Activate the containment field

My current virtual tabletop of choice for prototype work is Screentop.gg, which provides a 2D environment that you can access from a browser, and do this for free (though paid-for premium is apparently on the way - and has been for a couple of years now!) without installing anything, and without melting your PC from the load. This works well for me and makes me happy. It is also under active development, and new features crop up periodically, generally without fanfare (unless you are paying close attention in their Discord server), which makes for occasional excitement or confusion.

Note: this post is likely to not make very much sense to a lot of people. If you're not interested in Screentop configuration, I really won't mind if you move along and do something else with your life. Anyway...

A relatively recent addition is grid "dropzones", which appear by default on "container" components (which are the type of component you use if you want to put something on top of or in it - like a board, say), which made a huge difference, allowing containers to have a simple and useful default behaviour without having to mess about with setting up anchors in precise locations.

Anyway, what I wanted to talk about here is how you can make anchors (lines or points where you can drop other components) interact on containers in order to make some neat and helpful behaviour with little effort.

The driver for this is making a virtual prototype of my "City State Co-op" game, which requires cards to be tucked behind a small player board, and overlapped so that the main information on each card is easily visible. Like in the following picture.

The way this works is with a set of dropzones on a "player zone" container that I created for arranging player components on, arranged in a particular way:

In this, it is the "Cards" and "PlayerBoard" dropzones that matter. Screentop arranges things in order, down the list, so in this case the player board is rendered after the cards, and thus appears on top of them. If I rearranged this so that the cards are after the player board (the 6 dots to the left of the names are handles that you can drag around to rearrange the order), the board would appear underneath.

The PlayerBoard dropzone just has a point anchor in the middle of the container and isn't interesting other than its presence. The Cards dropzone has a bit more going on with it though:

The highlighted line in the image is the "Challenges" anchor, which isn't massively interesting, as it is a place to dump cards that have not yet been dealt with in the game - this anchor ensures that the cards are face-up, and aligned vertically with respect to the player zone, and makes sure they are lined up neatly (unless you have way too many in play - in which case you have probably lost the game) which is cute, but that's about it.

The other two lines are, I think more interesting. They are effectively mirror images of each other, and ensure that the cards that need to be tucked line up the correct way.

The x coordinates of the line here run left to right and the cards are aligned to the end (the right) of the line, with a gap setting that overlaps by the right amount to show what I want of the card. The rotate makes sure that the card is on its side, in the correct direction, and the "open" and "up" settings ensure that the cards are face-up. (Actually, in this case the cards are modelled as containers, which allows some other handy behaviour not available to tiles, which would usually be a good choice for cards, and so only the "open" setting actually matters.)

The "Buildings-right" anchor differs in that the x coordinates (which are shifted to the other side of the component) run from right to left, so that the "end" alignment now hits the left, and the rotation is 270 to allow the cards to rotate neatly the other way.

And the upshot of all this is that I can basically drag a card to the general area of one of these anchors and let it go, and the card will flip, rotate and tuck appropriately without further assistance, making the game much smoother to play than it might otherwise have been.

I realise that this post is very dry and probably of interest to about two people, and they may never see it, but please do let me know if this sort of thing is helpful. 

Games to maybe resurrect...?

 Over the years I have started many projects. Most of them I have worked on for a while and then shelved for one reason or another. Some have come back after a while and I've done some work on them again with a fresh perspective. A few games have been around this cycle more than once. As I'm trying to get back into the game design groove, one of the things that I feel could be fun is to look at some of these old projects to see if any of them spark anything in me now. After all, they all had something that interested me back in the day...

So, I've been through the records and pics, and here are some of the games that I think might be worth having another crack at. Any thoughts from anyone reading this would be greatly appreciated. 

Also, apologies in advance for most of these having truly terrible working titles. Such things are not my strong point.

"Role World"... This one was a lockdown project which I used to learn a load about Tabletopia, and is kind of a map building and exploiting game. The idea is that players each have roles, with things that they can do and things that they score points for. To start with the roles all involve laying map tiles, but later on we move to building towns, roads and the like, and also things like dragons and their gold turn up. It wasn't well organised, and the idea that the rules and objectives change through the game raised some eyebrows (it's a different experience if you know what is coming up compared to just playing as a game of discovery), but I think there may be something here. And this one has never been in a physical form and I'd like to change that, as there is something pleasing to me about tiles being placed to build maps.

"Puffins in Hats"... A few years ago I did a personal challenge of drawing something every day for a year, and during that year I drew a lot of puffins for... reasons. One day I drew a bunch of puffins with hats on, and that got an idea into my head that there should be a game called Puffins in Hats. I did a set of passable digital art of these puffins, which is a deft way to start a game design, but nobody stopped me. Then I tried out a couple of variations of rules based on the art, and never found anything that felt much good, so this is the least functional game on this list, but I'd still like to figure out a game here.

