Redesigning our best selling item

I'll admit, I'm not very good at click bait headlines so I have to be honest about the numbers. After all, how does that old saying go -- There are lies, damned lies and statistics.

So, whilst technically it is true that if you multiply the number of individual cards sold by the number of packs then Starship Scavenger adventure cards are our best-selling item which is also rather cheating. Yet, the point is still valid. We sell a lot of these sets of cards as they make playing the adventures easier to play, and can be used to easily populate your own adventures with encounters, NPCs and hazards (not shown).

And I am redesigning them.

The pertinent question at this point is - why?

The full answer is quite complex but the short version is that I think they can be made to look better. And when I say better, I don't just mean aesthetically, although I'd like to achieve that, but as in better to use in-game.

My first guidance to anyone designing material for one of our products is legibility beats aesthetics. Cards for our games are to be played, and that means legibility is king. Don't get me wrong, we spend a lot of time working on the aesthetics but when there is a showdown between one or the other, legibility wins.

Fortunately, the main structure of the cards are still solid. I don't think those need to be changed. And I don't want to. If the design changes too much then it runs the risk of making the earlier cards redundant and I don't want to do that. I want to evolve the cards. (Which we have already done once already, in fact.)

So the structure stays the same - mission specific information is on the left edge of the card along with the title of the adventure the card goes with, the right hand edge has the type of creature and, when it applies, whether the creature can hover or fly and the bulk of the information sits in the middle of the tarot sized card:

My goals were:

1. Increase the core text legibility

2. Create more consistency in the layouts

3. Spot light key information

4. Prioritise the card information

5. Make them more sci-fi looking

Those were also my goals when I set out with the cards originally but with a few more years of design experience under my belt, and many more hours watching design videos and game design tutorials on YouTube, along with reviewing a LOT more card samples from miscellaneous games I felt that I was now in a position to revisit the cards with an older wiser head.

I'd also learned a little more about my layout program Affinity - such as being able to curve only a single corner of a rectangle. I know, exciting stuff, right? But hey, check out those bottom yellow strips and admire their single-curved corners that mimic the card frame -- I couldn't do that a month ago! (Yes, this is how rock and roll game design is.)

How I Went About It

Funnily enough, it was a YouTube video about business efficiency that sparked a thought in my head that I then applied to the new designs. The video talked about reduction and elimination being the most powerful way of moving a business forward. The question being:

What can you stop doing that will enable you to focus on what is truly important?

And, in my head, that then became from a design perspective:

What can we remove or reduce to give the central text more space?

The central text, i.e. Sneaky Return and Split in the above card example, are the things that the player needs to read when facing (fighting) the creature. They want to be larger, clearer and ideally a consistent point size on all the cards. (Sometimes impossible due to the scale of a creature, so I'm going for an average, core scale for most creatures.)

I will let you take a look at the cards and see what has been removed, although it is only fair to say that the Resistant line has morphed into the list of icons underneath the creatures picture:

Speaking of resistance, I've resisted using icons on these cards as they do require that the player become familiar with them for them to be meaningful. That said, they save considerable space and, I believe, in the new layout they are given extra prominence with their placing and the coloured band.

The red diamond with the dot means Resistance, whilst a red diamond with a large central diamond means Immune. As those are the only two states we have in the game, it strikes me that those should be memorable. And, they save a truckload of space.

(The other icons on the left replace the old Pursues/Moves away section. The red crossed circle and the arrow is the new icon for flee. As the pursues or moves away action only occurs after your character flees.)

Going back to my point about legibility however, whilst you have to learn/remember the icons, their prominence should make them more likely to be noticed, and thus relevant in-game. It is one of those areas where a little design friction works (I believe).

The other big change is the separate box that relates to salvaging from the body once it is killed. The text On death: Salvage has bugged me for a while as on a card that takes up valuable real-estate. And then it struck me. On death was redundant as you can ONLY salvage from a creature/robot after it has been killed/destroyed. And thus, applying the business adage from above about eliminating the unnecessary it could go.

And then salvage came into my sights and it struck me that a symbol for that would be extremely useful as a shorthand as it comes up a lot in lists and in other locations in the adventures.

Salvage Icon - Diamond or Hammer and Chisel?

(You can see one of the traps that designers fall into shown above - we had a symbol that replaces cr for credit when showing the value of credit. We have taken that out now - too many icons.)

I looked around and found the hammer and chisel icon which seemed fitting to me however I'm also toying with using a diamond icon instead. This would be a universal icon for salvage so needs to make fair sense in all situations. I think both work. Feel free to share a view in the comments below or via a message hello@thegrinningfrog.com

Whatever icon we go with, having salvage in a section next to the creatures picture makes it clearer, and easier to find when it is needed - which as mentioned above is only after the creature is put down. To further differentiate the section I am using a new font for there as well.

In Conclusion

Did we achieve our goals? Let's see:

1. Increase the core text legibility - yes, as I was able to increase the core text size and the new background shade for the ability names help draw the eye to them

2. Create more consistency in the layouts - yes, assuming I can keep the content in the space I've built for it

3. Spot light key information - with the sections being relevant at different points in the game cycle I'd say yes

4. Prioritise the card information - see the answer to four, I believe so

5. Make them more sci-fi looking - I think so (although this has been raised as a negative design choice by one observer). There is actually a faint digital pattern behind the main blue although it might be so faint it isn't visible (it might need tweaking). The icons give more of a sci-fi feel.

   
   

Negatives?

An honest designer has to ask this question:

What did we break whilst fixing things?

The icons do require some effort from the player however with fairly few conditions that need icons and if we consistently use the salvage icon and the flee icon in the general text I think it is a fair design compromise.

Here's another reworked card:

Still showing that currency symbol rather than cr for value. That is not going to be a thing.

Final point - whilst I'm showing examples of old cards that have been redesigned, I'm not expecting anyone to rebuy cards. I'm using old cards because their original cards act as a useful reference for the redesign. I'm not even 100% sure that I will go back and rework all the previous cards (that would be a mountain of work). The new design will apply to cards going forward.

So, that was weeks of pondering and then ten hours in the office actively working on the card layout (again - how rock and roll is that?!). I'm still pondering, but I think they look better -- also, there is a new card category coming to the game, but more on that later!

Until next time, keep gaming.

Stephen