Dev Diary #11 – Board Editor

October 5th, 2011 at 2:55 pm

Hi, Farbs here. This week we thought we’d try something different, so here’s a short demonstration of our board editor.

The board editor is written in AS3, and runs inside special development builds of our game client. This allows us to access code and systems written for the game which, unsurprisingly, are also useful to the editor. A clear example of this is the board renderer – since both the game and the editor run the same renderer code, we can edit a board and see exactly what it will look like in game. Handy!

The board editor was built for Dorian, but I sometimes fire it up and create my own scenarios. This helps me identify and understand workflow issues, though to be honest I mostly just use it because it’s fun. I’m not quite as proficient as this video suggests however – I sped the footage up by 100%. Still, that means I can create a board in under three minutes. That’s a pretty good coffee break!

Next week Jon will resume discussing game systems, with an in-depth look at how we’re using quicktime events and football terminology to widen the game’s appeal.

Ha! I’m kidding. I have no idea what we’ll discuss next week, and I can’t ask Jon because it’s nearly 2am. Perhaps he’ll enlighten us in the comments..?

16 Responses to “Dev Diary #11 – Board Editor”

  1. Wow, looks like fun! The obvious question now is whether these tools will eventually be available to players/fans to create their own scenarios/boards.

  2. Cheers Muscat! We’re not planning to make these available at launch, but we’re certainly thinking about adding them later.

  3. Please do release these, it looks like loads of fun!

  4. Ya, even if you decide not to let players use it to make custom scenarios. You should use the tool to let players make scenarios for contests of entries to be added to the game campaign scenarios or for players to submit entries to be examined for future releases into the game scenarios. The board system looks really easy to use and very user friendly.

  5. Shame – if you were going to release the tools with the game then I was 130% certain I would buy Card Hunter. But, since you’re not, I’m only 120% certain. See what that poor decision cost you?

  6. Hahaha. I think this game is looking awesome.

  7. I just want to say fantastic job on the artwork. It feels splendid, truly evokes a great board game experience.

  8. I *really* don’t want to kick off a religious war, this is just curiousity on my part…. why ActionScript? Easiest to implement for browser game or… ?

  9. I had a little stroke when you mention quicktime events there…

  10. I WANNA PLAY IT NOOOOOOOWWWWW!!!!!!! XD

    …but I can wait.

  11. @Wounder – Yep! We picked flash because it runs in most browsers, it is mature and stable tech, and we had experience with it. HTML5 was (and still is) too flakey, and Unity3D didn’t quite fit our requirements as neatly as flash did.

  12. Not sure where to leave this, but are only half the posts showing for anyone else? Looking through the dev diary archives for example, it only shows me every other post. Same with card previews, etc…

  13. @Darkmoon: what do you mean by “only half the posts are showing”? How do you know that there are posts that you can’t see? Can you identify an example for me to look at?

  14. “We’re not planning to make these available at launch, but we’re certainly thinking about adding them later.”

    Hope it’s not like in Freedom force Vt3R where it still says under the editor -> “coming soon”. Still Freedom force is one of the my favorit games ever so i forgave it for that mistake :)
    But card hunter looks great, looking forward to it.

  15. @Tupelo: I’m sorry about anything that didn’t get released for FFVt3R. The bottom line is that we’ll be able to go on supporting Card Hunter if it does well – and won’t be able to if it doesn’t. It was the same story with the last Freedom Force game. Unfortunately, it just didn’t sell that well so we didn’t have the capital to keep supporting it.

    I’m sure Card Hunter is going to be wildly popular though so there will be no problem continuing to develop it! :-)

  16. I love that the Doodad layer is called a doodad layer. Wonderful tone.

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