Random card draw & random resource system?
If we have this type of “random resource system”, and couple it with random card draws as traditional CCG:s use, then we suddenly end up with a CCG that is more random than the average CCG. The player has even less control in WT than, i.e., she’d have in MtG if both resource system and card draws are random.

Surely, that is not my intent. On the contrary: I’d love for WT to be as deterministic as possible, within the scope for re-playability and fun of course. I have no issues with some random elements in the game, but would be horrified if I ended up creating a game that was more random than the average CCG.

That leads me to the conclusion that if I keep a random resource system, then I probably should ditch the random card draws. Is that a problem? Not necessarily, it even sounds appealing.

When thinking about it though, a system with a random resource system and non-random card draws seems to have some serious effects on the meta game: A player would normally seek to distribute the number of cards in her deck in a way which makes it possible for her to maximize resource usage every round.

For example, building a deck with mainly huge expensive creatures would be a bad idea: Every time the dice were thrown and established that resources for that round would be, say, 5, that player would almost be paralyzed.

The vice versa seems also true: If a player fills the deck with only cheap cards she would run out of cards very soon in a game where the players happened to roll high resource values a couple of turns in a row. It would in that case also have another effect: The player with the cheapest deck could easily “flood” the table with many creatures. That, combined with how the attack system works (MtG-style), and yet another bad resource roll for the player that has somewhat larger and more expensive creatures, seems to wrap it all up in a very boring way.

Is lacking random card-draws a negative thing? I’d say no, not on itself. It still sounds appealing to me, if it would work out well with everything else.

Predictability
With a random resource system the predictability of what tier of card you could play a given round is almost totally gone. In a concventional CCG one would expect that by round 8 the players can actually use more powerfull spells, or at least they could have the option to do so. That is not so in WT if we’d use a random resource system: The expensive über-cards could almost get into play at round 1. There is no “aggregation of power” and tier level over time.

However, rolling 2d6 to determine how much gold the players will get each round has some degree of mathematical predictability behind it. Let’s start with the obvious: Every round, the minimum gold given to each player will be at least 2 and max 12.

Although not as obvious, we can also learn that most of the time during the games of WT the most frequent amount of gold that will be given to the players is 7. On second place comes the gold amount of 6 or 8, and the third most common gold amount that will be given to the players is 5 or 9.

Sadly I was never much into mathematics in my youth and can’t come with greater wisdom than the following: The random resource system, although random, is to some degree very predictable due to the teachings of mathematical probability. It would not take long for players to grasp this, resulting in most of the decks evolving round cards that cost a) 7 gold b) 6 or 8 gold and c) 5 or 9 gold. As a result, all other cards will be underused simply because of this reason alone. That has some major implications on the meta-game and how people will build their decks.

the counting problem
With a random resource system that’s generated by throwing dice the players keep the sum in their own memory. So, If we get to spend 10 gold this round, and it’s my turn, I have to deduct whatever I pay from the 10 I got, and keep that result in my head.

Problem? Not really. However, it could perhaps become a problem really fast:

Let’s say I finished my turn. I have 4 unspent gold left of the original 10 that I got. My opponent is now playing. Suddently I realize I have a kick ass Event card (instant) that I want to play against my opponent during her turn. At that point in time, do I still remember how much gold I had left? And, equally important, does my opponent remember it as well, even though she is busy keeping track of her own?

In general, I think the game is playable this way and that it doesn’t have to lead to problems often. But, it really does invite cheating, demands the players full attention of keeping both her own and her opponents gold variables in head at all times, and there is no decent way to resolve conflicts since there is no “proof” of what was spent by whom in a complex situation where one of the players, or even both, are mistaken.

In a computerzied version of the game this doesn’t have to be a problem since the computer will keep track of your resource spending. In a real life version of it the problem seems very plausible (or does it? Am I right or am I just afraid here?).

