HAZARDOUS Conversations Itch.io Game Jam Part 2

In mid February of this year we released HAZMAT: Hazardous Masculinity. We have been thinking a lot about how to open up our games for others to use and make their own decks either on The Game Crafter or just as print-to-plays for themselves and others.

Because we are using Adobe’s Creative Cloud Suite (InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator) as well as Microsoft Excel to generate our games we didn’t know how to REALLY open up the game for others to use the “engine.” We use (we think it is pretty cool) a data-driven approach to how we generate our conversation games, it is a heck of a lot easier to iterate over a spreadsheet than it is to actually work in InDesign and do all the work of setting things up and manually placing items and what happens when you want to edit … blah, blah, blah. Since we have worked in digital games we decided to bring a data-driven approach to how we make non-digital games. We know we aren’t the first, but it has really changed how we make non-digital games.

Long story short…

Since many folks out there are finding themselves inside with all sorts of changes going on in their lives and talking about those changes–and we believe in the power of conversation to change people’s lives and how they relate to one another–why not offer up our game for people to play around with to help have those challenging conversations?

Though we wanted to go full-tilt and use something like Scribus and other FLOSS tools, we are working on it but are not there yet. But, you can get a 7-day free trial of Adobe Creative Cloud right now! You can use Google Docs or LibreOffice Calc or whatever you like to generate tab-delimited files… Why not do it now? There are limitations, but we can play within those!

So here is Part 2 of How to Make Your Own HAZMAT Game, where we get into using InDesign and making those cards come together.

How To (Part 2)…

Complete the steps outlined in Part 1. You should have an edited spreadsheet file, with Sites, Suits and Materials changed for your version of the game. You can, if you choose, change the names of the categories or even point at new image files if you change those.
Save that Excel file and then do a “Save as…” or an export and produce a Tab Delimited file by the same name except with “.csv” or “.txt”.
Next you’ll have to have InDesign installed, but open “HAZMAT-Pandemic Jam.indd”. Now, InDesign is going to yell at you something to this effect:
The right answer to this question is: “Update Modified Links”. Next it will load and you’ll think, “Hey! That didn’t change anything! The card still has these stupid things with ‘<<>>’ around them!” Totally true story.
BUT! Go to the “Data Merge” Panel. If you don’t see it, go to “Window” -> “Utilities” -> “Data Merge”.
Now click that little “Preview” check-box in the window. Suddenly your cards will appear and you can browse through them one at a time! IT’s like magic!
You’re also going to say, “Eww! Those images look like crap! These folks don’t know what the hell they’re doing!” You might be right about the conclusion, but you just have to go to the “View” menu -> “Display Performance” and select “High Quality Display”. You can browse through your cards and see how they look. 🙂
But to generate your full document, you’ll have to go to: “Generate Merged Document” in the Data Merge panel. That will give you this below. You’ll want to leave most of the settings the same here.
Do “All Records” and that “Generate Overset Text Report” will tell you if any of the prompts you made were too long. But once you hit “OK” InDesign will generate a NEW InDesign document and open it.
You’ll have to save it somewhere.
You’ll probably again be thinking, “This didn’t work! I still see the stupid ‘<<>>’ stuff!” Go to the “Pages” panel. There are all your pages.
Double-click one and then you can scroll through them all! You just generated an entire deck of your cards! Huzzah!
Next you can export a PDF of these pages. If you want the “Code of Conduct” cards and “Instruction” cards you can use “HAZMAT-PJ-Extras.indd” to export those PDFs.
The last step is to take that PDF document and “Print” them into a new PDF file that is six pages to each page. You can use Acrobat or Preview or whatever you want for that.

You just made a conversation game!

To finish the Game Jam, complete these steps:

We have two ways to play, but make your own ways to play! Conversation is a game and it is up to you to decide the rules. Share those new ways to play with us and others. You might spark something for others.
Submit your game on the HAZMAT Game Jam (Must be free, see Legal section below).
Share your game on social media with the hashtag #HAZMATJAM
Play other people’s HAZMAT games.
Rate other people’s HAZMAT games.

If you want to make promotional art using the same font that we use for the Title and Box art, you can snag that over here: Vladimir Nikolic‘s font “World Conflict” for the HAZMAT game title.

Then finally print out those cards and cut them up and you can play away!

(optional) If you want to get fancy the card backs are included in “HAZMAT-PJ-Extras.indd” as well and you can twist yourself in knots trying to get your printer to match things up.

(optional) You can change the text font/color and also the image colors in InDesign and then redo the data merge if you want!

Legal Note…

HAZMAT: The Game by Affinity Games, LLC is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at http://hazmatgame.com. This means that your Print-to-Plays must be free. It also means you have to attribute the work as using/based on our work. If you want to make a physical copy through say,The Game Crafter, you can, you just can’t sell it. If you want to do that, talk to us: comrades@affinity-games.com.

If you want to know how to credit us, you can see a good way of doing this over on our site: https://hazmatgame.com/credits/