Well well, a new week. How original. I had an idea for a possible Mechanic Monday but it turned out to just be Stratego. C’est la vie! (Although maybe it could still work if the forces weren’t all set in stone, and player’s had a limited number of reserve forces that they could secretly commit prior to each combat, and also instead of larger forces wiping out smaller ones, they would deal the difference in force sizes as damage)
(Also note to self: Each player starts with a different hidden amount of VP/Currency that they have to pay (plus interest) at game’s end, as a way to truly hide who’s in the lead.)
Anyway it’s Wednesday, so there’s no time for any of THAT stuff. Today, I’m going to kvetch informatively about Tabletop Simulator.
So, TTS is, near as I can tell, an incredibly powerful and useful tool. It’s also absolute ass to parse, as someone coming to it cold. The official guides are largely unhelpful for the designers whose experience is limited to tabletop; I’m sure it’s all well and good for digital devs adapting their work to tabletop, but that ain’t me. Fortunately, I’m just trying to model fairly straightforward card games, so hopefully if I can just figure out basic scripts for setting up each round, I can just make the digital objects and then play it as a true sandbox. With that in mind, making a custom deck is pretty much the most common and basic action, so there were plenty of guides for that. But I’m here to spell out what I had to cobble together, because it was stupid!
So, from the outset I determined that the input for a deck is a grid image, with each card face occupying an identical space. The default (max?) grid is 10x7, and there’s a template image that you can copy and paste your images onto. But I also found that TTS comes with a deck editor program, which made things much easier. It has drag and drop, and import, but first off… I needed to turn my Word / PDF full of cards, into a set of images. So I opened up the Snipping tool on my work laptop (oh BTW this is going to get convoluted AS FUCK thanks to the jankiness of the tools at my disposal) and the Word doc of FGM^2 1.0 and made a folder of the card faces, and then did the same with the carcbacks (of course, then I realized that tall of the cardbacks in v1.0 were still FO Abilities and not Legacies, so I opened a square in MS Paint [I TOLD YOU IT WAS GONNA BE BAD] and pasted text into it to make my New Cardbacks. Now remember, I’d done all this on my work computer (since my laptop has neither Microsoft Office, nor the Snipping Tool as far as I know, nor a 100% functioning screen), so I uploaded all my Faces and Backs folders to Google Drive, then downloaded those folders on my personal laptop.
Whew! I was finally ready to import the individual images into the TTS Deck Editor. I selected New Deck and quickly learned that the 10x7 card template is a hard stop, which meant that I’d be uploading my 80-card deck 40 at a time; also, the drag and drop functionality is unreliable when you’re trying to do more than one image at a time, much easier to skip that and use the ‘Add Cards’ function. No idea how to do card backs in the Deck Editor, so I made a new ‘Deck’ for the Faces and Backs of both the first and second halves of my Heroes Decks. 4 image grids capturing 40 input images each, glad I noticed there were bonus settings to tweak the card size to actually be square.
With these image grids (grid images?) in hand, I went into TTS and made a new Custom table, then added an object. Now, I thought since “Square card” wasn’t an option in New Deck, that I’d have to make these as tiles, but that’s not how that works. Can’t make a deck of tiles. So I imported the faces, specified that the cards had unique cardbacks, set the deck size so that TTS would cut up the input image properly, and hit import. Voila. A deck of forty cards. Another deck of forty cards! I saved both, then dropped one atop the other to make the full deck, and saved that too. And now I’ve got that Heroes deck as a virtual object in Tabletop Simulator. Aggravating, to be sure! But very cool, and a good start. Next up, I think I’ll have to make a new card file with the scoring and category cards, and then I’ll make the Draft Order card, the Guild cards, and the various tokens. I’ll have to learn how to snap the tokens to the right spaces on the Draft Order and Guild cards, and how to make the Scoring and Category cards line up so I can playtest the Hot and Cold Streaks mechanic, and then I may want to do some digging into how Splendor deals out its cards, as I’ll need to do that for every Draft. But we’re off to a start, and even though this was a week later than I wanted to start this build, it’s cool that I’m doing so in a format that might actually get playtested sometime this pandemic.
Ok, I reckon that’s all for this week. A-byyyyeeeeee.
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