progression of attributes. It made sense, and they weren't in any particular order originally, so I regrouped the skills into roughly the same order: skills associated with Strength and Reflexes were grouped first, and Influence skills were last, to mirror the attribute list at the top of the page.


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