Accessible Games

Organizing Your Files to Send to Layout

Introduction

“Dude, this is way more prepped than I am used to. It’ll definitely speed the process up and allow us more time to get particular with all the details.”

This is the response I received from Todd Crapper, the production designer behind Survival of the Able, after sending him the files for the book. If you had read any of my past posts about laying out a PDF, or perhaps this guest post from Ruben Smith-Zempel, then you may have an understanding of what a big process it can be. Anything a designer can do to make the process run smoother is a huge boon.

What did I do that elicited such a response?

Let’s talk about how I organized my files to prepare to send them to layout.

Manuscript

The entire manuscript for Survival of the Able is only about 38,000 words long. As complete RPGs go, I’d say that’s on the low to …
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Accessible Guide to RPG Layout Now Available

You may be familiar with our Tutorial Tuesday series which provides a lot of great information about how to create accessible RPG layouts. I’ve been hard at work collecting, categorizing, and updating these tutorials and putting them into a single eBook. Now available at DriveThruRPG, the Accessible Guide to RPG Layout is a great resource for any small press game designer.

The original tutorials will always be available free of charge here on the website, but purchasing the eBook gets you some additional benefits. The articles have been rearranged and grouped into a logical structure, making it easier to work through the process if you’re following along. The …
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Game Design Occupations Explained: Editors (Pt. 2)

This week we have three guest authors. Each is an editor with a lot of experience in the RPG industry, and they’re here to tell us a bit about what editors do for your manuscript. If you thought editing was just the process of finding typos (don’t worry, you wouldn’t be alone), you might want to pay attention.

Recap

Here’s a brief refresher about the types of editors you’ll commonly encounter in the RPG industry.

Types of Editors

Developmental editor: ER doc who can patch up the worst writing wounds and keep your manuscript alive; can also be a general practitioner who just checks to be sure that your ms doesn’t have lurking problems without symptoms

Copy editor: Specialist who can improve the health of your ms in specific, focused ways

Line editor: Surgeon who truly …
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Game Design Occupations Explained: Editors (Pt. 1)

This week we have three guest authors. Each is an editor with a lot of experience in the RPG industry, and they’re here to tell us a bit about what editors do for your manuscript. If you thought editing was just the process of finding typos (don’t worry, you wouldn’t be alone), you might want to pay attention.

Introduction

So you’re designing a game, or maybe you’ve already designed a game, or you will be designing one. At some point that means you’ll be writing it all down, whether it’s a world guide, an adventure, a bestiary, or something else. You might be the most inventive designer and accomplished writer since [insert your favorite RPG superstar here], but rule #1 is that everyone needs an editor to look over their work. Even editors who write need other editors. Of course, there are different kinds of editors, …
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Game Design Occupations Explained: Layout and Print Design

This week we have a guest post from Ruben Smith-Zempel. Ruben is a print designer with a lot of experience doing layout, cartography, and graphic design. See his “About the Author” section if you’d like to contact him.

Introduction

So your game is all written and you’ve collected all of your illustrations. Now you need to turn your raw elements into a finished product. It’s time for you to hire a print designer (or layout artist). This article will give you a brief overview of what the job entails and what questions you should ask when hiring a print designer.

 What to Expect

Print designers are responsible for combining your game text, illustrations, and other materials into the final product that is then sent to the printer. This is accomplished with the use of desktop publishing software, such as Adobe InDesign. The resulting file is then exported as a PDF (though other file formats …
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Game Design Occupations Explained: Writers

Introduction

I’ve spent the last few years learning everything I can about the RPG design process. As a small press publisher, I know I need to wear a lot of design hats myself, but there are certain skills I just don’t possess. I can write, proofread, and do my own page layout, but every author needs a good editor and most authors don’t also do art (I am one of those “most authors”). The tricky thing is figuring out who does what, how much it costs to get that done, and—perhaps most importantly—what your fellow designers need from you so they can do their job.

One of the most important skills any designer needs to learn early on is how to communicate with freelancers. Whether you’re hiring authors to help write for you, hiring editors to make sure your manuscript isn’t littered with errors, or contracting artwork to make your ideas come …
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Accessible PDFs with InDesign Alternatives

Introduction

I have offered a lot of tutorials about how to use Adobe InDesign CS6 to make accessible PDFs. It’s industry standard for a reason, but it’s also really expensive. Even with the new, more affordable Creative Cloud option, InDesign can seem out of reach for a small press publisher who’s on a budget.

In “How to Choose Layout Software,” I mentioned a few InDesign alternatives. Scribus is a free and open source layout program that is powerful, if not the most intuitive. Affinity Publisher is a low-cost alternative that isn’t quite as full-featured as InDesign, but it will get the job done for a fraction of the cost. More recently, I discovered LucidPress, a free web-based layout program, as well.

If you’re using one of these alternatives, you shouldn’t feel left out. Though I don’t have a lot of hands-on experience with these programs, I have compiled a …
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Prepare Your PDF for Print

Introduction

Last week, someone asked me a question about preparing their PDF for print. Specifically, they had a question about one part of the process of setting up their files to be ready for DriveThruRPG’s Print On Demand (POD) service. I decided it’d be a good idea to do a tutorial about preparing your PDFs to send to your printer, but then I actually began thinking about it and realized this is a big topic. On the D&D 3^rd Edition / Pathfinder size scale, prepping a PDF for print would be Colossal.

Here’s a 336 page book on Amazon that is said to be an introduction to the topic. (This is not an affiliate link; I don’t get paid if you buy this book. It’s just a random book I found and selected to illustrate my point.) http://www.amazon.com/Design-Into-Print-Preparing-Professional/dp/032149220X/ref=sr_1_7?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1397368461&sr=1-7&keywords=prepare+books+for+printing

Instead of a step-by-step guide on setting up your print documents, I’m going to …
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Uploading Unwatermarked PDFs to DTRPG

Introduction

After the spotlight on Shaintar I wrote a few weeks ago, I received quite a bit of feedback from people who had some misconceptions about DriveThruRPG’s system limitations. I’d like to clear up a few of them with today’s tutorial and walk you through the process of uploading a file to DTRPG without watermarks.

Much of the feedback I received was from other layout artists who, I presume, don’t often upload the final PDFs to DriveThru. Some of the feedback was from other publishers who, again I presume, don’t’ do layout work themselves.

I seem to be in a somewhat uncommon position where I do both. I realized that I have insight drawn from both sides of this issue; from the perspective of the publisher uploading the files and the layout person who puts them together. Whether you do one, the other, or both, I hope you can learn from …
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Why Accommodating Others is Your Best Investment

It’s April First, but this is no April Fool’s post.

Introduction

It’s Tutorial Tuesday, but this week I’d like to step back for a moment and talk more broadly about why accessibility is important. Many of the tutorials I’ve written up to this point have provided steps to help make documents more accessible, and there are many good reasons for that.

But before I get into the details, I wanted to share a link to this great podcast I listened to recently. The episode is about accessibility in web design, but there are a lot (and I mean a lot) of great takeaways that apply to all electronic media, and even a few points that extend into everyday life in general.

It’s a little over an hour long, but if you have the time I’d suggest checking out Episode #64 of The Web Ahead, which you can access at Continue Reading Why Accommodating Others is Your Best Investment