The solution, one might suggest, is easy: Let the players use tokens! Huzzah, problem is solved. Yes, that is indeed a solution: But, it’s not one I am fond of at all. As some of you may have noticed, I’m a minimalist and want to avoid any and all extra token handling / administration in the game if it can be avoided. I prefer a game where the resource system is more elegant than us having to gather resource tokens every round and then put them back (or add/deduct) from them all of the time. Thus, I would want to avoid this unless completely necessary.

So, let’s round this off by revealing that I’m lingering with the idea to abandon the random resource system and replace it with something else. I have my mind set on something already, but need some more time to dwell on it and to write up a proper intro.

Meanwhile, what’s your take on a resource system? Please dump your suggestions. Keep in mind that it should a) work well with the MtG-style fighting system and b) require minimal admin from the players.

The logo stuff

First I’d like to present the Rebel & Merfolk logos – the only two faction symbols that are actually completed at this stage.

Most of you are already acquainted with the Elf-leaf I whooped up for the Rebels, but have probably not seen it in all it’s zoomed in glory. While seeing logos zoomed in will be extremely rare in a CCG on the cards themselves, it is still a bonus if the logo still looks good when it is enlarged. I think these ones both do, and they don’t seem to need much extra work put on them when showing them off on posters etc.

A small number of you have seen me reveal the Merfolk logo (water drop) earlier in a mindmap. The symbol I used to represent the Merfolk was an import of the nice torrent client Deluge’s icon. While Deluge’s icon is really well done and beautiful, It was just a temporary placeholder.

I have now created a new Merfolk icon. Reasons were two-fold:

1. To avoid technical legal issues in the future if we would seek to use other or additional open source licenses on cards that have our original card art on them: Since we don’t own the copyright to the Deluge icon, and it’s GPL2 (or later, I think), we can’t re-license it legally to additional open source licenses. While all of this is a long shot right now and we are not planning on ever using anything but open source licenses, I believe it is still good to think well in advance and keep our backs free from possible legal crap. It’s of the utter most importance that WT stays legal and that we never use materials when there’s even the slightest doubt.

2. While the Deluge icon works perfectly for what it was originally created for – being an icon for a software – it was not equally great as a container on our card template: In the container there are numbers – the cost of the card, and due to the wave and other graphical elements that the Deluge icon has, it makes reading those numbers somewhat harder. Furthermore, it is my opinion that the more advanced a piece of art is, the less well it will scale down in size: A complex icon will look much worse and distorted on a printed normal sized CCG card.

Thus, I created a new logo for the Merfolk, simplified it, and will maybe have to tweak it somewhat more when future print tests of it are evaluated. (Keep in mind I do all template work on a computer screen, where it always looks huge and delicious It’s one thing to do that, and another to have the actual printed material in your hand.)

The difference isn’t striking, but it’s there and then again, how could it be, and why should it? It’s a water drop. There are really only so many ways one can depict it without skewing it and turning it into something else.

“Coincidentally” Magic the Gatherings icon for their blue faction is also a water drop that’s very similar. All in all, I think this is all related to the water drop having a very simple but elegant shape and is internationally used and easily identifiable: What better icon can there ever be for water? *scratches head* Because of that reason I will go with the water drop for the Merfolk, if they end up being a faction of their own. I don’t think its an issue it’s already used all over the world for whatever purposes. On the contrary, it gives us even the more reason to use it. An icon’s purpose isn’t to be as unique and mystical as possible. In this case it’s to identify a faction and, in best case scenario, capture some of that factions spirit and attitude.

The two above icons both do that: The green leaf reeks elvish forest living and nature, and the same can be said about the blue waterdrop of the Merfolk.

It will truly be a great challenge to put together good looking logos for the other factions. I have been getting some help and suggestions from toeholds but he’s been buried in other stuff and I fear I’ll end up trying to do this myself.

I’ve been thinking about his colour grouping and consider the concept of using colour groups an option. I won’t go into the details on that for now and will only post a part of his e-mail, outlining the idea:

Elves – green, leaf
Mermaid – blue, water droplet
Order of Dawn – purple, ?? (chalice? Don’t know anything about them.)
–
Loyalists: Red, shield
Knalgans: Yellow, ?? (What is a Knalgan?)
–
Undead: black, skull (doh!)
drake: brown, profile of lizard-like face
Northerners: White/silver, axe

Placing containers & presenting info

In the rules I’m working on I will probably have to add another variable to some cards: A threshold cost that relates to how many creatures of the cards faction that are in play (and/or in the Queue perhaps).

