Same but different: how we ventured into the board game industry and built on our expertise
Text by Simon Vincent
We meet a client to discuss a project or product, say, a publication, an annual report or a newsletter. Something they have in mind or something they are already producing and need help with.
Then, they share with us their goal for the project and what they hope we can contribute to it. In turn, we share our thoughts and suggest new ways of realising whatever plans and ideas they have for the project.
What I’ve outlined above is how, typically, an editorial or/and design project would take off at Tuber. When we began working on Fly-A-Way, though, we were in new territory.
Fly-A-Way would be our own project and we would have to set our own parameters for realising it. This new reality posed its challenges, of course, but it also excited us and, as we found, there were overlaps, along with divergences, between our usual work and game development.
Maybe you, who are reading this, also work in some creative field like us and are curious about what it would mean to expand into game development. Maybe you simply love games and are curious about what working on it on an organisational level is like.
Whatever the case, we hope that what we share here would be useful in thinking about the resources and talents you need and might already be able to tap in your organisation for game development.
Production update: blank sample
Since receiving the blank sample from our manufacturer, we have been corresponding with them to see how best we can fit all of the different components of Fly-A-Way in one box.
Working with cardboard material, instead of plastic, means that we cannot use moulds to shape our tray. It also means more handiwork by the manufacturing team. So, we have had to play more with designs to ensure that the tray holds and that there is minimal movement of the parts inside the box when it is carried around. It has been worth it, though, as we look to reduce our carbon footprint.
Here are the different tray designs we considered:
Winner is Option 4
Option 1, while having a lot of space to fit the bird, Wing It and Fowl Play cards, could not secure them as well as we would have liked. Options 2 and 3 were good in segmenting the different cards, but we felt that they still could not keep everything as compact as we wanted.
We also had to think about how the map board, bird board and event board would sit once all of the cards had been placed. So, we went with Option 4, which ticked all of the right boxes, as you can see from the video below.
You might have noticed those colourful pieces occupying the long slot in the box. Those are the game components that we have been able to produce in their upgraded variants, thanks to all of your support in unlocking our stretch goals.
We shall end this update then with pictures of the bird-shaped pawns, feather-shaped links and house-shaped location markers.
An ode to playtesters: what we learnt from the gaming community
Text by Simon Vincent
For the last two months, my colleagues and I have been busy doing the final checks for Fly-A-Way, as we prepare to send the collated artwork for production.
At one point, I was training my eyes to glance anew at pictures and words that seemed to have become so familiar that they could be anticipated before being properly processed.
Then, taking a step back, I noticed something that I had known instinctively but never comprehended in totality before: there were refinements in detail that we owed to the knowledge and feedback shared generously by playtesters and fellow game designers.
They have become a community we treasure and I think, in the spirit of collegiality, it would be fitting at this juncture of Fly-A-Way’s development to share some of the insights we have gained from working with these wonderful people.
How we designed Fly-A-Way
Text by Simon Vincent
We launched Fly-A-Way on Kickstarter on 23 November 2020. It was the culmination of months of playtests, during which gamers often asked us about the process behind creating this game and the design choices we made.
Here’s an overview of the various considerations we had when developing this board game on bird migration.
Recent Comments