Design Diary: A Butterfly Story
Reflections on the development of the coloring book game, A Butterfly Story.
This week, I present to you a Design Diary for A Butterfly Story, an all-ages Story & Color game I created as a promotional giveaway. The game was released on DrivethruRPG and itch.io on June 8th, 2024. A physical one-page journal/coloring book template with a download link to the complete game is also distributed for free by MonarcWriter at conventions.
“A Butterfly Story is a solo journaling game that uses the imagery of a butterfly’s life cycle to explore the history and transformation of a character over the course of their life. The game uses color and art as prompts for developing a narrative. The game uses a set of art materials containing up to 8 different colors, copies of the uncolored illustrations of a butterfly’s life cycle, and writing materials.”
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Origins
As I was preparing to attend my first convention as a game designer earlier this year, I decided to create a free product that reflected the quirky sincerity of MonarcWriter games. I wanted it to be a game that would complement my classroom TTRPG, Good Nature: something that appealed to fans of journal games, but designed for children across a wide age and skill range, and that could be tied into academic learning standards if necessary. As an educator who has worked extensively with students with learning disabilities and who are English language learners, I focused on creating something that would build language and storytelling skills for students who may struggle with speaking and writing.
Over the past 20 years, I have been to a lot of Language-development and Differentiation trainings for educators. A sample lesson that I often see repeated by trainers is the life cycle of the butterfly. I think it is often used because it can be broken down into four visual images, providing a very simple and accessible starting point that all students can engage with but it can be expanded to higher level standards quite easily. That academic foundation, combined with the vast possibility for allegories and storytelling inherent in butterfly imagery (and the connection to the MonarcWriter brand) led to the basis of the game.
Structure
A Butterfly Story is a game that generates the story of a transformative experience. It can be told literally from the perspective of a butterfly or other insect, or metaphorically as the story of a character’s development into their fulfilled potential. It is broken up into four acts that follow the life cycle of a butterfly: Egg, Caterpillar, Butterfly, Egg. During each act, an image is selected, then colors are randomly chosen and used to fill in different parts of the image. Each color used provides a prompt to respond to and develop the story.
Mechanics
I wanted to emphasize the visual aspect of the game and make coloring an image essential to playing A Butterfly Story. I looked at other games that included images to color as part of the game as a way to engage younger players, like Color My Quest by Dice Up Games and StoryGuider by TTRPG Kids. I liked that coloring pages were a tool to enhance the experience of their games, but what I really wanted for my game was to have the act of coloring as the core game mechanic—the action used by players to make decisions and move the story forward.
Most journal games use dice or decks of cards to generate randomized prompts. I figured, why can’t color serve the same function? Rather than roll on a table or pull a card from a deck, A Butterfly Story has players randomly select a color. The color chosen and the section of the image being colored determine the prompt. It's simple and straight-forward, but it makes the creation of art the game itself, and gives a finished product that tells the story visually. I have dubbed these mechanics the Story & Color system, and plan to develop it further for future games. (In fact, Paper Pixel Prologue uses this system, as well!)
Visual Design
The layout and graphic design of A Butterfly Story is quite simple: a green, leafy border (by Alderdoodle) on a plain white backdrop. This allows the color spots on the prompts and the occasional photograph of the different stages of the butterfly to stand out. The page size is intentionally small, so that it can easily be printed, put together, and distributed to a class of students.
The coloring page images are my own inked sketches based on reference photos from textbooks and educational websites. I wanted some variety for each life cycle stage, so that players wouldn’t all be stuck with the same images as their peers and allow some variety in replays of the game. The timing for getting the game published led me to settle on three images per stage. Each image also had to have enough “sections” to color to match the number of prompts for the corresponding act in the game. It was fun to meld components from different photos together and modify them to create segments that would allow for unique and interesting color patterns. The idea is that at the end of the game, players can create a butterfly life-cycle collage by cutting out and combining their finished pieces—a physical artifact of the game that can be turned in and assessed in an academic setting.
I plan to do much more with the Story & Color system created for A Butterfly Story. In the meantime, download the game (its Pay-What-You-Want, meaning free!) and please let me know your experiences with it, especially if you get to use it in an educational setting!
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