Example: Imagine we have a card that costs 4 gold and also requires there are 2 Rebel cards (Elf faction’s current name) in play and/or in Queue. How would we make the template look like?

2-container solution using gold coin

You guessed it: To the right we see two template examples where I’ve played around with creating a separate container for the gold cost.

It seems obvious enough to me, that the number in the “gold coin” is a cards gold cost, and the number in a card’s faction logo is it’s faction requirement of having 2 Rebel cards in play.

Interlude: The card type-field

The observant will also notice that I not only added a container, but that I also have extended the title text field in height and added card type info directly below the card’s name.  Using a template that looks like our non-creature template, with a “fairy tale/saga” look, really doesn’t leave me much options as where I should place the card type info. To me it seems sensible, somewhat aesthetically defensible and very functional to place it in the same zone as the name and cost can be found.

Using this particular template, I think it’s also the only way to do it. Should you have a different suggestion, please do a mockup and post it – I’d love seeing it.

In general, there shouldn’t be any greater confusion about what part the the name is and what part the card type is. While I went with the same font to avoid overdose clutter and keep things simple, I have also slightly altered colours, used bold for the name and italic for the card type (Event in this case).

Back to the gold coins...

Personally I am allergic to adjusting elements to the centre. While the symmetry of the gold and leaf containers is nice to look at in the top picture, phaving one on the left and one on the right with the text between them, I don’t think placing text in the centre looks good at all. It’s harder to read and deducts from the symmetry just gained by the opposing containers.

Add to that the fact that a player, in the first version, has to look at two opposite corners of the card to actually figure out what it would take to play that card. I’d suggest that’s a pretty good argument, on itself, against using a the first layout.

In the second one we have gotten rid of the centre-crap, and also collected all the cost info in one single place. We still have divided it into clearly different containers. The trade off here seems to be that the gold coin intrudes on the card text field. Since the coin container is placed below the faction logo it will not allow us to write as much text as we would be able to do on the first 2 lines of the card text. It seems like this layout makes us waste around 8 characters of text on each card on the first two lines. Is this a problem?

I don’t think so, but it could be. Another related issue that could also be seen as problematic is that we don’t get any symmetry between the card text lines: The first two are always shorter on their right than the following lines.

Dots  & simple icons

Instead of using real number to tell the player how many Rebel cards he has to have in play in order to use our Event card, we could convey the message by using some kind of iconic system.

I’d claim that the only time that’s a good idea is if the following criteria is met:

1. Icons are simple. Very simple.
2. There are very few kinds of them.
3. They won’t be used in excess since the player has to easily be able to “count” (actually, it’s better to write “see” here)  them as fast as painless as possible.

My opinion is that A & B above both accomplish that in a good way. I love the way A looks. However, A has three major problems that I only discovered after I created it:

First problem is that it’s icons are dark yellow. This is a result of me wanting it to match and look good in relation to the rest of the template with it’s goldy borders. While it looks good colourwise, it seems as a bad idea to use that particular colour, because it gives the impression the card costs 2 Gold Coins. It would be natural for any player that hasn’t learned otherwise that those dot’s represent gold cost and that the number in the faction logo represnts how many Rebel cards need to be in play.

That is not the case: The two yellow dots are the threshold requirement, and the number in the faction logo is the gold cost to play the card. This is an excellent example of how colour coding affects players and lead us to conclusions about what’s being conveyed.

The second problem with A is that the we won’t be able to place the dots at the same position on other cards. Why? Because other cards may be of other factions, and other factions will have differently shaped faction logos, thus, offsetting the position of the dots, and making them appear all over the place depending on what cards you happen to use. This is a consistency issue and problems like these should really be avoided unless they of course can’t. The problem is that a player will always expect to find the info in the same place, and that’s a good & reasonable expectation we won’t try to change. It makes the game easier to play if the info always is located where we’re accustomed that it should be.

