The first round of posts were a breakdown of the nuts and bolts steps toward building the board game. Here I'll pause to allow more time to work on the comic, before coming back later in the year with more posts focused on refining and developing the board game. This will include play sessions, iteration on game modes, design updates and all the fun stuff. The posts to date have mostly been a way for me to record the steps I took while building the game early in 2020. Since t

Mood, atmosphere and visual clarity can be enhanced by choosing the right lighting. And being a digital game, there's also a need to consider optimization - reducing the processing load of the game as a whole so it runs smoother and faster. Below are a few lighting tricks used when designing Cards & Combat. - Baked in Lighting. The example below isn't true baked lighting or a lightmap, but the technique is based on the same principles. For performance optimization (in this ca

Beyond the game board itself the play space needs some attention. In Tabletop Simulator you're contained to the area within the skybox, however with a mix of props, art, effects and skyboxes you can create the illusion any kind of space you need - within reason... don't go overboard with huge 3D assets that will slow game performance, and avoid features that distract too much from the players focal area - the game board itself. For Cards & Combat I decided on a fenced in envi

Some game spaces are fully enclosed within a 3D environment built and themed for the game. But often fully enclosed environments require alot of processing power due to increased polygon counts. If you're looking to keep the frame rate high and reduce demand on player's CPUs then a Skybox will be essential. A skybox being a single texture that wraps around the game space creating the illusion of an all-encompassing background. You can source a skybox online (example site here

One advantage of a digital board game over a physical one is the ability in Tabletop Simulator to consolidate several objects by combining them into, a multi-state object. For example; if a door object is open you can combine it with a door object that's closed, and during play with a click of a button you change the door from open to closed - no need to store, find and place the new object, it's right there ready and waiting. The most useful multi state objects are Playable

You can't have cards and combat without the card. Below is a short guide on, not on card design, but how to build your decks so that they're game ready. - Card Specs. Individual Cards can be any size you like, once imported to the Deck Editor (below) it will compress and resize the entire card sheet. However the card designs I made are high res so that they're print ready, if that's needed in the future. The specs : - Deck Editor. The deck editor is a modding tool that comes

In the previous posts we've sourced and prepped a 3D asset for ingest into Tabletop Simulator and we've modified the texture of the asset to fit our needs. Now comes the moment of truth, importing the new toy into the game. NOTES FROM VIDEO ABOVE: - Importing the Object into Tabletop Simulator. In the top menu select 'Object' -->'Components' --> 'Custom'; move the cursor to where you want to spawn the object; in 'Model/Mesh' add the .obj; in 'Diffuse/Image' add your .png or .

Following on from the previous post on prepping 3D assets, it's time to play with textures. The files below came with the asset previously downloaded in step 10. They are: : .PNG: the object texture : .MTL: ignore this, it's a texture file for .3DS objects :.OBJ: this is the 3D object file :.RAR: the zip file all of these came from, downloaded from Turbosquid : Metal.PNG, Normal.PNG, Rough.PNG: these are all lighting and surface maps that can be used in a variety of programs

If you're following along I'll assume in part it's because you want to know how the development of Cards & Combat can help you with your own project. So the next few posts will focus on customizing and enhancing a Table Top Simulator project. Once you have the tools and know-how, you'll also be able to create your own custom assets to incorporate into Cards & Combat or any other game you're playing using Tabletop Simulator. - Sourcing Assets. There are plenty of places onlin

This may not have been covered yet, but, every Game Mode has a Game Master (GM). The role is quite different to a typical Role-Playing GM. The Cards & Combat GM sets up the board and deck, rolls encounter tables, controls NPC's, and is dealt a hand of cards that they can use just as the players do. Being the GM is like adopting a different play style more aligned with that of a mischief making referee. That said, the GM needs to be able to organize, coordinate and use a range

For this game's development the program we decided upon is Tabletop Simulator, as a digital board game platform it offers a few opportunities that you won't get with a physical game. I won't get into the details of mouse and keyboard controls, if you want to know more follow this link for Basic Controls and follow this link for Advanced Controls. The general summary of the links is: you have full movement in a 3D play environment with zoom, you have object manipulation and yo

Combat is a centerpiece of the game's 'cards and combat' foundation. As mentioned in an earlier post, Cards & Combat is a casual adventure sandbox game, and in order to make the gameplay accessible to a wide player base the combat needs to be simplified, but, in order to retain seasoned players combat also needs some degree of tactical agency. While I could go into the basics of dice rolling and perk modifiers, let's skip over it and look at: MY APPROACH TO ENCHANCING SIMPLIF

Along with Combat, Cards are the centerpiece of the gameplay. In the case of this game we researched decks from adventure games (eg. Zombies!!!), from deck builder games (eg. Pokemon) and even decks from family games (eg. Monopoly). These gave a wide variety of perspectives on game modification, enhancement and complication while keeping many of the Cards & Combat cards tied to familiar tropes. In the end I settled on a Core Game Deck that governs actions when navigating the

While aiming to keep the gameplay experience light, it felt a little too simple to have every Playable Character be assigned the same attributes (e.g. moves per turn, combat strength). Each Character in the comic has a personality and it needed to be reflected in the gameplay. And every time the game is played it felt important that players had a variety in the buffs, de-buffs and surprise features that could change their play experience when they select from the 100+ availab

With a name like 'Cards & Combat' it's pretty clear what you're in for when playing the game. The Card and Combat elements of play are the foundation on which everything is built, we'll explore these in future posts, but for now let's have a look at what I hope will elevate the project beyond being a typical adventurous brawler. There are 8 game modes in development. On launch and during open beta testing there'll only be 3 modes available (two simple modes, one standard mode

The next few posts cover portions of the game concept and how they're intended to play out. First up, let's address a few 'surprise outcomes in play' built into this 'sandbox arena'. A SANDBOX BOARD GAME??? The term sandbox typically refers to an open world in a video game that allows free roaming and a degree of creative problem solving to achieve any goals. For Cards & Combat the board is designed in a way to allow freedom of movement with limited bottlenecks in movement t

It all starts with a 'big idea'. How's this game different? What's the genre?... I'll get to that at the bottom of the post, but to start with... ...when 'anything you can imagine is possible' it's easy to go off the rails and lose focus, so every project needs some sense of self-imposed guiding limitations to provide boundaries on a project's scope while adding clarity and focus to the development process. The guiding limitations I started with are... MY RULES FOR BOARD GAME

I've always had a drive to make a game, any game - who knows why. Early 2020 corona had kicked in, my 2D Tyranobuilder game turned out to be a bust, I'd played with GameGuru to create a 3D Machinima for the web series, I had a heap of design assets for the upcoming comic series and time up my sleeve. When introduced to Tabletop Simulator... everything sort of clicked. In a couple of weeks while procrastinating on the comic I built a prototype board game... since then the proj