DESIGN DIARY - 11.27.00

Lucasfilm Ballet

Once the cards have gone through rigorous preparation, once the rules have been carefully inked, it's time for the dress rehearsal.

Lucas Licensing approval.

It's one of the very last step of development, where the remaining kinks can be identified and worked out before the show officially hits the stage.

Cards are normally sent to Lucasfilm in their finished form. This means that the gameplay and the art are completely done. Also, Decipher's other Star Wars products are usually handed over as finished sets - which is feasible because the Star Wars CCG and Young Jedi groundwork has been carefully laid. Both sides already know what to expect. In the case of Jedi Knights, however, every element is built from scratch. The Premiere set will be the foundation onto which everything else will rest.

"So we're sending Lucasfilm batches of cards rather than the whole set," says Tom. "From the comments we get on one group of cards, we can anticipate concerns with the next group and take care of potential problems before the cards even leave Decipher."

As it so happens, the latest Jedi Knights package bound for Skywalker Ranch left Decipher last Friday. It contained twenty beautiful - and fully functional - cards. "I started by selecting forty cards I thought were ready," Tom explains. "I took them down to the Art Department, and they removed ten out of that group; ten cards they didn't feel were quite finished yet. Then I ran the remaining thirty cards through our convention document to make sure everything was standardized."
The shredder-sounding "convention document" is a compilation of standardized formulas for expressing gameplay concepts on the cards and in the rules. How to say that a card adds power during battles, how to indicate that a card features special characteristics, how to phrase the way one card affects another, and so on as precisely and consistently as possible. When the group came out of the convention engine (which is really just Tom going back and forth between cards and the convention document), all of the thirty cards had been brought up to speed with current conventions.
"Then Art did a final pass," continues Tom. And those guys & gals are pretty picky (a Very Good Thing as far as we're all concerned). "They removed another ten cards from the group. We sent the remaining twenty to Lucas Licensing."

As they were doing this, Product Development received comments on the previous batch. Lucasfilm uses four labels when reviewing Decipher cards: "Approved," "Approved with changes," "Resubmit" and "Rejected." Rejections happen very rarely; all Decipher normally sees are the other three labels.

"Approved" means that we can move on to the explanation of the other two labels.

"Approved with changes" means just what it says: change this or that and the card will be fine by Lucasfilm. One example of the "Approved with changes" label:

• "Please add 'TM' to the first appearance of 'Star Wars'."
  

"Resubmit" means that the modifications, either to gameplay or art, might be a bit more tricky, or that Lucasfilm just wants to make sure some finer details are absolutely perfect. A few examples of the "Resubmit" label:

• (for Vader's Custom TIE) "Change 'Mark II power collectors' to 'shield generators'."
• (for Greedo) "Han's boot looks too shiny - tone down."
• (for Ellorrs Madak) "Eyes should be more red."

The show must go on.

Sometimes, however rarely it may happen, a card will be rejected for one reason or another. "This is why we always submit more cards then we'll actually need," says Tom. "If the rejected card is a replaceable element, we'll just throw another (approved) card in. If it's a game-breaker - suppose Darth Vader is rejected - then we'd have to redesign and resubmit it." This takes time, which is why replacement cards are always planned, whenever possible.


And so, as the ballet goes into full swing, with cards gracefully moving to the tune of the precisely orchestrated rulebook, Jedi Knights is being assigned its final cast. The reviewer's first comment, on the Lucas Licensing Product Approval form, was "Overall, cards look great!"

When the curtain finally rises on the Jedi Knights production, I'm confident most spectators will agree.

Francis K. Lalumiere
The Juggler