Battle Royale At The Cape Town Horticultural Show was my first time designing and finishing a one-page RPG, although I have been thinking about creating them for a while and have a few as yet unfinished early experiments and ideas in my work-in-progress pile that helped me to learn some of the process. I don't have a printer, or quick access to anyone else's printer at the moment, so I have had to work entirely on screen, without being able to do any test prints to see how art and text would look once physically printed, which has been rather unnerving when one of the appealing points of these types of games is that they are something that can be printed if a player wants to do so.

After typing up the initial text and game mechanics for Battle Royale At The Cape Town Horticultural Show in Notepad, I designed the layout in Affinity Publisher. I then added art I had begun to create in GIMP towards the end of the process, once I could see in the layout where the visual gaps were that needed a little aesthetic help, as well as for gaps I had specifically left for some art, assuming I had time since I was intending to submit the game for the One-Page RPG Jam 2023, which meant I had a deadline.

Throughout the process I remained mindful of how it would likely print, based on my years of experience working at publishing companies on magazines, but I still wasn't entirely sure of what the end result would look like on paper. I've been using Affinity Publisher for years but it has mainly been to create PDFs and I haven't printed much of what I have previously designed. This is also why I designed two versions of the printable for the game – partly for legibility purposes, in case anyone might find the mud-splatter background distracting or difficult on the eyes, and partly in case that art ended up being something that just doesn't look very good when printed, especially since I knew most printers would add a white border around the page; you need to go to a printing company and ask for an item to be printed on oversized paper and then trimmed if you want to do borderless printing.

A few weeks after the jam ended I finally had an opportunity to take the PDFs of both versions to a local copy shop to get them printed. You can see an example of each in the photograph above – the version with the background is on the left and the version without it is on the right. (For any eagle-eyed horticulturalists who are alarmed that the main plant in the photo is a chilli plant and not a fern, fynbos, or fungus, well, yes, I am aware but I had to grab what I had available and which was portable.)

I am very pleased with the results (the copy shop also used surprisingly good paper, which was an added bonus) and I'm looking forward to making more in the future.