It’s away! I’ve uploaded a test version of GameSpite Quarterly 4 and should have the proof in my hands in about 10 days. Maybe sooner, if they decide to be awesome and expedite things. Wouldn’t that be nice? Yeah, I’m not counting on it.
Um, I think now would be a good time to emphasize that this image is not the actual cover art, fantastic though it may be. I’m still contemplating what to do for the cover art, and in the meantime I just threw in a random image from my iPhoto library as a placeholder to ensure the colors are correct and so forth. Speaking of colors, I’m most likely keeping the orange trim. It’s pleasantly eye-searing after the last issue’s muted, monochromatic blues.
There was a near-disaster in the production process, which I kind of expected. This is, after all, the first issue to have been assembled in InDesign rather than in Blurb’s craptacular BookSmart app, and I figured it wouldn’t go off without a hitch. I had the page bleeds and sizes wrong and ended up being forced to remove about a quarter of an inch from the layouts all around — which would have forced me to work my way through all 184 pages resizing every single element by a set percentage if not for the fact that I tend to design with a little breathing room around the edges of a page. So instead of being a crippling error, it simple means everything is going to crowd the edges of the page a bit more than I prefer.
(The 184 page count is the deluxe edition, by the way. The standard book should come in at around 156.)
So, let’s all cross our fingers and hope that the printed proof looks as lovely as it seemed in PDF form.
I thought the cover was some Half Life 2 joke. I say leave it.
At first glimpse, I thought it was a Half Life 2 joke, too. Considering how HL2’s gnome so profoundly altered the trajectory of play for idiots like myself who were hell-bent on launching that little bastard into space, it’s more relevant than you might think.
Problem is, HL2 is mentioned nowhere in the book.
I say leave the cover, and replace the garish orange with a nice fitting green.
Or else, do a clockwork/stat numbers/PS button pad-mashup cover and replace the orange with grey.
If it’s not too much work, you could take a screencap from Super Mario Brothers and layer King of Kong-style chalkboard trajectories of Mario’s possible movements/encounters with the enemies/obstacles before him over the screencap. (Extra brownie points for doing the same with Mega Man in Metal Man’s gear-filled stage from MM2.)
Failing that, a hi-res photo of some real-world gears/clockwork. Or fill a rusty toolbox with whatever videogame-related items and weaponry you and the guys at 1up can scrounge up, and take a picture of that.
Or the cover could be a blueprint (orangeprint?) of the inside of a gaming console/cartridge, with the chips labeled with the gameplay design features discussed within the book. (I’m shutting up now).
How about an image of Harry Benson from Snatcher as the cover?
Ooh, mechanics. This issue is going to be so good.
But then, they all are, so I don’t know that this says much…
Guh.. Breakman beat me to it. Although my first thought was FFIV Cid.
Unfortunately, I think Parish already beat everyone to the “Final Fantasy gameplay mechanic” pun with the artwork accompanying the GSQ #4 preview a few posts back.
If that’s the official theme label we’re slapping on this, might I suggest that you go with something literally evocative of how game design works? Like say, just a big collage of sprite sheets of various games’ characters’ animations/background tiles/debug modes/RPG stat screens?
You know, if Mechanics is the theme of the book how’s about gears from one of the Castlevania clock towers? Eh? Eh?
A group of mechanics in the style of GSQ2 perhaps?
Well, I’ve already used the game-mechanics-as-literal-mechanics sight gag on that FF article page I posted a few days ago, so I don’t want to recycle material quite so blatantly.
That being said, I’ve actually kind of fallen in love with the image I used for the back cover, so I may just switch the two images around.
I am broke, but I will buy this zine if you make that the cover art, because that is a sick cover. I am not joking.
I dunno. That cover is pretty boss. I know I’d buy the zine if you used it.