OK everyone. We are all waiting with bated breath for the final reviews to come in, and I don't want to get ahead or anything.
BUT while we're sitting around passing the time, I already have a list over a page long of "stuff I learned during this contest." Most of it is really basic, beginner mongoloid stuff because I have never tried to create a pdf before.
My process was like this:
I wrote everything up in Google Drive (where I write all my gaming stuff)
Drew the maps on graph paper, and the pictures in my notebook for the nice white paper. The art was the most fun. I did a few rough drafts, looked at google to get some ideas. I traced the double-tetrahedron by taping a piece of paper to my my monitor like it was a light table.
Budget-grade solutions, but they work.
Scanned the pictures at the local Staples, messed with them in GIMP (just stepped on the brightness/contrast, and digitally coloured the one) and put the whole thing into LibreOffice Word, which is the free open-source Microsoft Word lookalike that I have here in Ubuntu.
I then went on to do edits at this stage (horrible idea, I know that now). And fiddled with the layout until it looked halfway passable. Honestly, LibreOffice Word is not a great program for doing that, as some of you probably could have told me. It's like "zine-level" layout at best.
So my question is, how did everyone else do it? Some of you had tremendous digital art, some of you had great fonts and layout, etc. What programs did you use and how do you like them? Are they hard to use? Are they expensive? Anybody draw on one of them tablet things?