Please look over my game manual and suggest edits, changes to organization, etc

December 10, 2004 9:53 AM

Document design people!
Some months ago, I completed the first fairly rough draft of a (unofficial) gigantic manual for a half-life mod called Natural Selection. My manual sucks! I need help! (+)

1. If you're in the know about these sorts of things, you will spot several factual errors in the manual. I know, I'll be fixing them soonish. This has been, however, a 19 credit semester and I had no time.

2. ADOBE ACROBAT SUCKS. Or if it doesn't, I have no idea how to make it do what I want. The bookmarks aren't very cool at all, and anchors seem to go to the nearest page rather than exact lines. Or something. Basically I'd like to have stuff where people could click on a mysterious word, or maybe a little icon next to a mysterious word, and transport them to the relevant section of the glossary and back again. So either PDF tips + tricks with Acrobat 6.0 would be handy, or suggestions for an alternate format.

3. Organization. How's mine? How could it be better? This ties into the format.

4. Graphic design. This thing is ugly. How do I fix the ugly? I am clueless, and have access to an old copy of Photoshop 5.0 through work.

Thanks in advance!

posted by kavasa to media & arts (13 comments total)

I don't know if it will do what you want, but for a cool alternative to PDF, see Macromedia Flashpaper.
posted by grumblebee at 10:53 AM on December 10, 2004

I didn't download it to look (I'm really not all too handy with PDFs) but I would have done it in straight-up HTML with CSS. Unless you are expecting a lot of people to actually print it out.
posted by rafter at 10:58 AM on December 10, 2004

Is this going to live on the web, or will you be printing it?
posted by fandango_matt at 11:34 AM on December 10, 2004

Apologies, definitely web. Although as rafter mentioned, some folks might like to print it out for their own purposes. It's relatively thick, so would probably make decent on-the-can reading material, and could even serve two purposes there, in a pinch*.

*no apologies for the pun
posted by kavasa at 12:49 PM on December 10, 2004

I've finished looking it over, and right now there's no graphic design at all, so you can't really say it sucks. That said, you've already done the hard work of breaking everything up and organizing it, so you just need to take it a few steps further.

First off, chapters need to be broken up. That is, new chapters need to be on new pages. Don't be afraid of whitespace at the end of a chapter. Subsections should also be broken up. While it's intuitively obvious by the numbering and boldface, you could follow the standard format of: importance of section in the overall outline == size of font. That is, a chapter is a big break in composition, thus gets its own page. A chapter section gets, say, a 16pt. font and an underline. A sub-section gets 14pt. font and is italicized. Etc. Consistency is the key.

Second, your pages need headers for the sections. This just lets the reader know where they are at any given point by looking at the top of the page.

If you're feeling saucy, you could come up with a general graphic for each of the sections that keeps a general theme. Lets say you picked "football" as your theme. "Marines" could be a stylized (simple) drawing of a linebacker. "Commanding" could be one of those x - x - o - x drawings coaches like to use (with the arrows -- do you know what I mean?). Some kind of graphic element.

Third, you don't -- and probably shouldn't -- use 1" margins. You're not writing a report for school, so (again) don't be afraid of whitespace. A bunch of text go all the way across a page, top to bottom, is visually daunting for the reader. An extra half inch on the left and a full inch on the right would be fine. If you wanted real graphic design sassiness, you could put a 1/2" border on the right-hand side of the page, in different colors for each section, with the section label (running perpendicular to the regular text).

Anyway, just some quick, off-the-cuff suggestions.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 1:26 PM on December 10, 2004

I didn't download the manual, but generally speaking PDFs are only used when (a) someone wants to put a pre-existing print document on the web but is too lazy to do it in HTML; (b) the content of the PDF is meant to be printed out (like a form). Otherwise, it's far easier (in my opinion) to do it in HTML.
posted by savetheclocktower at 2:41 PM on December 10, 2004

Regardless of whether you do it in HTML, Word, Quark, whatever, use style sheets to control the formatting. It's much, much, much easier to change the formatting for a heading once in the style sheet than to change it for every instance of every heading.

Learn to Link in PDFs. That's from PDFPlanet's Tips & Tricks which will probably have other useful information. There should be a way to automatically have the table of contents link to the chapter heads and subheads, for example.
posted by kirkaracha at 2:42 PM on December 10, 2004

If you're feeling saucy, you could come up with a general graphic for each of the sections that keeps a general theme. Lets say you picked "football" as your theme. "Marines" could be a stylized (simple) drawing of a linebacker. "Commanding" could be one of those x - x - o - x drawings coaches like to use (with the arrows -- do you know what I mean?). Some kind of graphic element.

Isn't Natural Selection a really high-end, high-concept mod? I remember reading about it and wishing I had a PC. What I'm getting at is: surely there's some concept art or something you could pull.
posted by furiousthought at 2:54 PM on December 10, 2004

Oh man C_D that is some awesome stuff. These are all things that would never occur to me. I am an academic so I just sort of go WELL HERE'S THE INFORMATION, HAVE FUN. Thanks for the tips. :)

For those suggesting HTML/CSS: yeah, I think I will I go that route. I have experience with them already, which is preferable to learning crazy shit for PDFs. I think what I'll probably do is provide a stripped-down, text-only version of the manual along with the HTML version so people can print that if they want.

furiousthought - there is, I've got the media pack, and there are a variety of drawings and things. I'd definitely be more likely to use those than a football metaphor, which would be sort of surreal.
posted by kavasa at 2:59 PM on December 10, 2004

Just looking at the table of contents, I'd like to suggest:

First, separate "Contents: " from the rest of the list by at least 1 line. Maybe make it the same font size and style as the "Unofficial Manual" header. It's the section title - you need to distinguish it as such.

