Scissors and Glue

Wow! Has it really been three months since I last updated this blog? The time really flew by. I was too busy with my regular job to do much work on the game, but in the past three months I have managed to get a few pieces of art together (although still quite short of what I'd like to get for a final product). I also have a week off and a few leads on where to get more art, so hopefully I'll have some good news on that front soon.

Today I also fired up my copy of Inkscape and played around for a while to test different layout patterns. This is going to be a digital release so landscape orientation might be easier to read on a monitor (especially on a laptop), but portrait orientation feels more like a book to me. One thing that always bothers me about reading PDFs on a laptop is when the page is laid out for reading when you see the whole thing at once. I hate having to constantly scroll up and down to follow the text down one column and then back up to the top of the page for the next column. If you zoom in (or fit the page width to the window), you usually have to do that and I want to avoid that. I think I've settled on a three section page that seems to avoid all that scrolling up and down.

The typical page will be divided horizontally into three sections each about 10 cm high. These sections will be used in various ways to break up the block of text:

• two columns of text for easy reading
• a chart
• a callout box with commentary on the rules
• examples of the rules in use
• illustrations
• one column of text and a small illustration or graphic
• Etc.

Tomorrow, I'll get my copy of Scribus out again and review some tutorial videos on how to use it, then I'll try putting together some "lorem ipsum" pages to see how well the format works.