Back to the monsters

I'm looking back at one of the games I mentioned a few weeks ago as possible targets for resurrection. This is currently a solitaire game (though it could become a co-op) with the working title of Monster Invasion. This is a project that first got going in late 2015, had its last serious bit of work in the summer of 2017, and then saw a little bit of poking in early 2021. As you can see, some of my projects can get dropped for a very long time.

The idea of the game is that your village is under attack from a horde of monsters. You play cards that represent the waves of monsters, the actions you take to fight them off, and the adventurers and strangers who might turn up to help you. Two quantities are tracked, "threat", which is represented by red counters in the picture above, and "power", which is the blue. Threat increases mostly when monsters arrive or when you need to draw an extra card to allow you to play, and can be decreased by fighting back or using magic. Power is your ability to use magic, and goes up and down as you take magical related actions or encounter certain monsters and visitors. If you get through the deck and manage to reduce the threat level to zero, you win. If the threat level reaches ten, you lose. Why ten? It's a number that seemed about right when I was doing the initial work on the game.

How the cards actually get played involves chaining icons together. Cards all have one or two icons in their top left corner (most have one) indicating the card type, and up to three icons at the bottom. When you play a card, the next card you play must have a card type matching one of the icons at the bottom of the card you just played.

By way of example...

In the picture above, we start off with the arrival of some Orcs. That has a running person icon at the bottom, so we are able to play the Run and Hide! card. This card in turn has a book icon, which means that while we are hiding, we can find an Ancient Tome and do some research in order to raise our power level via the Summon the Power card we are able to play next.  That gives us a sandtimer icon, which allows us to have A Quiet Night, after which we are well enough rested to fire off a Power Blast that reduces the threat level.

This all actually worked pretty OK, and gave me a fairly fun way of spending 10 minutes or so. While something like this can be really lifted by nice presentation, and well-directed art could really help suggest a developing narrative in your battle, the game as it stood probably wouldn't engage most people for very long, and it really needs to do that without an investment in art.

The last couple of iterations of the game were toying with the idea of boss monsters, one or two of which could be added to the game, possibly seeding them into certain parts of the deck. The boss monsters could potentially have special effects that shape the way you approach playing the game, perhaps making certain actions you can take more or less effective. Boss cards might just be like the other cards in most respects, or they could stick around as modifiers until you find a way to get rid of them. I built versions of the prototype with a selection of bosses, but tests so far have resulted in lacklustre effects, though I was only using them as "normal" cards other than you having to play them as soon as you draw them.

Another issue is that sometimes you can just be caught for ages without drawing a playable card, building up threat as you keep drawing more cards, looking for something that won't get you killed. In some cases this happens due to a bad decision, but it can also just be that you draw eight times in a row and get nothing. This is bad, and may be fixable by tweaking the icons present on cards, or it may require some sort of special action like being able to play any card regardless of the continuity of icons. It may just be as simple as having too many different icons.

I think that, having had a bit of a play with this again, I want to have a bit more of a play to see if I can make this game a bit more solid and reliable. As a result I spent a little bit of time putting together a set on Screentop.gg, with a playmat that helps organise the components and make playing a little easier. I far prefer playing a game like this (as with most games) with physical cards, but once the basics are in place, I'll be able to iterate over this far more quickly, and will be able to share it with other folk who might be interested in taking a look.

If you look closely at the above, things like the sideways Orc Spellbinder card don't make sense, but they are set up for when I try something different for the boss cards. Aligning them sideways makes them stand out visually as a reminder that they should be used in a different way.

So, that's where I am right now. I have an urge to create some basic card art, which I may or may not do (note: this is entirely because I like having this sort of project sometimes, not because it is really needed), and will look at how the boss cards affect the game and how the icons are grouped and distributed. 

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.

From Spreadsheet to Screentop via nanDECK

 I have an old card game project that has been languishing without attention for a few years with the working title Monster Invasion, which was a solitaire game (which I could probably make into a cooperative multiplayer game) that I used to enjoy playing back in the day. I recently decided to give it a look again and see what I can do with it, which gives me a perfect opportunity for me to demonstrate my current workflow for building a virtual prototype on Screentop.gg, a 2D virtual tabletop that I am learning to love, with the wonderful nanDECK for creating the card graphics.

I'm not going to go into every detail of how this all works, but hopefully will give you a few pointers if you want to work in this way.

The state of the game as I got back to it was a nanDECK script taking data from a CSV file. This was last worked on in 2017, and I've developed my way of working quite a lot since then (even ignoring the shift to virtual prototypes), so my first task was to update the data source. nanDECK is capable of drawing data directly from a Google spreadsheet, as long as the spreadsheet has been shared appropriately (there are details of how to do this in the nanDECK documentation), so I imported the dats, made a couple of tweaks, and shared as appropriate.

