Digital Game Board
From Third City
The idea in a nutshell.
- Hang a projector above the table, aiming it directly down. (else you'll cause the miniatures to cast shadows)
- The projector displays the game board showing terrain, monsters, and system related images while still allowing for miniatures.
- Powered by a View Engine.
- Possibly powered by a Computerized Game Engine.
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Overview of Project Phases
- Phase One
- Make a fun and usable toy.
- Phase Two
- Find out what works graphically.
- Establish graphics standards (tile dimensions).
- Encourage people to create graphics.
- Phase Three
- Allow table player interaction.
- Allow remote player interaction.
- Phase Four
- Make life easy for the GM.
Chatting a bit about the Phases
- For the first phase, I think the best place to start is the projector. To use it, we'll need to build a simple (Java2D?) application that lets me add, remove, and move specifically sized images within a grid. It would be nice if we could have images on top of each other without completely covering them up (so you can see what the terrain is like in the character's square).
- For the second phase, I think we should spend some time playing with the projector to see what looks good. Basically, I want to figure out what people should know when creating graphics. I'd like this figured out early because creating all those graphics will be a big job, and I don't want anyone losing/redoing their work.
- If we figure out we'll need to dim the lights to really see anything, that might change the color choices and brightness settings of our graphics.
- Do we want to decide on style consistencies? Should everything be exactly top view or should there be a bit of an angle (slight front view)? Do we want to iconize some things (treasure, monsters, etc)? Do we want anything to constantly rotate so that every player can see it right-side-up? Will we have text overlays and if so, will those rotate constantly or redisplay themselves along the player's axis upon the player's turn?
- If we're going to apply overlays (fog) or color alterations (night) to images, I'd like to get a list of alterations we might apply to the images and provide an easy way for people to see how the alterations will effect their image.
- I'm going to be interested in zooming the map in and out. But I'd like the quality examined when we start changing the size of our images. Perhaps we can standardize the zoom levels so people can test those levels when creating the image so they'll be able to create graphics that zoom nicely at those levels. Perhaps we need different images for those different zoom levels, like replacing the character with an icon if we zoom too far out to tell the characters apart.
- I like the idea of letting people create terrain graphics without concerning themselves with where the grid lines might fall. I'd like a best practice found for this procedure. For instance, we can encourage vector graphics so that if we build a tool that overlays the grid, they can resize and tweak it to fit better. Also, should we keep the terrain as one image or should we break them up into tile images. Certainly we'll have separate tile images when we're creating rooms using the manual (one-tile-at-a-time) method, so should we accommodate both or should we have a tool that breaks up those bigger images into re-usable tiles?
- For the third phase, I'd like to turn to one of my main goals in all this, allowing player interaction, specifically remote players. Erik has a very cool design for a Omnidirectional Mouse, but I'd be just as happy with a normal mouse that realigns itself with a right-click. Remember that people will be sitting across from each other, and we're not going to want to rotate the screen to face them with our miniatures on the board. Once we have player interaction and enough player actions are done through the system, we can simple open a socket for remote players to log in and have their own interactive view. A little microphone and webcam action and it's as if they're right there with us!
- For the fourth phase, I'd like to put all the d20 rules into the system. This will give us snazzy interfaces for players to select their actions as well as automating a lot of what the GM has to keep track of. Remember that players only need to worry about one or just a few characters at time while the GM has to keep track of the PCs (their health and to judge their strength/weaknesses for proper enemy selection) and the NPCs, which may count into the many dozens. Plus, I'm getting old and I can't remember all the rules, especially all those feats and how they change the rules around. Even though this is the fourth phase, I'll be focusing on this system for my own purposes. I'd like it to also be usable without attaching it to a View Engine (your basic "GM's aid").
Hardware
- characters can use input devices such as mice, game controllers, or keyboard arrow keys
