A Rationale for protograf

Why do this?

I realize that there are many software programs available that can be used for creating graphics and layouts for games, some of which are very sophisticated indeed; for example, Photoshop, CorelDraw, Affinity, Inkscape etc. as well as various ones designed specifically for the Mac which obviously excels in this field.

However, for someone like myself who is not a graphics designer and doesn’t want to spend time learning all the complexities of these programs, I wanted a tool that was simple but flexible, aligned with my own capabilities and ambitions.

To be clear: protograf is not a tool that in any way competes with full-scale graphics or art programs, and if you already know and use such programs, you may just want to skip this one…

Why use this?

protograf is not going to change your life forever and make you wonder how you ever managed without it. It’s not the best tool for every project nor is it better than everything else. However, it is possible that for some cases for some people it might a helpful tool for part of the process of board game creation.

Most people who start off a game’s design process are going to be drawing by hand on large sheets of paper, or scribbling on small card-sized ones.

When things are in a state of flux, you don’t want to be committed to anything fancy that takes lots of time or effort to change. However, at some point, you’d like to share your creation with a wider group of people; friends, family or even fellow game designers and game testers. This means converting it into a digital format which gives you legible text and clear graphics.

At this point you’re not trying to create a fancy polished project that is ready for production and sale. You just need a prototype. If you are not a graphic designer, then you have a choice. Do you now try and learn a graphic design program, or do you rather just make use of any existing tools that you have — for example, a word-processor or spreadsheet — which are not really specifically designed to meet the typical requirements for a game layout and could be awkward to work with?

At this point you may want to consider looking at protograf to meet your needs.

Who would use this?

The approach taken by protograf is one that might appeal to those who are less visual thinkers and more logic / word thinkers.

The primary way that you express yourself is through logically constructed discussions and arguments where the details matter. With protograf, you start off simple and gradually add more layers of detail as you go on. Its very easy to turn things on and off, and everything that you’ve done so far is directly visible to you, and not hidden away in layers of menus.

Getting to a final product might seem intimidating if you are looking at a 100-line long “final script”, but because it’s a process that you are in control of from start to finish, your involvement in that process means that all the steps of it will make sense to you.

In addition, when you come back to that script in 3 months, 6 months, or even a years time, it should remain just as readable as it was when you created it.

How is this designed?

The three principles of protograf — as much as any piece of software can have “principles” — are clarity, consistency, and comprehensiveness.

By clarity I mean that the terminology and approach to constructing elements of a game design should be reasonably obvious. I do appreciate that nothing is fully intuitive and inherently obvious, and every new thing we do relies to some degree on our previous knowledge. So protograf tries to avoid jargon, and also to use “long hand”, rather than abbreviations which may not be that memorable.

As an example, to draw a rectangle on a page you would use a command like: Rectangle(x=3, y=5, height=6, width=7). If you understand the basic notation that x is used to measure distance of the Rectangle’s top corner from the left-hand edge of the page and y is used to measure its distance from the top edge of the page, then it’s reasonably clear where this rectangle would be drawn and what it would look like.

The language used for protograf tries to match everyday usage of terms.

Consistency is about doing similar things in the same way. An ellipse shape is similar to a rectangle except that - obviously! - it’s drawn with curves rather than straight lines. The instruction for protograf to do this would look something like Ellipse(x=4, y=6, height=7, width=8). Hopefully it’s obvious that there is consistency in the way you draw these two kinds of shapes.

Comprehensiveness is much more of a challenge. By it’s very nature graphics is an open-ended domain and almost anything that one can imagine can be depicted in some way, shape or form. It’s therefore unlikely that any single software program can hope to emulate that degree of creativity; the best you can ever achieve is some reasonable subset of that. That’s where the evolving nature of programs such as protograf comes in.

Hopefully, there is a reasonable enough range of features available to make protograf useful now — but as more people use it, more ideas for new or different kinds of things will be incorporated.