Month: May 2015

Designing the Planet Mercenary RPG Book

By / May 9, 2015 / 2 Comments

Designing books is an art. The presentation of the physical book must be pleasing and enhance the transfer of information from page to reader. For some types of books, such as novels, this is fairly straightforward. Put the words on the page, pick a good font, add a few graphic elements, copy edit, double check for widows, orphans, and rivers. (Note: Straightforward is not the same as easy.) Other books, such as textbooks are a bit more complicated. They include more graphics and a need for extensive indexing. A good RPG book, like Planet Mercenary intends to be, presents a real design challenge as it needs to incorporate elements that are similar to novels and elements that are similar to textbooks.

In facing this challenge I found it helpful to list out my design goals. There are four.

1. It needs to be a useful instruction manual for people learning how to play the game.

2. It needs to be a reference book filled with easy-to-find information for people who are playing the game.

3. It should be fun to read and have a narrative flow from beginning to end so that people who don’t really want to play, but want to know more about the Schlockiverse, can enjoy it.

4. It must be visually attractive on every page.

To show how I’m attempting to meet these design goals, I share with you the following page spread. It is a work in progress and will likely change before we got to print, but it allows me to show what I’m reaching for.
Web Sample

Instruction Manual
This spread is from one of the heavily instructional sections of the book. The pages before it explained how to go about creating characters. These pages are designed to give a player enough information so they can choose which type of sophont they want to be in the game. There is text about the advantages and disadvantages each sophont brings to the table. There are stats so players can do quick comparisons. Design wise, I’ve turned the stat information into easily recognizable blocks. All of the instructional information has to be carefully planned so that we’re answering questions in the order they come up, or we’re indicating that the question will be answered. It is very important that a learning player not feel confused.

Reference Book
Note that the outside edges of the page are clearly labeled with the section of the book. There is also color on the edge graphic. Each section of the book will have a different color and texture. This means that players can look at the edge of the pages and quickly find a section they are searching for. Chapters will be clearly labeled on the upper corners of the pages. The page numbers are on the bottom corner to make finding a specific page is easier. The primary point of the narrow outside column on the page is to be useful reference. There will be page numbers for additional information, definitions of terms, and other reference type material. The book will also have an extensive index, which will be a giant task all by itself.

Fun to Read
This is a tricky piece to fit into a book whose primary purpose is instructional and reference. Fortunately the source material has humor built into it. Also working in our favor is the concept that this book was created by a company inside the Schlockiverse as a way to trick low level military personnel into learning important information. This is the origin of the CEO comments that also show up in the reference column. Those CEO comments will form a story of sorts, starting with the belief that the comments would be removed before the book went to print. (They weren’t, which is why we get to read them.) Much of the world information will be told with the same humor as can be found in the footnotes under Schlock Mercenary comics.

Attractive
Most of the attractiveness of this book will come from the art that is contracted to fill its pages. My design job will be to make sure that the pages are organized in ways that display the art to advantage. I need to pick fonts and elements that work well together. Since the art for each page will be different, I will have to arrange the words and images on each page individually. Sometimes we’ll have to re-write text so that everything fits and no information is skipped. This is a long and tedious process which requires a rough layout so we know what art to commission and then everything has to be adjusted for the art we receive.

The animated gif below gives you an idea of how things shift around during the design process. Images change, text gets nudged. The shift at the end shows when we decided to swap the pages because the Fobott’r art looked better on the left. There are probably three times as many iterations between where the page is now and where it will be when the book goes to print. I can already see half a dozen things I want to nudge and make better.

Page-Spread-gif

This is such a big project. I’m really excited to be working on it.

Medication is Complicated

By / May 11, 2015 / 2 Comments

It was a routine trip to the pharmacy. I had seven prescriptions to pick up. That right there says something. Somehow a seven prescription pharmacy trip has become “routine.” Three of them had been called in over the phone. Four required me to hand signed pieces of paper to the pharmacy staff. I understand the reasoning behind requiring paper with signatures, yet the need for it adds layers of complication to my life. Any time the prescription needs a refill, I have to call the doctor’s office and either physically go get a piece of paper or plan ahead to allow time for them to mail the paper to me. Add in the fact that the insurance companies keep track of when they last filled the prescription and they won’t fill early, so there is a window of only a few days during which I’m allowed to refill a prescription before we run out. I always try to hit the early end of this window because sometimes the pharmacy doesn’t have the pills on hand and they have to be ordered in. Tracking all of this has become routine. I’d done the math, calculated the windows of time, and taken myself down to the pharmacy to pick things up.

Then the pharmacy register rang up at $500 instead of the $35 I was expecting.

When I picked a healthcare plan last November, I paid close attention to the prescription copays. I picked a plan with $5 copays for their Tier 1 medicines. Tier 2 costs $35 and Tier 3 is $175. It is a system designed to encourage people to switch to the Tier 1 medicines. I don’t really know all the reasons that medicines get assigned to various Tiers. We had some stress in January because my kids had to be switched to a different form of their medicine because capsules were Tier 3, but caplets were Tier 1. Then we had to get special permission for Howard to be on the same medicine because anyone over the age of 18 needs a doctor’s approval, but under that age the insurance company doesn’t require preauthorization. So we jumped through hoops, and settled everyone onto their medicines. And all was well for a couple of months. I was relieved each time I picked up a prescription and it cost only $5. We’d paid much more than that in years past and it had been a financial burden on our family.

