It Begins

Be Somewhere.

Portunoidea, better known as Crab Fragment Cay, is a tiny volcanic island in Les Îsles Rouges, situated between Crowley and Spiders Neat, southeast of Tiempo Libre in the Sonland Sea.

It is here that we find ourselves.

I have written “It Begins” about five times this week, while I try to figure out this toolkit. Those pages are gone now. Perhaps this one will survive.

I’ve been toying with the idea of Crab Fragment Labs for about a year now, based on a throw-away logo that I made for a design lecture in 2018.

The talk was about “graphic design for prototypes,” explaining the basic rules that will make your early drafts more playable, even if you are “not an artist.” For a key section I created an example game card that was as terrible as possible, so that I could fix it one step at a time. In the corner of this card was the Crab Fragment Games logo.

The point here was that you shouldn’t waste critical space on every card with your company logo, or anything else that is exactly the same on every card. I built a terrible logo and stuck it on the card.

I was soon in love with this awful thing.

Now I’ve made Crab Fragment Cay into a place, a tiny island hiding in the middle of the faux-Caribbean setting for my perpetually-in-the-works pirate minis game Cagway Bay. Because I love it when everything relates.

Crab Fragment Labs is launching now, as soon as I make sense of these site building tools, with a logo that’s more or less exactly the same as the first draft.

Crab Fragment Logos, Old and New

I have a rather bad video of that design lecture, but I hope to redo it once this whole “building a website” thing is under control. In the meantime, welcome to Crab Fragment Cay, enjoy the beaches and the buffet, and please remember to use plenty of sunscreen.