Cliché Studio

I am happy to announce that people have been not only picking up the game but writing about it. A google search for “hexit strategy”(the old name of the game) turns up two postings:

A detailed breakdown of the game

and

A more casual deconstruction

We’ve also had a good flow of people downloading the print-and-play pdf of the game, with 48 people over the past 30 days. Our biggest source of traffic to the game has been the unbound boardgame geek page.

37 of those 48 are from board game geek

Our next steps are to make a gameplay video and a digital version of the game to help spread the name a bit more and then  early next year start looking at quotes from printers and launch a kickstarter to run a print of the game to get physical copies to people.

If you’ve played the game we’d appreciate it if you took a moment to go rate it at boardgamegeek. If you haven’t and are interested go ahead and download unbound:endless war on gumroad.

Fortunes work has taken an upswing lately. Regular feedback is a huge help and I’ve been lucky enough to have made a friend who is willing to do a pretty good job of giving consistent feedback and poke me about making fortunes updates.

I’ve done a bit of restructuring of the user interface to try and make things like what team you’re on and which score corresponds to which team more obvious(the fact that things like this aren’t apparent are things you lose sight of when you know the game in and out and have been working on it for a long time.) Still need a way to make the different suits of cards clearer but that may have to be up to the final art to convey. Still would be good to be able to convey this somehow other then relying on the art though.

Also added a score summary at the end of hand before the divination screen to give a clearer picture of how you fared.

If you want to see how Fortunes is in its current state, go ahead an go play fortunes.

New cards with art

 We’ve updated the Rules for Hexit Strategy and James has rendered a pdf with the rules and print outs for those of us who don’t know us personally to be able to play as well.

Spread of Cards

We’ve also included a new special card from the first test version, an explosion hex which reveals and destroys surrounding hexes once it is revealed. Since it reveals the surrounding hexes before it destroys them, this can potentially cause a chain reaction.

Big Bada Boom.

So please if you’ve read the updates before and wanted to try it out yourself, feel free to download the pdf and let us know what you think.

So things have been slow lately with the holidays disrupting schedules and James’ ungodly amount of work from his dayjob, but we are chugging along.

Fortunes

I have been working faithfully on the UI of fortunes because apparently people couldn’t figure out what to do. That was quite embarrassing. Got a lot of feedback from the feedback Friday posts over on Reddit and done a lot to shape things up.

Only thing is there has been a resolution error between the Unity editor and the web player, and apparently what I thought was the visible area was in fact larger then what actually gets shown. So in the future I need to separate my build folder from what gets shown here on the website. Unless you all enjoy seeing my mistakes. Oddly enough even in full screen it just shows the same partial portion of the screen.

Hexit Strategy

That is the name we are thinking of for the hexagon game we’ve mentioned recently. Thanks go to my friend Sam for the name suggestion.

We are editing a pdf for a print and play version with the current rules and then will be working on a variant based on our recent playtesting and feedback from Sam and we can see what works better and what people like more.

Hopefully we’ll be getting a press cutter sometime next year and be able to make a copy of the game with actually symmetrical pieces instead of the uneven cardboard coasters we’ve cut ourselves.

We are entering the final hours for the grimace kick starter. Thank you to everyone who has helped support us.

If you were waiting until the last minute we’re hear, if you weren’t planning on helping fund the project, we’d like some constructive feedback to help improve in the future.

Thanks for reading!

So I got some feedback from reddit that people were confused about what to do when playing fortunes. Surprise to me, I’ve been working with this so long everything seems pretty natural.

So I’ve made two changes recently to help make things more intuitive. I greyed out the cards you can’t play instead of just having there name turn red, and I worked on getting double click support in.

When I added the ability to drag your cards to play them I took out the old click to play. This was to prevent mis-playing cards which was admittedly mostly in preparation for the mobile version. This I think made things less intuitive in the web version. Hopefully this fixes things.

If you haven’t already had a chance or you want to see the new updates please take a chance to go play fortunes now!

So for all of you wondering how the project is coming along, now you can just go play fortunes.

This has all happened before, and it will all happen ag- wait wrong franchise.

So the divination has been worked out for the most part. Going to have to do a different but similar approach for the smaller screens for phones and what not. Also had some issues loading pages come up when I tried to throw up a web-player here.

How is Fortunes? What is unclear? What could we improve upon? Let us know!

So as some of you may know I’ve been working on the tarot card-game fortunes. It’s been great fun and I’m pretty happy about how it looks now except for the need to replace our stock art with the art our artist comes with. It is getting very near the phase of opening it up and letting you loyal readers hammer away at a web version of it, get any kinks we missed polished up and getting it worked out for iOS and Android.

Since the fluid design is pretty settled at this point I’m going back and doing something I probably should have done in the beginning; unit tests. Honestly I didn’t because I didn’t know much about unit testing for C#/unity as most of my unit test experience is with java/JUnit. I found the documentation of NUnit very useful and the realization that monodevelop had support for NUnit if i just downloaded it to begin with to be promising.

So looking forward to letting you all play fortunes in the next few months!

A big challenge I’ve faced recently has to do with data.

“All i see is blonde, brunette, redhead…”

Getting data from non-technical people.

James created this fancy spreadsheet for Barbara to fill out for the divination part of fortunes and only have to deal with one card at a time. After handing me this huge spreadsheet I had to figure out how to get the game to use this data.

Proprietary data formats and multiple build targets

After a little bit of google research I got Unity3d and excel to play nicely and had a pseudo-database set up running pulling in data from multiple sheets in the excel file for various parts of the game. Now if any of the card values needed to change, not just the divinations but card names we could modify the spreadsheet and not worry about changing any of the code. Sounded brilliant but it only worked on a standalone windows player. A web player or android build got stuck repeatedly trying to pull in the data from a class it couldn’t properly access.

You must take your eyes away from the tree before you can see the forest

This image may or may not be a non-sequiter

I spent awhile butting my head over many days trying to get this excel file reading to work on various formats. I was almost ready to set up a PHP script on our site for the web player, but didn’t like having a separate solution for that and for android. Eventually looking at workflowy I realized i was trying to solve the wrong problem. I shouldn’t be trying to read the excel file on these separate platforms. I just need the relevant data from the excel file. Some poking from that angle revealed the Resources class in unity3d. Between a little bit of work condensing the data I need into one sheet, saving that off to a tab delimited text file, and writing some code to parse that file I’ve got the current version of fortunes working with the data on android, windows, and the web player. I don’t have a mac to test that but I’ll probably get my fiancée to test that sometime soon.

I’ve been chugging along polishing fortunes. Had an interesting issue with text windows and scrolling because I somewhere down the line changed the input settings in Unity and got scrolling to go the entire text at once.

Once I’m in an OCD enough mood to get the new NGUI interface all aligned properly I’ll share some screenshots. In the mean time for the few of you who have expressed an intrest keeping up with the project: Fortunes

Thanks Sophie Houlden for informing me about workflowy!