My card data in a Google spreadsheet, all ready to go.

If you can see the image of the spreadsheet above, there are probably a couple of things to draw your attention to or at least explain. At the top right is the number 55; this is calculated as the sum of the values in the "Quantity" column, and I find it helpful to have something like that for my reference as I make changes. At the bottom is a line for a card back and a set of nine "blank" cards; this is to help me later build a card image for import to Screentop.gg later on. When I am working with physical cards it is convenient to work in multiples of nine, which is a good number to print on a single A4 page, and coincides nicely with a standard deck size for manufacturing purposes if we get that far. On Screentop I find it convenient to have sets of 55 cards in a five-by-eleven grid, which allows me that same number of cards plus a slot to use as a card back which, if I pad appropriately with blanks, I can make always appear in the last slot of the image.

As an aside, a similar strategy works well for Tabletop Simulator, though typically you use the final slot for a "blanked out" card face. Tabletopia required individual images, which are also easy to set up using the same tool chain, but I'm not doing that today.

As you may know, nanDECK is a system for building cards (and other game components) using a scripting language that allows you to have huge amounts of control if you want it. There is a "visual" mode to the system that I have never spent any real time trying to use, and I gather that works well for some people, but I can't offer advice on this. 

OK, so the nanDECK script. I'm not going to show you the whole thing here, but can show you some of the bits that are relevant...

The first part of my nanDECK script.

A few comments on this first part of the script, assuming you can see the image above...

The first few lines are there primarily for when I want to output a printable PDF document, but an important point here is line 3, which defines 'DPI=140'. This defines the resolution, and thus the file size of the output. Normally for printing purposes you might want to work with about 300 DPI (dots per inch) to get a high quality output, but for virtual prototypes you may have file size limitations, and so may need to reduce the resolution. In the case of Screentop, the limit is an image size of 4096x4096 pixels, and to fit within that constraint I need to either reduce the resolution to about 140 DPI as I have done here, or go for a slightly higher resolution and make the output image a more square shape than I have done.

Line 9 is the link to my spreadsheet. nanDECK is smart enough to recognise that this jumble of characters is a Google spreadsheet ID and acts accordingly.

Lines 11 to 20 define icon images to associate with the letters I am using in the "icons" columns of my spreadsheet. 

Lines 22 and 23 (and the earlier line 6) are a habit I got into long ago of printing a version number onto prototype cards so I can tell that I am using the set of cards that I mean to use -- and this can be important with a game that I am iterating over and revising rapidly.

Then at the bottom I start off the definitions of the actual cards, using an IF structure to select options according to the "CardType" column in the spreadsheet.

After skipping a few lines, here's the end of the nanDECK script.

Towards the end you can see the card back being made by drawing a coloured rectangle at line 55. I have got into the habit of using two-colour radial gradients like this (with various colour mixes) for place-holder card backs, sometimes with text over the top if that seems appropriate. I find them sufficiently pleasing for minimal effort.

Finally, line 60 is where the magic happens, outputting a single image file for cards 1 to 55 (i.e. all of them), arranged in a grid 11 cards wide. 

So, if I validate and build this script, I end up with a nice image of all my cards...

And here we have the output of my script: a big image ready for upload.

So, on to the next tool in the chain: Screentop.gg...

Screentop is a bit of a work-in-progress at the moment, but it is very useful as it stands and is being actively developed and supported. I like it because it does enough for most of the projects I am working on, and is far less demanding on computer resources than its 3D cousins, and just about anyone can join a game from their web browser if I send them a link. On the other hand, there are a few odd quirks to get past. One of these scares off a lot of people: rather than having intricate GUI elements, several of the tasks you may want to do will require using the "bulk editing" system, which uses a programming language and you need to type code into a window to make your changes. Back on the positives though, there is very useful documentation, which provides bits of code that you can just copy and paste as appropriate for most situations, and this makes it potentially rather less scary than the likes of nanDECK.

The Beginner's Tutorial for Screentop takes you through the steps of creating a deck of playing cards, and you can simply follow that, substituting your personal deck image (as I have just created) instead of the sample one they provide.  The tutorial only uses the necessary cards from the image, but I usually make cards for everything, including the blank cards, which allows for more flexibility and cleverness later, which I will go into shortly.

So, just a few minutes of work and I have a pile of cards, some of which are blank...

Cards now up on Screentop.gg - ready to go!

So the game is more or less playable now in it's present state, though I need some way of tracking two scores: power and threat. I can do that by adding some tokens, adding a little score board and a couple of tokens, or using one of the built-in component types, a counter. Or doing the tracking offline with physical components too, I suppose. I can leave that as an exercise to the reader, as I wanted to just show one little extra thing.