“That price can’t be right.” I said.
“You can call your insurance company” the pharmacist said. So I stepped over to a bench and called the customer support number on the back of my insurance card. It was a long phone call with multiple waits on hold while I watched my frozen groceries in my cart slowly thawing.

The systems around health insurance are arcane and complicated. I have to make far too many phone calls because automated systems aren’t as automated as they should be. Yet any time I’ve talked to an actual person on the phone, both for my insurance company and for the government healthcare marketplace, they have been very kind and helpful. The pharmacists are helpful. I end up with this sense that we’re all tangled up together in some weird bureaucracy where the key focus is not on best treatment, but on appeasing the computer system so that treatment can be extracted.

The customer support lady looked up the pharmacy order and found that I’d been billed at a Tier 3 rate. She looked up the medicines and they were all listed as Tier 1. Then she looked at another place and they were listed at Tier 3. Ultimately she had to put in a support ticket to…somebody… to figure out which Tier is accurate. There might have been a change in the formulary listing for these medicines or maybe it was just a mistake. She says she’ll call me back once she hears back. I have her name and number, because I fully expect that in a day or two I’ll have to call her because she hasn’t yet called me.

In the meantime my kids are taking medicine once per day and we’re running out of pills. It may be that the insurance company has changed these meds to Tier 3, which would mean that I have to research and figure out which medicines are comparable and are Tier 1. Then I have to call their doctor and discuss a med change with him, discussing the options and what possible consequences there might be from switching medicines. Then I would either have to drive to Salt Lake City (2 hours round trip) or wait two days for the prescriptions to be mailed to me. After which I then have to make another trip to the pharmacy (40 minutes round trip).

Just today my “routine” trip to the pharmacy cost me 2 hours and significant emotional distress. And I still don’t know how much more time it is going to cost.

So when people accuse parents of putting kids on meds for the parents’ convenience, excuse me if I laugh out loud in derision. There is nothing convenient about this. I would dearly love to be able to skip it all. I wish that willpower, diet, and exercise had worked for us. That would have been lovely. I track and manage all of this medical mess only because I can see that the medicines make a positive difference in the lives of my family. As an ancillary effect, my life is better too, for which I’m grateful. But better is not the same as easy and it definitely isn’t the same as convenient. The minute my family members don’t need medicine anymore I will ditch the stress and expense. I think that some of them will reach that. I suspect that others will need medicine for most of their lives. For this week, I’ll be tracking remaining medicine, waiting for phone calls, and making phone calls. Again.

UPDATE: The insurance company called me back the next day. It was a glitch in their system. The pharmacy re-ran the prescriptions and they came up at the correct $5 rate.

The End of the Day

By / May 4, 2015

I’m at the end of a day where I can look around my house and see that it is more organized than it was when the day began. The same is true for my email and my task list. I like being at the end of that sort of day. I particularly like it when we also took the entire family out to go see Avengers: Age of Ultron. We frequently have trouble finding an activity that appeals to everyone, but this movie fit the bill. Everyone had a good time and we all came home happy. All that remains is to remind the kids that we still have school in the morning. None of us wants to remember that. We’re all very ready to have summer. This feeling is amplified by having Kiki home from college. Four weeks left. We should be able to make it through.

For now, I need to go to bed so that tomorrow can be another day where things are more organized at the end of it.

April Photo a Day Part 5

By / May 4, 2015

I had fun doing the photo a day list during April. I only missed one day. I won’t be continuing to post photos to twitter every day, but I will be posting them sometimes when there is a thing in the world that I think is pretty or interesting.

A Favorite Place (reading with a kitty)
A Favorite Place

Flower
Flower

Landscape
Landscape

And these last two are from May.
Moon
Moon

Yellow Ladybug
Yellow ladybug
I walked past this ladybug a little bit later and realized that I’d caught it just after it emerged from metamorphosis. It was sitting there letting it’s wings dry. When I cam by again it was more orange and spots had begun to develop. So I guess new ladybugs are like Polaroid pictures. It takes a while for the colors to settle into what they’re actually going to be.

Ten Miles is a Long Walk

By / May 2, 2015 / 6 Comments

I was anxious before the hike began. The entire church group planned to walk ten miles in preparation for the Pioneer Trek we’ll be taking in July. The trail was a fairly flat bike path, but ten miles is still a long way to walk for people who aren’t used to walking very much. I worried that one or more of my children would, at some point, sit down on the trail and declare they couldn’t go any further. I worried that there would be blisters and pain. I worried that if one of the kids had to be rescued part way by a vehicle, then that kid would refuse to go on Trek at all. But we needed to know what ten miles of walking would do to us, because if we did need to be rescued, perhaps the trek was inadvisable.

We were all good until mile eight. That was when Howard’s legs began aching in new and interesting ways. It was also when Link slowed down and began to limp. By the end he was hobbling along and wincing, but he continued. He did not stop. He did not give up. And we made it to the end.

The remainder of the day was spent sitting on cushy pieces of furniture and wincing any time we had to move. Yet I can tell that all we suffer from is some sore muscles. We’ll be better fairly quickly. There were a few small blisters, but we can attend to those. We all did ten miles with very little advance training. If we do more walking in the two months between now and the trek, we’ll be fine.