WTactics

Version 1.2 ~ 14 May 2010

Feedback

I have an idea for the game, who can I tell?

1. Before proceeding make sure you have read our Design Goals and that your idea isn’t in conflict with them. They can be found after this section.
2. Read all of this faq.
3. If your idea still seems good to you, write down a short summary in 3-5 lines.
4. Then also write down a very detailed explanation of it where you show what it is and how it works, and most importantly, why it should be in the game.
5. Include labeled sketches as jpg-files if they make your idea easier to understand. Don’t send us files that are larger than 1 MB.
6. Mail us at: contact [at] wtactics [dot] org and use “WTactics” as the e-mail subject.

Global Design Decisions

What are the goals with this game? What design decisions have been made?
The following decisions have been made in regards to design and game play, and will in most cases act as guidelines for most rule development projects. If it’s on this list it is not likely to change without very thorough discussion.

General

• Skill based: The game should primarily be of strategical nature. Skills, not luck, must be what decides if a player wins or not. This does not mean that no random elements are allowed in the game if a design team wishes to include them – just that they must, in the end, be possible to usually circumvent with strategy/player skills.
• 2 players: WT must primarily be created for a 1vs1 format. While supporting other formats that allow more players to participate is a goal, it shouldn’t be so while designing the core rules.
• Normal playing time: Average playing time should be around 1 hour, maximum.
• Deck building: The game should include deck building as a meta aspect, and the decks may be between 15 to 60 cards, max. Reason for the 60 card/deck cap is economical.
• Medium card pool: We have legal art for about 120 different creatures, and once all the art work has been used a very limited amount of additional art will be acquired by us. To get art for more cards we need the community’s direct support – either artists that want to contribute or donations that will enable us to hire ones.
• Balanced & unique cards: Since we’ll give away all the cards to all the players, for free, rarity etc and creating crap cards like most CCG:s do won’t serve any huge purpose in the game. Every card should have it’s function and lack it’s equivalent and “2o sibling”.
• Minimal preparation: WT has to be playable on a normal kitchen table, without a board, prepared terrain or other pre-requisites that work as or emulate a playing field. At the same time it’s seen as a bonus if the game could somehow utilize spatial mechanics and have a strategical spatial aspect in play, even if it’s adapted to a cardgame and limited compared to what would be found in a boardgame with meeples/miniatures on a board/pre-arranged§ playing field.
• Minimal administration: Normal administering of tokens, dice, counters, writing etc must be kept to a bare minimum. Creating rules that add new repetitive or tedious administrative tasks is not encouraged. That said, some admin is always required in a real game, that is to be expected in WT as well.
• Creature Based

Aesthetics

• Aesthetics matter, but never more than game play functionality. Function beats aesthetics. Ideally they can however be combined.
• WT should look at least as good as it’s comparable commercial alternatives and preferably even better. Average Joe conducting a blind test should not be able to guess that it’s a homegrown project just from looking at it.
• A comic book style is preferred to realism and/or 3d graphics
• WT must only use art that it has legal rights to use, without violating any copyrights. If you’re an artist and see your work being wrongly used by this project – please contact us and we’ll remove it.
• We always welcome new aesthetical contributions: If you have artwork you want to submit for a new or existing card or anything else please contact us, but only do so if you have the copyrights for that work or can prove that the rights to use it are liberal. Due to the nature of this project and our goals we can’t and won’t pay for art work.
• The main art source being used is the amazing work from Battle for Wesnoth because of it’s great quality and coherency.

Development

I want to help develop, what do I do now?
Contact us and tell us what you want to do, what skills you have, and what you think is fun. If you have a detailed suggestion for a rules system or anything else please include it. We’ll get back to you as soon as possible and put you into good use.

Must I work with others in a team or can I be a one-(wo)man-team?
It’s up to you if you want to a) join the dev of an existsing rule set, b) form a new team with people you choose that develop new rules or c) work totally alone and develop your own rules.

Must I adhere under the suggested ruleset or can I develop a brand new?
Totally up to you. You can either work on developing our Original Rules Concept or you can design your own ruleset from scratch. In either case you are very welcome and should contact us asap.

