WTactics

- open source strategy ccg

Posts Tagged tool

meanwhile in the batcave…

Jun 20

Posted by snowdrop in General | 5 Comments

  • 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. :)

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a new tool & test prints

May 10

Posted by snowdrop in General, ORC | No Comments

Time came for me to check out some test prints of both the creature and event card templates. In reality it’s not really a conventional printer that will do the work. Instead, I have sent them in to a photo lab, where the “test prints” will be developed as digital photographies on high quality matte photo paper.

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.

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orc re-vamp & a tool

Feb 24

Posted by snowdrop in ORC | 1 Comment

the ware
First I’d like to introduce a nice new tool I discovered that’s called Dia. It allows us to create nice flow charts easily and a sample of the original rules concept turn/phase sequence can be seen here to the right. Dia is open source of course and available for lovely Linux among other OS:s. I’ve added the link to it in our FAQ and recommend everyone with the need to try it out.

the vamp
As anyone that has actually playtested the orginal rules concept (orc) has surely noticed it’s not working out and has some serious and fatal issues.

1. victory points á la shapes
The main problems it has is that the victory point system – which enables a player to get points for creating an empty shape in his opponents army – does not play together very well with the fact that a player can recruit freely every turn (even if he/she pays for the recruit). Most of the different empty shapes never occur because the opponent will mend the holes in his/her army by recruiting a new unit.

Using shapes for any kind of victory condition has proven to be very tricky to accomplish. I’m probably abandoning that idea for now, but would gladly revisit it should anyone have some good input on it.

The concept of shapes can, in any case, be used as a requirement for some types of ability payments: The more we want to limit the use of an ability without having to make much more expensive in marked cards, the more incentive we get to ask for a payment in a shape, i.e. [c] instead of [2].

2. overpriced
Most cards are overpriced. All creatures should probably have their cost lowered with 1, and many of the abilities are also too expensive. This will be fixed in the next revision of the elfs.

3. AP:s goodbye?
There may be good reasons to ditch the AP:s, allow unlimited number of attacks (but still just 1 per creature due to the fact that attacking marks a card) but limit the number of movements to just 2 per turn.

4. attack system
I’m not impressed at all by how I devised the attack system and will look at alternatives. The thing which bothers me the most and which is related is the admin it takes to keep track of HP of each character. If possible I’d fool around with letting everyone have just 1 HP and use some kind of MTG approach instead to lessen admin work and add elegance to the system, if I can also still keep the effect of Rows and Spatial placement in the game.

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