Two months since I last posted. Bleh... I've really been slacking.
Except, I haven't. It's been a really busy couple of months. I've been doing a ton of stuff, mainly centered around Tabletop Simulator. Three things in particular:
Manaforge on TTS
I finally did it. I realized a while back that I had left my implementation of Manaforge on Tabletop Simulator incomplete. I had it marked as a 'release candidate' version and had neglected to update it once the game was published. Once of my tasks was to correct that oversight.
Pictured above is the result of that work. It's still the same game, of course, no rules changes or anything. But it should be a lot more playable now. I switched out the table for a much larger one and moved all of the player boards to the same side of the table (not like elbow room is really a thing in a virtual environment), so everyone has the same view of the cards. I updated the token bags to actually look like the tokens they're holding. I replaced the pawn I had as the first player token with an anvil model. I added the rulebook as an object in the game. I added some scripted buttons for common tasks such as refreshing the cards on the central board or passing hands during the talent draft. And I added a UI element that I call a 'mana tracker', taking the place of the mana abacus accessory in the physical game, for use in keeping track of how much mana you have during your turn.
And, for flavor, I updated the environment. I found several freely-available mods on TTS containing various models for use in tabletop role-playing games; I copied a few of those into my game, added a floor and some walls, and decorated it with the same magic circle templates that were used on some of the game components. I'd like to think that it looks pretty good now.
The whole thing is published on the Tabletop Simulator Workshop as the 'official' version of the Manaforge mod. (It's the same link as before, just the content is improved.) Oh, and I prettied up the workshop page for the game as well. Added links to the rulebook, faq, and game page on my site.
(Come to think of it, I should have a link to the BGG page for the game. Add that to my to-do list.)
Check it out here:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=826257424
Nebula
Of course, I've still been hammering away at Nebula. Playtest, fix, playtest, fix, playtest, fix... yeah, you get the idea. The game has been coming together remarkably well. I think I'm pretty close to done with the mechanical changes and I'm starting to get into balance tweaks. Pretty good sign that the game is coming together. It's also a good sign that my last couple of weeks worth of playtests have been giving me a lot of positive feedback. Players are almost always saying that they enjoyed playing. For the feedback I'm getting, it's more small stuff and balance bits. (And quite a bit of graphic design and layout stuff, but I'm not able to do much with that right now.) I've got several people asking when I'm going to host a playtest next, and one person even saying that they're ready to back my Kickstarter. Very encouraging! :D
At this point, I'm going to do a couple of rounds of balance changes, and then start on the rulebook. (Actually, I have a rulebook made, but it's from months ago and is way out of date.) Once I get the game playable from the rulebook, I'm going to start setting Nebula up to be blind testable. Running playtests is great and all, but the game needs a lot more testing than I can do with the time I have. Hopefully having the game played a hundred times will help shake out any lingering kinks that I'm not seeing.
After that, it might be time to start thinking about publishing. Graphic design and artwork and marketing and crowdfunding and production and shipping... yeah, don't want to get ahead of myself. With luck I can start aiming for a Kickstarter date. Hopefully not too far into next year. I wonder if I'll hit a 2021 holidays delivery date.
OBJ Library
One other little side project. This one will only be useful to other people that are creating games on Tabletop Simulator. This is one of those things I did mostly to prove to myself that I could, although I'm hoping it might be useful to others as well.
I created and published a workshop mod containing a bunch of generic shapes. Cube, cylinder, flat plane, various regular prisms, and pyramids. All of these objects are done as model objects in TTS, and those models are using .obj files. While most normal people would use a modeling tool to create obj files, I decided to try my hand at creating them using a Java program. (Since I'm very bad at using modeling tools.) It was an interesting challenge, writing code to generate vertices, normals, and texture coordinates. Stuff that I haven't done in a long while, and certainly haven't done in Java at all. The file format for obj files is actually pretty simple (it's just a text format), so the main challenge was to come up with the coordinate data and figure out the quirks of Tabletop Simulators Unity rendering engine. (And yes, there are definitely a lot of quirks.)
The nice thing about using models instead of the built-in TTS components is that you can do several neat tricks with them. I used the cylinder objects I made as the bags in my Manaforge rebuild. Model objects have a behavior setting, which can give the object various properties. Examples of behaviors are 'bag' (stores other objects), 'die' (has sides and can be rolled), and 'figurine' (always uprights itself when interacted with).
I do want to add more shapes and better texturing options to what's there, but I'm hoping what I've done so far will be of benefit to someone.
Check it out here:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2217611502
And that's it for now! I hope to have more news about Nebula soon. If you're interested in playtesting, send me an email and I'll see about setting up a test. I'm also going to keep testing on the various Discord-based playtest groups for a while, so if you frequent any of those you'll probably see me around.