Third problem relates, in a way, to the above one: The template for the creature cards is totally different. This placement of the icons is not as viable on it for several reasons.

Hence, I present B as a solution to all of the above.

I believe a system as simple as this, by just using dots, could work. These dots are almost equal to “coloured mana” in MtG. Typically a card would never have more than 3 on it. Usually it would be a lower amount, between 0 to 2.

I am not happy with how the dots look like but would still want to keep them as simple and pretty effect-less.

What speaks for using this instead of numbers is that it doesn’t 1) take up space from the card text or 2) require an additional container to always be around as clutter.

Dual-numbers

Third solution I came up with is straight forward:

• Only one container that always shows faction belonging.
• In addition, it shows both the gold cost and the faction threshold (if it exists).
• Gold cost is always the first number in the container. Whener there’s a threshold number, the gold cost is followed by  : x, where x equals the threshold value.

To the left we see a card that costs 4 gold and has a threshold of 2. To the right we see a card, without a threshold  – it only has a Gold cost of 4.

Admittedly, the threshold number could be coloured somewhat differently, making it even easier to distinguish it from the Gold cost.

Conclusions

Much of this is, to a degree, a matter of personal taste. Taste will matter when one chooses the way we’ll layout the template if we choose between two or more equally good alternatives.

That raises the question how we should choose between them. In the above text I’ve tried to give some arguments for a couple of my views.

I am aware that many designers would choose some kind of 2-container solution (á la Gold Coin). It is easily the most apparent choice if one wants to be overly obvious. Design teachings tell us that we can never be that. So what is there to loose by going with the 2-container solution? I think it has it’s problems, as stated above, and that it is hard for me to implement it in a good way in the current template. Until I see somebody doing it for me, I will probably rank the dual-container solution at the third place.

The runner up and winner here is hard for me to decide on. My guts tell me the dot icons is the way to go here, but my eye really hates them. I guess it could be fixed by making them look better.

At the same time I have no problems whatsoever with the dual-number solution: Having two numbers separated by a colon (:) shouldn’t be that hard to handle, or would it? Most of the time only the player that actually plays the card will have to ever look at these numbers only once. And on occasion, whenever the opponent or player does look at them he/she’d be interested in the first number 99% of the time – the gold cost.

What are your thoughts on all of this? Share! I’d love to read ‘em…

Edit 1, 28 July:

After some interesting and unexpected input on the bgdf I’m currently contemplating something like the card to the right: It costs 4 gold and has a threshold value of 2, symbolized by the rectangles below the faction icon.

I myself am quite happy with how this looks. It was originally Rich Durham’s idea to use some kind of rectangles. However, Rich expressed an idea of letting them symbolize cards in a more direct manner. My implemntation of the rectangles are far from representing cards, instead they just seem to represent an abstract notion of the threshold.

Rich kindly contributed with his mock-up here, where he shows how vertical rectangles can be used instead, and argues that the cards come into play vertically. I agree with his thoughts on it being more apparent that the threshild is about number of cards at the table, but, question here is if a person – by looking at his mock-up – would understand that those were cards in any way at all, or in some higher degree than by looking at my own implementation of it? I’m sceptical it would send the card message to anyone, and think both our attempts fail to relay that (not that it was my intention to begin with, but a strong case can be built for it).

The test prints I ordered ages ago finally arrived today. They were over a month late due to the photo labs machine breaking down. As this reveals, they are not really “prints” in the sense that they have been printed as a newspaper would have been. Instead I have intentionally used a digital photo development service, as a proof of concept that this can be easily done by anyone and to keep down costs to almost nothing.

The purpose of this first test print was to ge info about how a real sized card would work and feel in the hands of a player. I wanted to know how the fonts would turn out, what sizes, placements and colours we could use. What worked and what didn’t. The results were better than expected and will now be shared in the following.

