Well, I had all these ideas about a game, but how should I make a game out of it. I need a story, rules, tables, a designed board, tokens, players aides and lots of other stuff – and I have non-so-ever knowledge of designing or design-apps on the computer. So I decided to go with what I know. MS Office. For any text related issues I used word and for the designing I used Powerpoint. Powerpoint might not be the typical program for designing a board game, but I know it well, it is easy to include pictures and other things and I can scale the page size somewhat to the size I need (once you know where it is).

Did any of you create their game in Powerpoint? What were your experiences?

So I started writing some details about the game into Word, adding more and more content. What the story is about, what I need on material, what the basic rules are and so on. And I started making the first squares, circles and hexagons in Powerpoint and created bit by bit the first rough board.

I also looked for pictures that I could include into my game which somehow fit the story. That was actually much more difficult than I thought – to find the right pictures. And to be honest I did not find the really right ones. In the end I used what I could find and looked halfway suitable.

Everything that I did that involved designing was more difficult. While others use graphic programs to change/arrange pictures and then import them in the right size I used the mostly the tools Powerpoint provided me and in some instances I also used Paint. So if I wanted to change the color of one of my figures I used the option change color in Powerpoint. The problem. I only had a few colors as options. And sometimes this even changed from file to file. That is the reason for example why I had not boat with yellow people. I just did not have yellow. But two types of blue and red.

But with time going by the game and the design came together and someday it looked like it could be something that I could actually print out and test it – whether it is any good. So the next topic came up I had to focus on. How to create a prototype…