Except, I haven't. It's been a really busy couple of months. I've been doing a ton of stuff, mainly centered around Tabletop Simulator. Three things in particular:
Manaforge on TTS
I finally did it. I realized a while back that I had left my implementation of Manaforge on Tabletop Simulator incomplete. I had it marked as a 'release candidate' version and had neglected to update it once the game was published. Once of my tasks was to correct that oversight.
Pictured above is the result of that work. It's still the same game, of course, no rules changes or anything. But it should be a lot more playable now. I switched out the table for a much larger one and moved all of the player boards to the same side of the table (not like elbow room is really a thing in a virtual environment), so everyone has the same view of the cards. I updated the token bags to actually look like the tokens they're holding. I replaced the pawn I had as the first player token with an anvil model. I added the rulebook as an object in the game. I added some scripted buttons for common tasks such as refreshing the cards on the central board or passing hands during the talent draft. And I added a UI element that I call a 'mana tracker', taking the place of the mana abacus accessory in the physical game, for use in keeping track of how much mana you have during your turn.
And, for flavor, I updated the environment. I found several freely-available mods on TTS containing various models for use in tabletop role-playing games; I copied a few of those into my game, added a floor and some walls, and decorated it with the same magic circle templates that were used on some of the game components. I'd like to think that it looks pretty good now.
The whole thing is published on the Tabletop Simulator Workshop as the 'official' version of the Manaforge mod. (It's the same link as before, just the content is improved.) Oh, and I prettied up the workshop page for the game as well. Added links to the rulebook, faq, and game page on my site.
(Come to think of it, I should have a link to the BGG page for the game. Add that to my to-do list.)
Check it out here:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=826257424
Nebula
Of course, I've still been hammering away at Nebula. Playtest, fix, playtest, fix, playtest, fix... yeah, you get the idea. The game has been coming together remarkably well. I think I'm pretty close to done with the mechanical changes and I'm starting to get into balance tweaks. Pretty good sign that the game is coming together. It's also a good sign that my last couple of weeks worth of playtests have been giving me a lot of positive feedback. Players are almost always saying that they enjoyed playing. For the feedback I'm getting, it's more small stuff and balance bits. (And quite a bit of graphic design and layout stuff, but I'm not able to do much with that right now.) I've got several people asking when I'm going to host a playtest next, and one person even saying that they're ready to back my Kickstarter. Very encouraging! :D
At this point, I'm going to do a couple of rounds of balance changes, and then start on the rulebook. (Actually, I have a rulebook made, but it's from months ago and is way out of date.) Once I get the game playable from the rulebook, I'm going to start setting Nebula up to be blind testable. Running playtests is great and all, but the game needs a lot more testing than I can do with the time I have. Hopefully having the game played a hundred times will help shake out any lingering kinks that I'm not seeing.
After that, it might be time to start thinking about publishing. Graphic design and artwork and marketing and crowdfunding and production and shipping... yeah, don't want to get ahead of myself. With luck I can start aiming for a Kickstarter date. Hopefully not too far into next year. I wonder if I'll hit a 2021 holidays delivery date.
OBJ Library
One other little side project. This one will only be useful to other people that are creating games on Tabletop Simulator. This is one of those things I did mostly to prove to myself that I could, although I'm hoping it might be useful to others as well.
I created and published a workshop mod containing a bunch of generic shapes. Cube, cylinder, flat plane, various regular prisms, and pyramids. All of these objects are done as model objects in TTS, and those models are using .obj files. While most normal people would use a modeling tool to create obj files, I decided to try my hand at creating them using a Java program. (Since I'm very bad at using modeling tools.) It was an interesting challenge, writing code to generate vertices, normals, and texture coordinates. Stuff that I haven't done in a long while, and certainly haven't done in Java at all. The file format for obj files is actually pretty simple (it's just a text format), so the main challenge was to come up with the coordinate data and figure out the quirks of Tabletop Simulators Unity rendering engine. (And yes, there are definitely a lot of quirks.)
The nice thing about using models instead of the built-in TTS components is that you can do several neat tricks with them. I used the cylinder objects I made as the bags in my Manaforge rebuild. Model objects have a behavior setting, which can give the object various properties. Examples of behaviors are 'bag' (stores other objects), 'die' (has sides and can be rolled), and 'figurine' (always uprights itself when interacted with).
I do want to add more shapes and better texturing options to what's there, but I'm hoping what I've done so far will be of benefit to someone.
Check it out here:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2217611502
And that's it for now! I hope to have more news about Nebula soon. If you're interested in playtesting, send me an email and I'll see about setting up a test. I'm also going to keep testing on the various Discord-based playtest groups for a while, so if you frequent any of those you'll probably see me around.
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