[Background Blog] Astatos - Preparing for Print

Hey patrons, Compymono here!

Sorry for the delay on last month's background blogs and concept art posts but we had some assets come in at the end of last month meaning that my work shifted towards wrapping up the print files for Astatos across all four languages. 

So for the first background blog for August, I figure it'll be a great time to look over the asset creation process and preparation for the Astatos print files. 

The scope of the product assets

Last time we talked about the design process for Astatos, we talked about the challenges that came when designing the box for the starter edition of the game. Since then, we've completed the designs for every asset in the game, had a sample print, corrected any mistakes found, and wrapped up the designs ready for print. 

When breaking down Astatos per asset--not counting repeated card graphics like Energy cards--you have the following:

• 1 starter edition box.
• 4 expansion pack boxes.
• A3 playmat design.
• A3 instruction sheet.
• 20 Energy card assets.
• 20 Spell card assets.
• 2 Identity card assets.
• 62 side card assets.
• 10 Seal card assets.
• 60 Hero card assets.
• 1 card back.

Then all of the above are translated into Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, and Japanese for a total of 4 languages, and 618 unique assets that all have to be designed, checked, exported for print, and checked again.

(Counting other rewards for the crowdfunding would add on another 70 assets on top of that)

Preparing the game assets

Before the beginning of the crowdfunding for Astatos last year, we had prepared and translated the basic hero cards, spell cards, and side cards into English, CHT, and CHS for our promotional material and original prototypes. (The game was originally written in Traditional Chinese but since I took over the graphic design process after the crowdfunding all the final wording of the cards and the instruction sheet and packaging was translated from English as the source language.)

By early 2020 the text for the game was nearly finalised for all the packaging and the cards so localisation into the other languages could begin. With all the added expansions, revisions to the game rules and other additions from crowdfunding there really was a lot of text to work through!

You'll probably notice that nearly every card seen in the original crowdfunding campaign has had its text changed. Most notably, I initially had added flavour text into all the Hero Ability descriptions to give people a bit more of a feel about the characters, but as we got around to writing the ability descriptions for the next 24 cards, I quickly realised that I just didn't have the space to fit this anymore. (some of the expansion pack Heroes have really unique abilities though!) 

Once all the text was localised I could begin to move it over to the design files for the cards in order to do the typesetting.

This is basically the most time consuming process in working on the game's assets as I had to typeset each card and other element with text on it three more times. It's always an interesting puzzle working out how much text you can fit in a space while also balancing aesthetics and legibility.

In English I can usually get creative with wording, with the goal of both reducing the space a description takes, and also making the ability or text as clear at conveying the mechanic as possible. (For some of these abilities I had paragraphs of info on how they worked!)

When it came to typesetting other languages, the text was added on another layer group in the Photoshop source files and I was able to flip between the different languages to make sure the overall layout and positioning of text was similar between all the languages. However, I did end up having to go back to the translators multiple times to request shorter versions of the text, particularly for the Japanese version!

Mukaki here is a pretty extreme example as the God cards have some of the most complex descriptions in the game which really push out both the English and Japanese versions. (I expect to get some feedback to adjust the card once the final asset checks are done for the Japanese version)

Once all the typesetting is done, the assets are all imported as individual cards into an InDesign file. 

Here the cards are arranged into the order for both sides to be printed (i.e front / back / front back), and given some extra space around the outside known as bleed. This allows for slight cutting errors that always happen when printing so you get an image that goes all the way to the edge no matter how it's cut.

When finished these files are exported as a PDF and they're ready for the printer!

Next we have all the boxes, and other materials in the game. For these I work off templates provided by the printer and design them directly in Illustrator.

I actually live-streamed a bit of the localisation process for these assets on Twitch a few months back but my computer was really struggling! The different languages are all kept on different layers so I can manage them all from the same file just like the cards.

From there it was just a matter of making adjustments, adding localised text, and exporting the documents out from Illustrator directly in PDF files. (And then remembering you forgot to outline the text and a bunch of other errors so you have to re-export them half a dozen times!)

Wrapping up

We're now into the final stretch on production for the Astatos card game, so it's basically just a matter of waiting for printing and shipping preparation until it's getting sent out to backers, patrons during the crowdfunding campaign, and made available to the public at Pawprint Press!

Hope you guys enjoyed this read through some of the massive amount of work behind the scenes that goes into producing something like this, and be sure to look for an update on the Kickstarter soon with more details about what's next!

- Studio Klondike