Quality
The cards look amazing when it comes to their print quality. I’m not writing about their aesthetics here, as that is only related to personal taste and what artwork and layout we use. I’m discussing the technical quality of the photo labs printer/machine that developed the cards. And it’s top notch.

My photos of the developed cards on the table don’t do any justice at all to them and don’t really show you how good they look because of very bad light conditions, forcing me to use the flashbulb, and also wrong optics on my old but beloved EOS400D.

Technically, and by just looking at them, there is no way on earth to tell them apart from any commercial and professionally mass-printed CCG out there. They look at least as good as any released CCG, if not even better than some.

Notice that they were developed using non-glossy paper. I think it may seem as a matter of personal preference, but I’d be willing to argue that it’s usually a better idea to develop the cards on non-glossy paper instead of on glossy, as they won’t reflect the light as much and also won’t gather as visible fingerprints and dust.

Price
Here’s the info from my bill: 8×13 cm, 65 pieces x 1,85 SEK per piece, results in 120,25 SEK. Convert that to Euros we end up with 12.8 € for 65 cards. Price per card is approximatively 0.2 € or 0.25 $.

These figures do not include the postal fee of the lab I ordered from (3.35 €), nor do they take into account the 10% discount I got on all cards that were printed after the 49:th card (10% discount, resulting in a total discount of 1.3 €).

If one would take all of that into account as well, and top it off with a high but cool Swedish tax, the price per card is about 0,23 € or 0,29 $.

What seems true in most cases is that the larger quantity one develops, the cheaper it could become. Many labs seem to offer different kinds of discounts, suggesting costs for the players can be lowered somewhat more. This would of course also depend on what lab one used. Personally I never go with the cheapest labs. Instead I usually go back to the one I trust will do the job well and that offers most customization.

All in all, 14,9 € for 65 cards is almost on par with what the cards would cost if one bought a pre-constructed deck of a random closed source and commercial CCG.

Let’s mention the obvious here: I got to select exactly the cards I wanted – I never pay for a card I don’t want to play with or own, and no card is more expensive or rarer than any other. Put in that perspective, a player should reasonably save much more money on playing our game than the commercial closed source alternatives which all have more or less flawed distribution models. And the money saving seems to very true even if the player goes with deluxe printing services like I did in the above. If one would use other services or other means of acquiring the cards the costs could be cut down plenty.

Template conclusions

• Everything works.
• Card text can go down to 9 if needed, but such a small size should be avoided. Usually we’d keep it between 10 to 12, staying as large as possible.
• Footer text in the green field on the bottom of the card is readable when in size 6,74 using the Liberation Sans font that it currently is. Using 9 for it seems to large, so we’ll land at something between 7 and 8.
• Footer text would probably have to be made brighter to gain readability.
• Size of Event card title text will likely be around 13- 14. 13,85 seems to work well.

Theses findings will help me a lot in the future work on the template, especially on how to size things properly.

Lastly, a blurry picture of some sleeved cards. Also, to the right, there is the back side of a sleeved card, using my “deluxe” sleeves.

If you’re curious about test printing yourself you have all that you need and plenty more in this neatly downloadable package. If you do print them, please share the results and your thoughts in here as a comment.

I’ve come to a conclusion for the rule set I’m currently working on, and I’m fairly confident it’s a global design issue that is in direct relation to how the attack system works/is resolved in a CCG. But before we look at the resolution, let’s have a quick recap of what we’re looking at here:

• In most combat orientated CCG:s creature have a number that equals thier HP/Life.
• If they do, that number is usually greater than 0.
• In most good CCG:s, that number is easy to keep track of and is between 0 to 10, in contrast to 3459.
• This is where we now continue: How should one keep track of a creature’s HP in a CCG where that variable changes often on each individual creature?

Tokens
The most straight forward thing to do is to keep track of a creatures HP by placing tokens on it. Either to add a token each time it’s damaged, or, to remove a token that happens. The most logical thing to do for most games, from a designers perspective, would be to add tokens on the card.

