Breaking up the Wall of Text

Well, playtesting is slowly winding down so now I have to think about adding artwork to the game. Right now there’s already some, but it’s mostly boring stuff like pictures to go with creatures, robots, and starships. I need to add a lot more to make the game more visually appealing. Rules are a pretty boring to begin with (just ask my Editor), but by adding art I can at least break up some of the monotonous text.

I’ve already looked at my two online stories and grabbed some art from there, but I felt like they needed to be more unique, so I used some filters in Photoshop to freshen them up (see below for an example). I’m going to create brand new renders also, using my best friend: Poser 7. I haven’t done any big time renders since I finished Magnus Black over two years ago, so I don’t plan to get too complicated. Mostly I’m just going to create some scenes and maybe some portraits and see where that takes me.

Besides adding artwork, I also plan to create an index next month. I’m dreading it, because it’s an enormous pain in the ass. I’m guessing it will be a few pages long, but I’ll need to go through the entire 240-page document to pick out all the words to be indexed. I also have to wait until playtesting is basically done (ie: few if any changes left), otherwise I’ll have to go back and retag various indexed words. From a usability standpoint, however, it’s vital that I have an index, otherwise it’ll take people forever to find stuff in the game. In other words, by being a pain in my butt now, it’ll be less of a pain for players. Ultimately, I’ll have my revenge by forcing people to look at my hackneyed artwork. ;-)