This is part 3 of design diaries about Abdec's development. Check out the whole series here.

I'm writing this entry basically on my way out the door, headed to Georgia (Europe) for a vacation. At the same time, I'm writing an email to the printshop I work with, attaching the final files for the physical Abdec. I'll be on the trip for a little less than 2 weeks and hopefully, when I come back, the printshop will finish their work and physical Abdec will be available for purchase. Not only that, but the digital PDF file will also get an update, a pretty big update if I may say - Abdec will be upgraded to the second edition.

As said in the previous design diary, I didn't mean for Abdec to be released physically at first. A difficult and non-user-friendly game, I saw it as as side project and put out a PDF without much thought or expectations, but the response has been so kind since the release that I decided to chase the idea of an analog booklet after all. However, Abdec being a difficult game wasn't the only reservation I had about releasing it physically - the theming and graphic design also called for a specific approach to printing that would be very impractical and costly.

Abdec is supposedly an old textbook about a writing system of an alien species, fictionally released back in the 90s - a damaged and burnt textbook, with crazy scribbles on the sides of the pages and added annotations - which meant I had to use colour in the PDF for the burn marks and visual tricks, such as showing the page behind the partially-burnt page.

Having a PDF in colour of course meant I had to print the book in colour as well. I considered a black and white version, but it felt wrong for the physical edition - which is supposed be the ultimate edition of Abdec - to be inferior to the digital edition. So I settled upon colour.

The other thing - the textbook being damaged, with missing parts of pages - was the bigger problem. Cutting the pages physically, making the book look worn-down, ripping the corners; this simply wasn't an option. Honestly, I haven't even checked with the printshop if it was possible - it probably was, but at a great cost - because the idea itself felt too gimmicky to me for its own good. I still wanted the physical Abdec to be a sturdy, well-bound booklet. So I had to look for alternatives that wouldn't seem strange and out-of-place. Sure, I could slap the PDF onto paper unchanged, with the illusion of backpages being visible, but printing out a test copy proved to me that what works digitally doesn't necessarily work physically. Seeing a page behind a charred piece of paper and then the same actual page on two different leaves bothered me in a sense that's difficult to put into words.

My solution was to make the physical Abdec a reissue, which helped me immensely in almost all aspects of the graphic design. The story is that Letibus Design, the original textbook's publisher, found the last remaining copy of Abdec, which was long considered to be lost, and scanned it for a reissue with all of its physical imperfections and annotations. I could explain the actual book's intact pages, modern spiral bounding and its true year of release (which is mandatory when publishing physically) just by putting in a foreword from the current Letibus Design's fictional editor-in-chief (for whom I borrowed my girlfriend's name). Besides describing how the puzzle book in our hands isn't the original run-down issue, the foreword also uses a very distinct background colour, which I re-used as a background texture for all the burnt pages. The reissue re-theming simply worked.

But updating the visual aspect of Abdec wasn't the only thing that was changed from the PDF edition. Once the dust settled from the initial March release, I came to realise I could improve some things. A large help in deciding what to better was just reading the comments online, seeing where people struggled the most.

I updated quite a few puzzles of the main campaign, making some of them completely unrecognisable to their previous incarnations. I added only one new puzzle, to make a certain realisation even clearer, but felt like the scope and general flow of the main campaign was already in a good place and didn't want to stuff in too much new content.

But I did add a lot of new content elsewhere. Firstly, I added hints for all the chapters, hopefully keeping some solvers engaged this way even if they got stuck solving on their own. Not only that, but I also added explained rules, obscuring them a bit to avoid accidental spoiling; it surprised me how few rules are actually used in Abdec. They fit on three pages, but I separated the realisations as they are revealed from chapter to chapter - if I would write out the rules compactly, as they are understood at the very end of the main campaign, they would probably fit on a single page! And I also added solutions, again obscuring them a little bit and also burning all the pages where the unknown letters are seen. (Abdec is a puzzle system that makes you deduce the shapes of alien letters. Only "a" and "b" are revealed at the start.) I included the solutions even if a big chunk of them is missing, just so the player would be comfortable in their initial assumption about how a solved puzzle should even look. This way, Abdec became a tiny bit gentler, which I think was necessary.

Another thing I also added was... Well, we are now entering the spoiler zone, but I will try to not mention anything that wouldn't be obvious just by flipping through the new edition. Basically, Abdec has a ton of new marks, images and pages. What is their purpose? How do they fit into the whole puzzle system? I won't say, but I will say their inclusion elevated Abdec to a whole new level for me. Playtesters of this fresh content also commented how Abdec now feels complete and done. I am excited for the really dedicated solvers to crack the final challenge. This addition is no small thing - even if it's not obvious at first, the meta-stuff consists of more than 20 new puzzles.

The time has come. I have to send the email to the printshop, I have to go on the road. I am excited for the product and, to be honest, also a bit scared. You can never be 100% how the colours in a colour print will come out. But I'm confident in the printshop I'm working with - they printed out the last 3 print runs of my previous puzzle book LOK and they were all of the highest quality.

If there won't be any unforeseen circumstances, the release date of the book will be on the 30th of July, maybe even sooner. If you wish to learn when it will be available, subscribe to my newsletter. Also, join our Letibus Discord channel, if you haven't yet!

I wish you all the best,

Blaž