This isn't public yet, and almost feels like the kind of thing I'll never ship.
I've been working for a while now on the idea of a card / board game. The concept was bouncing around in my head for a while, and I started taking a lot more notes on the idea after my second kid was born (4mos ago). All of a sudden, I had a lot of time to sit quietly in a dark room with my laptop (and help the kiddo get to sleep). I eventually came up with a list of ~200 cards for the game, about 4 different decks, all stored in a big-ol spreadsheet I'd been editing on my phone (as I pace to get him to sleep).
But eventually with the idea, I kind of got it as far as I could with my mind's eye, and had to start actually playtesting. That would be practically impossible for me. There just isn't the time in my life right now to set up a small board game, play through it, take notes, and iterate on the balance.
So what did I do? I took that spreadsheet, dumped it to JSON, wrote a script to convert the JSON to placeholder .pngs of each card, and then built a dummy webapp with a canvas to simulate a virtual tabletop. Yes, I could have used TTS or something similar, but I felt the inner loop of changing the stats for cards, re-exporting them, then removing them and re-adding them wouldn't scale well.
This has ended up working great! I've been able to play through my game 20+ times now, all with a sleeping baby in my arms. I don't need to worry about leaving the game out on the table (for the 2 year old to find) - it's all just saved on my laptop. I don't need to futz with re-printing cards any time I want to change things, I just edit the "database" and reload.
I finally feel happy enough with the balance to show friends and family, which I thought would be a pipe dream just 3 months ago.
Might be interesting to you for playtesting when you want to show to others! Good luck on the game - I'm a big tabletop/board game nerd, so would love to play it once you get the game ready!
I'm also impressed you're able to edit while dealing with a fussy baby; I find it impossible to be productive on a smartphone, and my son wouldn't go to sleep if I was standing at my workstation (keyboard noises and the screen are too interesting).
It's a very careful balance haha. I mostly just do spreadsheet updates on my phone at this point. I've got a very delicately balanced laptop next to the rocking chair, so I basically use a pillow to support the baby in one arm, and work with the other.
It's been an _incredibly_ slow process, as you might imagine :p
Funny, I did almost the exact same thing for a MTG app I’ve been working on, and similarly also started messing with the idea of using the same software to soft launch my own rtcg. I would be very interested to see how you did yours.
Honestly, I would almost rather _not_ share the code, because it's Bad. Like, I just have one big <canvas> element and redraw all the entities (cards, tokens, etc) anytime there's input. It's got terrible performance for being what it is.
I'd kinda rather that no one in their right mind copy what I did.
I've been working for a while now on the idea of a card / board game. The concept was bouncing around in my head for a while, and I started taking a lot more notes on the idea after my second kid was born (4mos ago). All of a sudden, I had a lot of time to sit quietly in a dark room with my laptop (and help the kiddo get to sleep). I eventually came up with a list of ~200 cards for the game, about 4 different decks, all stored in a big-ol spreadsheet I'd been editing on my phone (as I pace to get him to sleep).
But eventually with the idea, I kind of got it as far as I could with my mind's eye, and had to start actually playtesting. That would be practically impossible for me. There just isn't the time in my life right now to set up a small board game, play through it, take notes, and iterate on the balance.
So what did I do? I took that spreadsheet, dumped it to JSON, wrote a script to convert the JSON to placeholder .pngs of each card, and then built a dummy webapp with a canvas to simulate a virtual tabletop. Yes, I could have used TTS or something similar, but I felt the inner loop of changing the stats for cards, re-exporting them, then removing them and re-adding them wouldn't scale well.
This has ended up working great! I've been able to play through my game 20+ times now, all with a sleeping baby in my arms. I don't need to worry about leaving the game out on the table (for the 2 year old to find) - it's all just saved on my laptop. I don't need to futz with re-printing cards any time I want to change things, I just edit the "database" and reload.
I finally feel happy enough with the balance to show friends and family, which I thought would be a pipe dream just 3 months ago.