This is not as straight forward as one might think. Consider what the implications are and what we’re doing: When we keep track of the HP and remove a HP we do indeed take away one HP for every token we remove from the card.

When we do it the other way around – add a token – it becomes clear that we’re not actually adding a HP: Why would we add a HP when a creature loses combat? In most cases we want to deduct one, we want to remove life to show us that we lost comabat, not reward the player by giving him/her more HP for playing crappy. Thus, it’s apparent something else is happening implicitly, something that most players already know: We’re adding a wound/damage. This however, has direct effects on everything from wording to mechanics in a game.

My personal dissatisfaction with a HP system that relies on using tokens is that it requires constant management, especially in a game that focuses on combat. Add to that the span of the HP: if we have creatures that have everything from 1 to 10 HP, or even 1 to 5 HP, it could mean plenty of token handling.

Pen & paper
Scribbling a cards name and changing it’s stats while playing, and doing it for every card in play under your control, is out right a stupid solution. While viable in an RPG that is not as heavy on variables changing as often as a normal CCG is, it simply doesn’t cut it in a CCG.

Meters
Using some kind of custom solutions, usually by creating a type of meter/counter system, is an interesting touch. For a CCG this would, I think, always mean that there should be some kind of “termometer/HP-meter” printed somewhere on the card and something attached to the card or placed on the scale that indicates how much HP the creature has. Compare this with what HeroClix do in the world of semi-minis: They have added a dial on the base of each mini, that can be easily used to keep count of a units life as well as other stats depending on life.

Here’s a sloppy mock-up I did to illustrate the principle and how it might have looked like in WTactics:

Drawback that come to mind with my way of doing it in the above is wear-and-tear: Remedied maybe by sleeves & sturdy photlab paper & the fact that all our cards are free. Not sure if this is a serious issues, especially with plastic paper clips being less harsh to the cards than metal ones. In any case, it really makes sleeves and/or sturdy photo paper a requirement, raising the bar, unless of course, one would use a token instead of a paper clip.

Other more common meters instead of built-into ones are dies: d6, d12, d20 etc can all be used as cheap and effective meters, available in all local game stores.

In any game that would have more than 2-3 HP to keep track of, I would definitely prefer to go with a meters solution instead of a free-form token-placement solution. It seems very much more appropriate.

Using meters in WTactics is, at least from my own viewpoint, to tempt the general design criteria for the project: We either add more adminstration to the player, or, we add more administration and also more parts and preparations required to play the game (getting hold of proper dies, having sufficient amount of them, always carrying them around along with your deck etc).

I’m not suggesting it is a clear breakage with the general design document and the criteria we have that state that WTactcis, no matter what rule set it uses, should be easy to setup, take with you, demand minimum preparations and have no overhead administration while playing it. I’d place the need of meters in the twilightzone.

Rotating cards
An apparent and pretty good way to keep track of a creatures health is to rotate the card. This means that each creature could have 4 HP at most, as indicated on it’s own variable on the card.

Tha drawback of this system is that all players have to be very consistent in how they lay out the cards on the table, but that’s really not a big problem and likely self-fixable once they realize the importance of it.

The real issue is that this HP tracking system suggests that we can’t rotate cards to indicate other status changes to the card. I.e. how do we mark that a creature has already attacked this turn? Or used it’s other abilities?

We could of course create a game where no such abilities or attacks demand that the card is marked thus resolving this problem. Most CCG:s would however not be satisfied with that solution, and I for one wouldn’t be with WTactics.

Or, we can… bring tokens back into the picture: This time around we only need two different types of tokens probably – one type for marking that abilities have been used, and another for marking that an attack has been done. Again, this could make sense in some games, but it still seems bulky when all comes around.

HP tracking goodbye
To me, what meets the design criterias for this project to an apparently greater degree is to simply get rid of HP tracking altogether. This does not mean that creatures have no HP. They could still have. It could simply be either 0 or 1. You’re either dead or alive. You are never wounded after battle has been resolved.

Now, what does this bring or take away from the game? I think plenty. It has major and direct effects of how would design the battle system, among other things.