Like how you've split up the numbered sections. You could put bold headers on each of these:

Aliens
3.1: Introduction
3.2: The Resource Model

That way the character class the section applies to doesn't get lost in the rest of the text.

Skimming the rest of the manual, just want to note that for headers and other short-line text, italics don't stand out as well as bold or even underlining, so please consider switching. In the Glossary section I'd definitely bold or italicize whatever term is being defined.

For a document this big, you could also make title pages for each section - at least the first 5, and maybe the rest could be grouped behind one or two pages. It's a good excuse to play with pictures and graphics and whatever else is in the media pack.
posted by casarkos at 3:49 PM on December 10, 2004

My manual sucks!

What you have is actually not bad [in case you were fishing for compliments], and has a lot of potential. Relatively short sentences; paragraphs are logical and flow; it's packed with lots of useful information. So what the manual needs at this point is tinkering, not massive revisions.

I second Civil_Disobedient's comments about formatting.

Other points to consider:

* Parallelism - if you don't have a "b", it doesn't make any sense to have an "a". For example, 3.1a, Bunnyhopping, isn't followed by 3.1b (and the transition into 3.1a is abrupt).

* The history of a game and its facets can be interesting, but it's not relevant to a new player, and should be omitted. For example (from 3.3a):

"Groupings of OCs (sometimes with other chamber types), are often referred to as “walls of lame,” “WOL”, and “lame” , using “lame” as (a noun). This no longer has any real negative connotation, and is a holdover from previous versions where it was possible to construct defenses that were practically invulnerable. That is, they would require upwards of 200-300 resources to break through. That is reduced to an historical curiosity these days. While modern OCs are deadlier than they used to be, a [A] determined marine team can and will break through any lame if left unopposed."

* It's better to overexplain than be cryptic. For example, "Also make sure to set a bind to open up the minimap" is the first mention of "bind". At least to me, it isn't clear what a "bind" is (key mapping?), or how to make one. Or, for example, "Shoot your first weapon at marines and shoot your second weapon at aliens (it will heal them)" probably makes more sense if you say "the weapon in your first weapon slot" and "weapon in your second weapon slot" [I think]. And perhaps acknowledging the oddity of a "weapon" being something that heals would help the reader fix this idea in his/her mind.

* Use bullets and/or bolding, not just paragraphs, when you have parallel stuff within a number. So, for example, in 3.1, when you say: "There are three basic alien structure types, and the difference between those types should be explained in this introduction.", you should end with a colon, start a new paragraph, and then help the reader clearly see where each of the types is described. [adding "of alien structure" just after "second type" and "third type" could help the reader who is struggling with a mass of information, or who jumps into the text, later, rather than reading down into it].

Finally, if you want an absolutely top-notch manual (it may not be worth the effort), the only way to achieve that is to have some of your target audience actually read and use your manual while explaining to you what they are thinking. It can be a bit humbling (because it all made perfect sense to you until someone pointed out it didn't), but these sort of user comments (sifted appropriately) can be gold.

Good hunting!
posted by WestCoaster at 3:52 PM on December 10, 2004

Coming from the design perspective and having a quick 'flick through', the main thing that hits me is that there are quite a few text heavy pages (well it is a report) that will need breaking up. C_D's suggestions for adding graphics around the theme are fab, even if they are tinted in the background. This may help break up the pages so you can leave some space around those graphics.

To make things easier to read you might want to consider breaking the text into 2 columns so it has more of a magazine, newspaper feel to it. By creating columns you can add your images at various sizes, filling either the width of one or 2 columns. Check out some mags for inspiration.

Perhaps add some colour to the page itself (even just the occasional page), especially if it's mainly going to be seen on the web and you don't have to worry about that full colour bleed when printing.

And definitely get some headers in there for each section.

Good luck!
posted by floanna at 4:35 PM on December 10, 2004

I am an academic so I just sort of go WELL HERE'S THE INFORMATION, HAVE FUN.

In my transition from webpage designer to print designer, this was the hardest thing to come to grips with: people don't like to read. Present them with a page of text, and they'll choke. Present them with 3 pages of the same text, with big-ass margins and tons of paragraph spacing, and they'll read it. Good print design relies heavily on psychology.

Me, I kept thinking, "But it's going to cost you three times as much to print all those pages!" Go to the bookstore and take a look at just about anything printed, however, and you'll see tons of whitespace.

Actually, you should go to the bookstore anyway, because you can rip off some good, basic formatting from, say, popular manuals. And by "popular" I mean, "for the masses." Maybe those "...for Dummies" books. Try and pay attention to the design layout. It's easy if you just think of the text as big blocks of graphics. Those aren't words -- they're very complicated pictures.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 5:53 PM on December 10, 2004