Dec 5th updates: Manual, concepts, design and more!

Chip Shop has had quite a busy week and I have a few updates to tell you about.

New Website Design

I’ve redesigned the website slightly and there will be much more to follow, it’s something of an ‘evolving’ site. A lot of the design change are due to me keeping an eye on how the game will grow and progress over time.

Amended Core Concepts

Whilst working on the manual and some initial cards for the game I realised I had hit a bit of an issue with representing real world History in the game. I was trying to make products and events as accurately as possible but became rapidly unstuck attempting to somehow represent products that cost millions of dollars to produce and attempting to keep the numbers as historically accurate as possible. I also got stuck figuring how to represent the differing sizes of companies that have produced computers in the 80s, for example a stalwart like IBM vs a small team that emerges such as Amiga. In the end I decided on abstracting concepts and just using the costs on product cards to represent many of the factors I was attempting to include.

Now there is ‘money’ (of no specific denomination) which can be spent on resources (that are all the same) and these resources can be distributed amongst product costs as players see fit.

This keeps the game much simpler and allows me to move the game through eras and setting without having to constantly adjust for regional currencies or changes in monetary value over the decades.

Game Manual

I have started working through writing the manual for the game as this helped me identify what steps I needed to undertake next in development. You can start reading it by clicking through the pages on the right <— under the manual heading. It’s not fully written yet, but hopefully you’ll start to get the idea of how the game will work.

First cards

I have started creating some cards as part of the products deck. In my mind they are ready for publishing here, but as they currently use real product names I need to decide wether I start contact license holders or just make up my own parody names.

Twitter Hash Tag

Every project needs a twitter hash tag, I’ve set ours as [#chipshopbg](https://https://twitter.com/hashtag/chipshopbg?f=realtime). In it I will be posting various bits and pieces from my research or other quick thoughts that will build towards these blogposts. For convenience, there is a block showing you latest tweets over on the left <—-.

Design Mockups

Attached below are some files for card, score board, factory place mats and player screens.