Hello world! My name is Petar, and you probably know me best as the creator of SimsVIP’s PDF Game Guides & Manuals. If you have downloaded any of the PDF guides in the last two years, it was me who created them! About two years have passed since we published our first game guide (Generations), and I want to share the game guide process with you. Lets start! 🙂
There are a few goals we always want to achieve when we start preparing for our guides. The guides need to be thorough, unique, and beautiful, so we must make sure they are! After we put together the format and sections of a guide, I begin works on PDF sketches. I usually do few sketches before making them public, and then pick the best format of all. The  picture below is an example of my early sketch for the Sims 3 University Life PDF guide.  The final version excluded the lime green color, and was exclusively orange.
After all the long hours I spend on sketches, I release the final version to Alexis, who then posts a preview for everyone here. This is a great way for me to get feedback from our readers.
There are multiple sketches in which we pick and choose content from to create the final version. Even the public sketch is never the final version. Â I redesign some of the low quality elements like shadows, forms, and picture borders, so that they have a crisp, clean look. This part of the process “beautifies” the guide and is less tedious.
The next part of the guide making process takes more time and energy: Creating the Guide. It’s not really that hard of a job to put all the information into the guide, but when I want it to look perfect, my perfectionist disease kicks in! The picture below shows you a two pages of guide, and how they  look in the program before publishing.
Confusing right? 😛
I usually create the guides in 20 page parts, this way I can send them over to Alexis to proofread. I’m pretty clumsy sometimes, and make plenty of mistakes!
After I finish adding all the game guide content to the PDF, I combine all the pages into one whole PDF, and send it to Alexis for further review. Alexis usually makes me change this and that around the guide, but in the end it all looks great. (Alexis can be very picky sometimes, but I’ll save those stories for another time) 😛
We put weeks and weeks of care into the game guide we release, and are very proud of the work we release . Having so many fans around the world using our guides, is something both Alexis and I are proud of. The amazing feedback  from everyone is the best reward we can receive, and it’s given me the courage to do more amazing things with each guide.
With that said, thank you for taking the time to read my article, and here’s an exclusive first look at Island Paradise’s PDF Game Guide sketch. 🙂