My feeling this far is that systems that allow the attacking player to point out the targets tend to go with a system where HP:s are usually greater than 1. Vice versa also applies, combat systems where you’re not allowed to select your target (i.e. Magic the Gathering’s) can totally remove HP tracking and use a system where all creatures have 1 HP since the defending player has the privilege of select if/which creature will engage the enemy.

As WTactics is designed for the table top primarily and we can’t rely on automation in real life I think that ditching HP tracking is probably what I’ll go with on the rules I’m working on.

Does the “destruction” of something fit the elvish profile? Like in this case, the destruction of an aggressors weapons? I’d argue it could very well do so. This is of course a matter of taste and understanding how “a real elf” would act. But, wouldn’t a real elf “destroy” anything that was evil, aggressive or threatening if it had no other choice? Or would an elf perish and rather die and see all others do the same instead of standing up for it’s rights?

It seems like a bizarre notion to have the general elves depicted as such hard core pacifists (while it also seems very likely that there would exist religions & cults where ones own death would be preferable instead of raising arms against an aggressor). From what little I know about fantasy there is plenty of room for elves to destroy whatever is bad.

Notice how this is still less powerful compared to “Destroy all equipment carried by target creature”, which would typically be something I’d like to have associated with the Black Legion (Undead & Co.) instead. Elves will never have the full power of destruction or the means to target such forces. Whenever they do have it it is conditional and in line with their alliance profile of being peace loving.

• Yes, figure that: I haven’t been slumbering. On the contrary, a lot of work has been put down on getting our brand new wiki going, and a lot of work is still needed before we make it official-official and add it as a link on this sites main menu. I’m filling it as I get time & wisdom. Feel free to use it as long as you’re registered.
• First day of my vacation today. Hopefully the free time I’ll get this summer can be well deposited into WTactics.
• toeholds has shown interest in contributing to WTactics, begun work on an art piece, is also involved in BfW Campaign-work & has mapped out some suggestions for new WT faction logos.
• This site has had it’s heart updated to 3.oo. Theme will follow later on, but these changes are likely not noticeable to most users.
• It was 4 weeks ago the photo developers told me that their machine will be fixed in max 3 weeks. I still haven’t seen a trace of the test print cards and yesterday I wrote them an e-mail. I’m an extremely patient person, but wouldn’t want to be forgotten as a reward for my virtue
• Have given a test assignment to an additional new artist – we’ll see how it all plays out.

Time, oh time…
Creating a CCG takes a ton of work. Doing it han-solo style as I am doesn’t help and it seems the ton even multiplies since I’m doing everything except for raster card art myself. I’ve also begun to measure how much time I’ve spent on the project and how it’s distributed by using Project Hamster, a superb & nifty gnome-utility for us pingo lovers as seen on my noble laptop to the righ, where almost all the WT dev is done.

Just this far in in June I’ve put down at least 38 h of work on the project, which is 1,8h/day. Given the fact I have also carried out my normal life & job at the same time I’m satisfied. That said, I think I’ll spike the charts now in June & July since it’s vacation now.

Problem is that this still is very slow progress and a lot of work lies ahead of me.. if you are interested in helping out & joining the dev team please contact me already.

I’m also thinking about other possible and nice names for the card. While I myself like the current which sends a clear message about the function of the card I think there might be more elegant ways of doing the same. Question is, are they as straight forward? Which brings me to another one: Are elfs straight forward? Or are they mysterious and speak in riddles? I have a hard time imagining them as tall & thin Yodas, and in my imagination they are honest and direct, but without being aggressive or meaning harm, and they also have good motives for their actions. In this particular case, a hint of that can be seen in the flavor text.

I also experiment with adding some kind of flavor text at the bottom right whenever there’s room for it. Wtactics goes for simplicty for the eye and we won’t ever include the flavor as a part of the main card text, nor will it be mandatory to have flavor texts for all cards either.