But I really have a working ruleset/design that involves some of the concepts which you guys have already ditched! Should I just throw it away because you have decided on a totally different solution?
No, you should not:

We invite everyone to join this project and recognize that you or your crew may have totally different ideas for the game and where it could go and what it could become. By doing so we of course also expect that some of you may create new and own, original, paths of development. All are welcome and will be announced and gathered at this site, as it’s the center for the project and all of it’s spawns.

If you have a very different concept in mind than the ORC one, you should name it and present it to us in detail so that we can publish it for you. When creating a new concept you are of course allowed to use whatever rules you want. As soon as we trust you you’ll get your own account in here and may roam free.

Must I adhere under the suggested design goals or can I use different ones?
We prefer that you stick to them. You are of course legally allowed to ignore them, but we wouldn’t recommend it if you want to be a part of this project since it already has clearly defined goals and purposes which are reflected by the design decisions.

That said, we do also appreciate a discussion about them and would be happy to hear your thoughts about them if they’re constructive.

Why should we work on several development paths at the same time instead of co-working on one?
For starters, there is nothing that says that we will have several development paths, but experience tells us that people usually have very different ideas, solutions and needs, sometimes resulting in radically different end products.

While it may sound as an ideal to always put all developers on one and the same path and direction it could might as well be a mistake to do so in this stage of the game development because of two reasons:

First and foremost we believe that a game development process must be allowed to be wild and free. We want a climate where many ideas & systems are gathered and tried out methodically one by one, instead of one where there is only one concept that is tried at a time.

Secondary to that is the notion about human nature and individuals as resources: Since we can’t offer a salary for peoples work we are dependent on whoever gets interested in this project to a degree where he/she actually contributes somehow by doing something. Fact is that the chances of that happening will be greater if people are allowed to a) suggest and develop their own concepts and paths and/or b) join a team which already has a clear path.

Ehrm.. what is a development path/concept?
A development path is a route that a team of developers take. It’s often an idea of where the rule set is going and what kind of concepts should be included in a game. Due to the nature of this project we might end up with very distinct rule sets. Each such rule set is it’s own unique development path and process, and usually will have it’s own developer(s) behind it. In the end we will select one rule set and announce it as the games official rules (while at the same time probably keeping some of the others as optional ways of playing the game if it’s doable with the same cards).

What tools & software do you use when developing?
Hardware
A computer, scissors, black & white printer, pen, paper, tokens and perhaps also plastic sleeves created from CCG:s which can be obtained form your local game store nearby. This should be more than enough to get you everything you need to start playtesting and developing.

Software
We strive to keep this project as open and available as possible. That has it’s serious implications on the primary selection of the software we use, as our selection of tools can have a huge impact on what we end up creating and the process where we do it.

As a rule of thumb, whatever can be done in libre/open source software should strictly be done in such environment. By following that simple rule we see to it that nobody is excluded because they can’t afford proprietary software and we also get better control of what we create, not being threatened by various whims of the commercial forces at large and their design decisions when it comes to future file formats, continued revisions of their software and other strategical business decisions that might affect the end user negatively.

With that in mind, we recommend the following for anyone that has the need to read this (and please keep in mind that everything on the list is free and great):

Playing Games

• OCTGN2 – Coolest virtual card table around for Windows.

Creating Games

• Ubuntu or any other user friendly Linux as operating system. It’s super stable, very customizable, spam/virus free, free-free, and comes with access to thousands of programs and games – for free. All in all, it’s probably superior to both Windows & Mac in most respects and we highly recommend it as the primary choice.
• Inkscape to edit anything that is a vector, such as our card template. Inkscape is an amazing tool and excellent replacement to, among others, Adobe Illustrator.
• GIMP, which covers any work with raster graphics and photo retouching needs. Can in most scenarios replace products like Adobe Photoshop quite well.
• PdfMod, as the name suggests, let’s you do easy editing with PDF:s after you have created them with Inkscape or GIMP. An even freer alternative but less polished one is PdfEdit.
• FreeMind is one of the best mind-mapping/brainstorming tools out there. Great for internal work and when you design games or work with other projects.
• Dia, a nice flow chart program that will aid any game designer in resolving chaos into structure.
• Phatch let’s you batch process plenty of images with lightning speed and even thicker comfort.

