DEV-TALK 003: A Quick Game of Edits & Iterations

As a quick lesson learned/continuous personal reminder: Do Not Write Your Product In The Design Tool. I learned the hard way that doing all of your writing in a tool like Homebrewery is a recipe for disaster, as seen in the right image where a formatting change lead to well, everything breaking. Thankfully, we were already in the process of commissioning our new InDesign template while I was having my existential crisis on what or how we were publishing, so we didn't lose nearly as much time otherwise. The major issue however came when we wanted to start re-editing/re-writing for publishing a full book. See, with everything saved/kept in Homebrewery we didn't have any unformatted documents for porting into our pretty & new InDesign template or for making/tracking edits.

Please don't make the same mistakes that I've made.

We currently leverage Google Docs for writing & editing, broken out by each setting guide or adventure module, and InDesign for, well, layout design. We've currently transcribed six of twelve working documents, and after making the first template, all of the subsequent drafts are coming along a bit quicker. Attached below is a cleaned up template with some general ideas for how we design and describe our setting guide locations. While it sounds very obvious as I write this, I must say that creating templates for our repeated products has been hugely beneficial, especially with a smaller team of writers.

As mentioned above, we've gotten through about half of our reformatting and rewrites at this point. Production wise we're a bit ahead of schedule for a planned March release on Kickstarter, giving us the cycles to work on some additional items for our final release like a subclass or two and some custom spells. One such subclass I'm incredibly excited for, and might even have our lead designer (and my darling brother) do a bit of a write up for to put in here. Until then however, I'll leave you with a parting gif on the topic: