Thursday 24 January 2013

The Thrill of Victory

My new Remnants book went to the printer for proofing today. That means it's done! Happy dance time? Not quite yet. Proofing is one of the many parts of game design that has yet to go smoothly for me.

Proofing works as follows: create PDFs, upload to printer, get printer approval, have proofing copy shipped back, approve proof, green-light sales, profit. Well, that's how it's supposed to work. Things have yet to be that simple.

Problem crop up at every step. Just getting the PDFs right takes multiple attempts. This book took three attempts before everything looked right, and I was happy with the setup. Uploading to the printer went very smoothly this time.

When I tried to upload the first Remnants book, I first tried to upload it in a size the printer can't print, then I had colours on the cover that were outside the printer's saturation limits, and then I accidentally tried to upload a black & white book as a full colour product. After fixing all of that, the printer finally approved it. So now I hope the book gets approved a little faster than the last one.

Getting the proofing copy is always exciting. All of your work is laid out in front of you in a slick finished product. Too bad it's always full of problems. I am 0 for 2 for the first proof being "right". There is art that is too dark, or too light, or too blurry. There is a glaring spelling mistake in a major heading, or there is a format error that needs to be fixed on EVERY. SINGLE. PAGE.

So this means we do a bunch of formatting, editing, and uploading, and do the whole dance again. Remnants made it through on the second proof, but Edge wasn't right until the third. After all of that we can move onto the sales stage.

All of this means I am not ready to do the happy dance yet. That book still needs to be approved by both the printer and us before it's done, and that might take a while. When you can go to DriveThruRPG.com, click on the link and buy the book then, and only then, will I do my happy dance.

And it will be very silly.




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