"Corlea"... This is one of the most Euro-like games I've worked on, and it has been through a couple of iterations, being something more-or-less like a worker placement game about building a wooden trackway through a bog in iron age Ireland, all inspired by a visit to a fascinating site in County Longford. This wasn't terrible, but not quite engaging enough as a game of its type, but I still like the idea of basing something on this setting, and the overall mechanism of communally processing wood in order to build the trackway.

"Steampunk Workshop"... This one is not really an engine building game in the way that most hobby gamers would understand it, but rather a game where one of the core elements is assembling a shared "machine" of tiles with half-cog connectors. You then have the ability to traverse the machine in different ways to essentially convert resources, plus there are a load of gadgets with steampunk illustrations (which came out of that period of lots of drawing I mentioned earlier) that can help you in different ways. There are potentially some interesting interactions in the "machine" as different tiles get connected and player agents get in the way of each other, but I think the game felt a bit plodding in its pace when I last tried it.

"Courier"... You're a small courier company charged with delivering packages around the city. This was my attempt at a pick up and deliver game; in this case your playing pieces are card stands that you can move around, and the consignments are cards that slot into the stands, and which show where they come from and go to, and the amount that they earn for you. Actions are card driven, so you can upgrade your capabilities by buying more stands or more cards. The big problem I was having with this was in managing how the consignments could be brought out in a way that feels right for the game. 

"Explore and Settle"... This was a bit of a beast that was way too crunchy for its own good. I don't mean that good "solve a puzzle" crunchy, but more of a "way too much to think about for what it is" combined with a bit of confusion about one of the core mechanisms. It's largely based around a map build using standard cards, where the main part of the card is a square of terrain, while the remaining "tab" produces resources and other benefits, but only until it is covered over by another card. I think there is probably something good here, and I've not looked at it for a few years, so I might have some new insight.

"Monster Invasion"... This is a little solo game about defending a fantasy village from a monster horde, where each card constrains which cards can be played next. Some cards increase "threat", some allow you to power up in preparation to use magic, and some cards reduce the threat level. If you can't play, you can draw a card and increase the threat. Too much threat and you lose; get through the deck and you win. I rather liked this one, though the play was often tense and edgy until it wasn't, and then the game just played out. That's a matter of tweaking and balancing. I was also trying to figure out how to get boss monsters into the game in an interesting way. 

"Roll-Move-Race"... So I wanted to try making a roll & move game, so this one involves racing robots across the table on a track that you build as you go, with the potential to gain upgrades that provide various boosts and luck mitigations. I quite liked this (though it certainly had a long way to go) and I'm not sure why it fell off the "active" pile, so I should probably pull it out again and give it a fresh look.

I think that'll do for now. I'm sure I can make some good progress on some of these, but we'll just have to see what grabs me most. As I said, any thoughts, questions, or input would be gratefully received.

Starting over for a new year - March is the new year, right?

Over the last couple of years, the board game design part of my life has stagnated quite a lot. While online game development and testing works pretty well, it turns out that I am most energised by regular face-to-face sessions of testing. Before Covid, I was visiting London for an afternoon of playtesting most months, having a monthly meetup with a couple of semi-local designers, and having occasional other testing opportunities at other times too. It was never the several-times-a-week testing that some folk manage, but it kept things moving along pretty nicely.

In recent months, I have started getting back to the London meetup occasionally (not regularly yet), and we have just reinstated the semi-local meetup, though I've not yet tried recruiting other local playtesters again. 

During an email exchange with another game designer recently, it occurred to me that I used to enjoy writing this blog as a rough journal that encouraged me to get thoughts into some semblance of order, and very occasionally being the start of a conversation with someone out there. I've fallen into a cycle of not feeling I have much to say and editing myself too much, as well as finding all sorts of excuses why I shouldn't write anything. I don't think this is a helpful situation, so maybe I should just pull my finger out and write something.

So, in the spirit of getting things going again, I'll make a quick note of a few of the projects I have been working on recently...

The Artifact is a tile-laying and some-other-stuff game that I have been working on with Alex Cannon, almost entirely online. There is a core of game play that works pretty well and there are several other bits of game that we have tried, but while the game has had many forms that have played pretty well, there has always been something that we have been unhappy with. This has been a really interesting process, and I think we are gradually homing in on a game that we can then work on refining properly, but there is still a little way to go.

Squirrel Invasion is a re-imagining of a game that I was working on long ago, that long-term readers of this blog might remember as Invaded. The idea is that players control tribes (now of squirrels) trying to get by in their homeland, which is invaded by an aggressive, non-player, colonial power (grey squirrels). The current version is very light and plays more like a wonky family game than I would like, but it plays, which is something, and I have some ideas.

City State Co-op is an implementation (with a terrible working title) of an idea I posted about on this blog several years ago. The core idea is players each control city states in an ancient world that are beholden to demands from both their populace and the gods; the problem is that some of the demands involve attacking each other, and you need everyone to survive and thrive in order to win. I was stuck on this for a very long time, but a discussion a few months ago with Rory Muldoon got some good ideas up, and I now have a functioning version which I think has some merit, but the challenge curve is currently terrible.

Now, let's see how often I can continue this blog...