Bond, James Bond

Ever since I was a kid I've always been a big fan of James Bond. Sure, he's got the fast cars and he travels all over the world and he's got those Bond girls...but let's face it, as a kid it was the gadgets that made him cool.

I've seen all the movies, read most of the books, and somewhere in the stack of boxes in the garage is a copy of the James Bond RPG. As kids we created spy missions around the neighborhood that usually involved death defying missions like spying on people as they mowed their yards or secretly tailing people as they jogged around the block.

Jump forward in time, October 2001 to be exact. I'm working for a sports card/collectible card game company...I feel the best in both industries, but then again, I'm probably a little biased. I've always found that the best way for me to learn something new is to jump right in and create something myself. It was with this thought in mind that I set out to create a James Bond collectible card game. I mean, if I'm going to spend all this time on something it had better be something I know a little about right?! And that's how it all started.

I began, honestly, with very little knowledge of collectible card games. I had played Magi-Nation, an incredibly easy to learn CCG, and that was about it. So I grabbed the only two Bond DVD's that I had, "Tomorrow Never Dies" and "The World Is Not Enough" and started grabbing images from the movies. Looking back now, I don't recommend this order of events in creating your own CCG, but then again, I was making this up as I went along. Grabbing the images with no idea of gameplay in mind just doesn't make a lot of sense. But I knew that grabbing the hundreds of shots from the movies would take a large amount of time. Before I knew it, I began to realize that as I was capturing these images I was getting a flood of ideas on how the game would be played.

There would of course be characters, both good and bad. And what Bond game would be complete without it's share of gadgets and vehicles. Locations seemed to make sense as I watched 007 hop around the globe in pursuit of the master villain. Other elements, like chases and actions and events also became apparent as I studied these two films.

I created playtest cards to help create the core gameplay. These cards varied in design from simple black and white cards with all the necessary elements but no photos to full color cards for color testing purposes. With my experience in usability and interface design on the web, the size, placement, and color of each of the elements was a big concern for me. Early designs were created by playing cards, holding cards in my hand, playing them on the table in various positions just to see what areas of the cards remained the most visible or had the most attention drawn to them. This gave me a visual hierarchy for laying out the different gameplay elements on the cards.

What cards would be played from a persons hand? What cards would be selected and placed on the table before the game began? What cards needed to be easily viewable by both players? What was the best way to stack cards? This early playtest period, even without well defined rules, gave me a good starting point in developing the card interface.

By December of 2001 I had over 200 screengrabs and a pretty basic idea of how the game would be played. Then I had an idea...a way to get the game out to the rest of the world. It would be free. A free downloadable collectible card game from the web. There wasn't an official James Bond game on the market, so I didn't feel I would be taking profits away from anyone, and the game seemed to be shaping up to a pretty fun game...at least in my mind.

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