Who decides which rules will be the official ones if several suggestions come in?
All rules will be heavily playtested, the community will have a lenghty discussion, and after a while there would be some kind of agreement of a) which rule sets suck and b) which don’t. Snowdrop will then declate the official rule set from that material. All other rule sets will however be kept here at the site as alternatives, allowing the community to maintain them if it wants to.

Playing

Will the game be playable online?
Yes, by using open source CCG engines like OCTGN2 and/or others like LackeyCCG the game can easily be played online, for free, without spam and other crap. It can also be done so in a decentralized and totally community driven manner – something we value highly.

Will the game be playable with real paper cards?
Yes, we will supply the world with the cards as high resolution files in common formats like png/pdf etc. People can then print the cards them self (and use plastic ccg sleeves to make them thicker/sturdier) or develop them as digital photos and get really great looking cards.

Won’t printing/developing the cards be quite expensive?
Not compared to buying any other CCG on the market, no. It will actually be quite cheap since the player knows exactly which cards he/she wants to print, so he/she doesn’t have to pay for random cards or other cards they don’t intend to ever use.

Battle for Wesnoth

What is this section about? What the frakk is BfW?
If you don’t know, please skip this section. Now. It will only confuse you and is not needed, really.

Several things in WT don’t correspond to how they are in BfW. Can you fix it?
Yes, but we will not.

Our goal has never been to port or replicate BfW into a tabletop game in a way that as many mechanics and details as possible remain true to how they are in BfW. That would be great to do if the tabletops value is measured in how well it replicates the computer game instead of looking at how well it works on the table.

BfW already exists, and it is a great game on it’s own right, in the form it’s in, meaning as a computer game. Many of it’s concepts and ways of handling things depend on it remaining a computer game. While it is perfectly possible to convert the whole computer game into a tabletop game and retain every detail or as many as possible WT was not created to do so. We think it’s meaningless to create something which is only a worse off copy of the original BfW. To anyone that wants to play BfW on a table with a friend we’d recommend using two laptops

To create a fun and easy to play card based tabletop game we deemed it necessary to deviate from several BfW core mechanics and principles. Some of the ones that were left behind in the Original Rules Concept were the: Terrain system, keeps, gold and villages. Instead we focus on the battles only, and even they were revised so that plenty of dice repetitive rolling isn’t needed.

But this and that is in BfW and would work great in WT…
If you can show us a concept in BfW (or anywhere else for that matter) that doesn’t contradict any of our design goals and which adds something functional to the game which isn’t already there in some form please contact us.

If you on the other hand have some of the following concepts in mind: Time of day, more randomness and damage types – then please don’t contact us about those topics if you want to include them in the Original Rules Concept. They’ve been under consideration and we have decided against it for different reasons. Again: Ask your self if the reason you want it in WT is that it replicates BfW, or if it is because it brings something else to WT which isn’t there. (If you on the other hand want to devise a brand new rules system that use such mechanics please go ahead and then contact us – we happily acknowledge and accept all suggested systems and would love to publish it here.)

What is the relation between the two games?

• W Tactics is short for Wesnoth Tactics, as the game is heavily inspired by BfW and also is set in the same world, using many if it’s characters and some of it’s concepts on purpose.
• W Tactics uses the excellent artwork found in Battle for Wesnoth as card art.
• Except for that, WT has really nothing to do with the computer game Battle for Wesnoth or it’s developers, and vice versa.

Must I like or play Battle for Wesnoth to enjoy W Tactics?
Not at all, there is no such relation between the games. However, if you do happen to like one of them we’re confident you should at the very least give the other one a shot. One of them if made for computer gaming, other one is a tabletop.

Is there a random element in W Tactics, as there is in BfW?
WT has much less randomness involved than BfW. Having battles with strong random influence where misses are possible only makes our game last much longer and adds the repetitive task of administering dice rolls all the time.

But I want to play the computer game on my table, with cards/dice/board/gold/meeples…
Then create such a game yourself and play it: We give you all our material and so does Battle for Wesnoth. It’s “easy” creating a game, especially if you’re intentions is to just clone. There is also the option of using whatever cards we have released, altering them somewhat and releasing your own rule set instead.