Your Worst Enemy

Treehouse Dreams has been available for some time now on both DriveThruRPG and TheGameCrafter.com. I first created the game in the early 2000s, but did not finish the published version until 2014. Once the cards were up online I never found the time to finish any packaging for it. Until as recently as last month I was still ordering the cards and then making hand-crafted tuck boxes for them.

There are definitely benefits to a hand-crafted approach. The authenticity is unquestionable. The fact that every piece you hand out is unique makes each purchase a meaningful exchange. But the downside is obvious and insurmountable: to get this game into the hands of everyone that I want to share it with means spending the next 80 years of my life creating hand-folded tuck boxes. So that’s not an option.

My plan was easy - spend the last half of the day creating a box for my game. That should be easy, right? I have the packaged ID file in my Dropbox archive, the dieline isn’t something I have to create because I’ll be publishing through an existing Print on Demand website, and the look and feel for the game is already set.

Well. The last thing kind of turned out to be true.

First, let’s define the problem.

When I opened my old design files I found something that I’ve grown to hate. The design, as a final print, looked fine, but ‘behind the scenes’ my ID file was a chaotic mess. The swatches panel had nearly 40 swatches in it - how many were actually in use? The fonts now showed a series of residual errors that I would LOVE to chalk up to transitioning from a 2015 creative suite file to the creative cloud version, but I knew it was likely my own inconsistent use of caps vs caps formatting. And lastly I found that the vector pattern I was using looked great in Illustrator, but left a hairline between it’s tiles that was visible on every single card.

So my plan for a quick 3 hour project turned into a 6 hour rebuilding of my own files. And who do I have to blame for this? 2015 Andy, of course.

Next, let’s talk about the solutions.

For the swatches issue: InDesign has an incredible GREP feature. But you don’t need that for a fix like this. A good design for something like this shouldn’t use more than 3 colors per card. There were 4 types of cards, which makes 12 swatches total.

Step one: use the built in feature to highlight all the swatches not being used. Throw those into a folder, because we don’t know what 2015 Andy was thinking. Some of those we might actually need.

Step two: identify the core color theme - what are those actual 3 swatches per card being used. Get those into their own folder.

Step three: what I was left with were a series of swatches that were *similar* to the ones I knew I was using. But slightly off (For Pete’s Sake, 2015 Andy, CMYK and RGB swatches in the same file? guh. Go home, 2015 Andy, you are drunk).

Instead of GREPing my way through this blindly, and because it’s important to understand what the Fail Designer was doing, I opted to go through my remaining 3-5 swatches and just delete them one at a time, replacing the color automatically with 100% Magenta. This gave me the chance to see where I’d used the ‘wrong’ swatch - almost exclusively in the Master Pages. Clearly I’d thought I found the color I wanted, then changed my mind during the layout process, and forgot to go back to fix the Masters. An easy mistake… for 2015 Andy. The fool.

Now for the Formatting vs. Actual Caps issue. The font I found that was *perfect* for Treehouse Dreams was a nice broad-paintbrush font. Like the kind of lettering you’d see on the outside of a roughshod tree fort, big, thick, and single-swashes for lines. This font also had no lower case version. So ID automatically fixed that with formatting.

But it’s tricky to play with leading when you’re working with formatted copy, and in case I do want to print this via PDF (instead of the individual PNG formatted files that GameCrafter demands, we’ll get to that later) I wanted to have something more solid.

Here’s where this is most tedious. I couldn’t find a reliable way to switch case on all the panels that was any faster than just going through each card and doing a [click on the text frame, click on Type, click on Case > UPPERCASE]. That took a solid 50 minutes.

If anyone has any advice on a solid, quick way to adjust the type (literally, not just by formatting) please let me know!

Now my swatches and copy were fixed. How to fix that seam in rasterizing the files…

The Game Crafter.com is a fantastic site. It’s got hundreds (thousands?) of easy to design templates for their products. And you can group them all together. But they don’t RIP the images for you. Instead, they have a strict naming convention for your items, and demand JPG or PNG files.

Step one: save the game to individual PDF files. Easy enough in ID.

Step two: use the Mac OS powerful renaming feature to match the new file names to the old file names exactly.

Step three: adjust the last 12 cards or so, to make sure their “back” lines up with the right card "front."

Step four: For each type of card, I opened the PNG in photoshop, zoomed in on the seam between the tiles, and grabbed that line of pixels. I hit that with a quick Content-aware Fill, then did a few hard pixel cut-and-pastes to make it seamless. Once I patched one, I would grab that section of pixels, c&p it into all the other cards of the same color, flatten and save. This took another hour or so.

Needless to say, now I’m into the evening and I’ve not started my actual project.

Building the box after all this was cleared up was quick and easy. I used a background layer with the same leaf-pattern, then placed ornamental rectangles on each side. For the summary of the game I used the darker swatch theme, and used a condensed version of the copy from the Instructions card.

For flair I changed all of the card backers from “A.D.Henderson” to “a Graypawn Game” - replacing the A in Pawn with the same custom graphic I created for my own logo. This is way more on brand for 2020 Andy, with apologies to the 2015 Andy that still thought he had a shot as an s-f writer.

It’s really amazing, after battling with 2015 Andy, how fast and easy it was to build this last piece of the project. So here’s some advice on how to finish a project in a way that will make the You you Become 5 years later less frustrated when they come back to what you’re saving now.

1 - Always Package your Files.

I’ve found on COUNTLESS occasions the thing that saves my butt is searching my Gmail for the most recent reference to the file name, with extensions, and then grabbing and re-downloading the packaged file you sent your customer way back when you first finished it. All history in design is dynamic, and you’re going to loose hard drives and switch computers before you get asked to “change one little thing and resend it” for a client. If you always, ALWAYS make it a habit to mail the packaged file (and not just a screenshot, or a single print-ready PDF) you’ll have a backup to track down and reuse. Keep everything, fonts, links, all of it. Digital storage is the key.

2 - Use a Slug.

Create your own personal slug, if you have to. Keep track of Fonts used, Swatches used, and the color profile you’re working in. These are the hardest things to guess-work re-create later on. If you also get in the habit of finishing every file with a complete slug you’ll be tricking yourself into taking notes.

3 - Keep a Junk Drawer.

Sometimes you don’t know what you’re going to need in the future, but your designer-sense is tingling, and the thought of hitting that delete keys is unnerving. It’s always better to duplicate and modify than it is to delete or destroy. Have a layer with all your half-finished elements, or alternative designs. Turn it off, but keep it around, for future work. You can always delete it in the PDF or the “final” packaged file. But don’t worry about a few K of memory when all it takes to straighten things out is one layer marked, “Ideas” or “Scraps” or whatever.

We’re never going to escape the world of design as it is. We’re always going to open files from another designer and say, “What is GOING ON HERE?” - even when that designer is just US but from last week. Even as we cement the future of design with files named “project_final_FINAL_FINAL2.ai” the lessons learned are not about what is right and wrong. It’s about what works and what confuses. In the end you’ll find your own method to making sense. As long as you remain consistent, and open to ideas about how to organize things, you’ll get faster and leaner as a designer.

And, then, five years later, you’ll realize what a dunce you were. But that’s okay, too. That chump is just going to look like a dunce to You in 10 years. Be proud of the work you did today.