The photodevelopers I ordered “test prints” from have informed me that their only machine that can deliver exact dimensions when developing the cards needs to be repaired. They estimated it would take 3 weeks, so I still haven’t been able to see if the flavor text is too small yet. I’ll get back to this as soon as I receive the prints and will then share my findings with you.

I got some reactions asking of there are homosexual elfs. In short & minus the discussion:

1. Why wouldn’t there be?
2. WTactics shouldn’t be heteronormative. On the contrary, it should be pluralistic and inclusive.
3. A kiss is a kiss – it says little about the subjects sexuality.

Would anyone react if it was a male an female elf making out? No? Then surely the question should be why people react on this, and not why I choose to include such art.

My ambition is to avoid making WTactics a clone of every default fantasy setting that’s already out there. That mission is impossible to a certain dagree. Some basics should remain there. An example is the basic appearance of Elves. Without following any fantasy convention the world would be very hard to understand and grasp for the players, and, it would maybe even not be a fantasy world at all in the meaning the term “fantasy” is used.

That is why many things will indeed stay stereotypical to the genre. They are defining it and they make it easy to understand the world. At the same time my belief is that WTactics should dare to push the genre in new directions, some of which touch up on real world contemporary issues, stereotypes and other problems. This would all have to be done in a balanced way of course. There is a real big difference between daring and challenging, and out right provocation & propaganda.

WTactics can create a revised and modernized fantasy setting which isn’t afraid of the controversial or unusual topics being shown and, via the game, debated among the players. Maybe it will even giving birth to thoughts, perspectives & discussions even though it’s a game made primarily for entertainment.

Let’s try to find our own way and convention of what we want to deliver instead of following the same old path blindly.

While playing around with the templates in Inkscape to prepare a couple of test cases for the digital photo lab I discovered that Inkscape couldn’t do a bitmap export of them in a format that the photo lab supported.

At that point I could just have used GIMP or any other editor to open and re-save the PNG-images from the Inkscape export into whatever format I wanted, but I chose a different path since that would have to be done to over 20 images, one by one (if one doesn’t know the delicate secrets of the terminal in combo with GIMP )

Thus, I started my quest for a user friendly – yet powerful – open source solution for easy batch processing of image files. Thanks to durand I found out about a powerful and flexible easy to use piece of software that met all of my criteria: Phatch.

For anyone that craves after a nice GUI and powerful batch operations, this program would be it. And trust me, when developing a CCG it will likely come to good use plenty of times as having to deal with 200 – 300 cards is really something that should be handled by batch processing and nothing else.

To show a sign of life (yeah, there is a rule on the internet which says every great project which hasn’t posted anything in a month is stone cold dead, I know…) and calm your nerves I decided to show some double folded progress.

card
As seen to the right the new art looks delicious, doesn’t it? It’s a sample of how it could be used on an Event card. In this particular case, it also happens to be a card that will be playtested once I get enough cards done for the next major experiment with the orginal rules concept, one which kill the ORC and breathe life in a brand new offspring from my masterful wannabe-wose mind.

template
As the observant reader may have noticed there have been some development on the Event card template. We have gone from this template to the one you see to the right. In particular, the following has been changed:

Info box added at bottom: This will contain the artists name if the artist has contributed for free by donating his/her work under the GPL. In any case, it will also contain info about the cards ID number.

Each card will have a unique number which is a fast way of identifying the card without using it’s name. Next to that, followed by a dot, there is also a version number. This allows you to easily check if you have the latest and most up to date version of a card, since sometimes a card will undergo balance adjustments, spelling corrections et.c. as needed. Example: 1.3 would mean that the card ID is “1″ and it’s version is “3″, meaning that is the third time that specific card has been changed since it was officially published.

Leaf Icon: The new leaf icon in the top right corner of the card represents the Elvish Faction in the game, which would probably be called “Rebels” and be a part of an alliance (alliance is shown by the green colour of the card’s borders/containers).

Thought is that each faction will get it’s own icon which easily identifies the cards faction belonging. Sadly the factions lack official icons in BfW, but it won’t hinder us from drawing completely new ones when it’s time for the others.