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So, after about a year of writing, re-writing, editing, and re-editing (while also coming up with distinctive voices for all the recurring Jack Chick characters), Leighton and I had a game book. Now we needed to figure out what to do with it. The first step was combining the text with art in a way that would allow us to print the book. We didn’t know anything about layout, but I worked with a guy named Robert who was an art teacher and was pretty sure he could do it in Word. Since that was better than any plan Leighton and I had, we hired him as our layout guy (for a 6-pack of Zima, if memory serves).
To supplement the page of art we had from Dale, we talked Skaught and another guy I worked with–also named Robert (this one would go on to create The Walking Dead and Invincible, among other things)–to draw some things and/or give us some old drawings they weren’t using. Leighton then did some illustrations to round things out, and I think I did the map of the monster cave. Since the internet was new and we didn’t know any better, we also included a Yahoo! map showing how to get to Red Rock (the place where I worked with all the Roberts, and the one place we knew for sure would carry our game).
Robert (not the Walking Dead one) was in fact able to do the layout in Word, in a lovely font we’d found called Comic Sans. This alone should indicate how long ago we wrote QAGS. Again, the internet was young so we didn’t know any better. Since (I think) we were still planning to print the book at Kinko’s (ask your parents), the trickiest part of the process was moving the pages around so they’d end up in the right order when folded. In other words, we had to make sure the cover had the front and back covers on one side and the inside covers on the other, the next page would have the first and last pages on one side, the 2nd and next to last pages on the other, and so on.
By the time we got the layout done (or maybe after, or maybe before we even started the layout–it was a long time and the details are fuzzy (alcohol may have been involved))–we had a better plan than Kinko’s. One day at work, I found out that Bob, one of our semi-regular customers, worked for a print shop. After talking with him for a while, we figured out that if we did a large enough print run, he could print the books “professionally” for about what Kinko’s would cost. I had a suspicion that this was going to be an under the table job that Bob’s boss might or might not know about, but it meant better quality and kept us from having to locate one of those long staplers for stapling zines together, so we made plans to take him up on it.
Since we expected to have the books soon, Leighton and I signed up to run QAGS at Ukon, the University of Kentucky game club’s convention. Bob didn’t get the books done in time, so we printed out a couple copies of the layout file to use in the games and show people. Somebody stole one of them, then ran a QAGS game the following year and bragged to us the whole con about how he didn’t even have to buy the book. Gamers are the worst.
We ran some fun games at our first convention as a company. I’ll tell you about them next time.