The way Screentop handles graphical assets is that you can upload an image and then divide it into a certain number of rows and columns, which are then indexable sub-assets. This is useful for handling entire decks of cards together or potentially other components like custom dice. (Tabletop Simulator is similar in this respect.) In this case, what this means is that once you have set up a deck of cards (or similar set of components), you can, with just a few clicks, upload a replacement for the graphical asset and it will instantly update the cards.

So, if I want to change the background colour of the boss cards, that's one line in the nanDECK script, and replace the blank cards with a pointless message, that's a quick edit of the spreadsheet. A couple of clicks in nanDECK regenerates the graphic, which I can then upload.

Uploading a fresh asset in Screentop is really quick and easy

And, ta-da!...

An updated version of the game in just a couple of minutes.

This updated version is actually the same session as the one in the previous screenshot, having refreshed the page a few times -- this behaviour is brilliant, but doesn't seem to always work first time. A fresh session would (and did) update the cards straight away.

Anyway, now we're all in place, I can start looking at the game and decide what I want to do with it. Card updates will be absolutely trivial with the basics now in place, so we'll see what inspiration comes. 

I'm not sure how interesting or useful this sort of post is, but I guess if you found it really boring you won't have got to this point anyway. Thanks for reading!

Defence against the horde...

I've been doing this game design thing enough now that I am starting to get the "problem" of unbidden ideas taking over my head for a while.  For the last couple of days it has been for a card game that wouldn't go away until I created a prototype.  What happens next, I don't know.

To step back a bit, some time ago I was thinking about the very enjoyable Sherlock Holmes the Card Game, which I used to play quite regularly and features a nice mechanism where each card specifies what types of card can follow it, allowing a pleasing (though occasionally silly) narrative to develop.  So, while in the country, Holmes may find a clue, which leads to suspicion of one of the players, who has an alibi, after which Holmes is compelled to catch a train back to London.  The rules can be explained quickly (though the end of round scoring can take some work!) 

Alone against the monster horde. Luckily this wandering mystic has come to my aid.

I was trying to think of a way to play with this basic mechanism to come up with a game that built a narrative of a conflict between opposing forces, ideally where players are at least mostly on one side, but possibly with one (or more) of them taking the role of either an adversary or a traitor.  This never really developed very far; I had a very basic attempt, which mostly worked, but wasn't really interesting enough and relied too much on the game that provided the inspiration.

Months passed and then this weekend, for some reason, I started thinking about the concept again.  What got me moving again was some looking at the wonderful website, game-icons.net, which does pretty much what it says on the tin, and deciding that the card types could be labelled with icons representing different parts of the story (characters, events, actions and so on) and each could allow for a small number of other types of card (by icon) to be played next.  So far this just changed the representation of a concept: text in Sherlock Holmes is turned into graphics in my game, which is no change at all, really, but sorting through some candidate icons the ideas started flowing.

The game would be about the players helping to defend a village from an invading army of monsters.  I was trying to come up with victory conditions for a competitive game, but eventually thought that the setting lends itself to being cooperative, and that is a style of game that I haven't yet tried designing (or, for that matter, solitaire).  Eventually I came to the idea of having a "threat level", which would be increased by some cards and reduced by others.  This still didn't seem enough, so I also had a magical "power level", which could be increased to allow magical defences to come into play.

Usually I would rough out a prototype with pens and bits of card, but I was confident enough of the most basic functioning here that I turned to some very basic nanDeck coding plus the icon assets I had downloaded, worked out a basic selection of cards, and soon had printed out a small deck of 36 cards to play with. 

By this point I had thought of a couple of ways for players to lose the game -- if the threat level reaches 10, or the deck of cards run out -- but I hadn't really figured out how to win.  Never mind, start playing anyway...

By half the way through my first solitaire test, I had figured out the main win/lose conditions: if the threat reaches 10 you lose, as previously planned, but to win you need to work through the deck and then get the threat level to 0 with whatever cards are left over, otherwise you lose.  Also, if you are unable to play a card you add a threat and draw an additional card.

This seemed to work. I lost my first three games in a row and found some frustrating points where there were no playable cards for some time, which was largely due to the icons on the cards not meshing with each other properly.  A small change or two with a pen and I won a couple of games.  Yeah, balancing this is going to be difficult, but at least there is the option of having selectable difficulty levels thanks to varying hand size, starting threat level, and so on.

Now the game is out of my head and in a tangible form that makes me think I might like to keep working on this.  I definitely need to think through the card mix carefully if we're going to progress, and one problem I've noticed is that on many turns there are no real choices to make: you just have to play the card that fits.  OK, so every few turns there can be really interesting decisions, but the rest can be scripted.  That seriously needs to change.

Much still to do...