SCMAker

• Maker: Holland Cutrell
• Genre: guide, instructions, hints, tips, how to, game manual
• Level: Graduate
• Program: Composition, Rhetoric, and Digital Media
• Course: WRIT 5800: Editing, Layout, and Design
• Instructor: Dr. Eric Mason
• Semester Created: Winter 2020

Description

For project 5, I was required to create a multi-page designed document. I have been playing video games since I was young and I fondly remember the game manuals that came with each game inside its case. In recent years I have noticed a sharp decline in physical manuals coming with physical copies of video games- the place where the booklets used to be is now either black or filled with thin promotional material like new game fliers or DLC codes. A game that I have grown to truly enjoy over the past year or so is a prequel to Red Dead Redemption, aptly named Red Dead Redemption 2. I logged many hours into the game, savoring its virtual western world and found myself wanting to hold and flip through a tangible booklet accompaniment to the game- a gaming manual! Upon hearing the expectations for project 5, I immediately wanted to test my hand at creating a supplemental guide for Red Dead Redemption 2. I used an open-source program called Lucidpress to freely design and add text and screenshots to each page.

Reflection

I had to do quite a bit of writing for this project, but the kind of informational writing turned out to be very different from the typical “academic graduate” writing I am used to. I worked to make the text clear and very concise since I had limited space to work with on each page. My writing turned out to be a lot more causal than my regular academic writing as well. Collecting all of the images I used for both the backgrounds and screenshot stills turned out to be extremely time consuming because I had to make sure everything I used was fair-use, meaning I wouldn’t be penalized for using anything under copyright or trademark. Figuring out how to make all of my text work on very different backgrounds was challenging, but I managed to make it work to the best of my ability.