Protospiel – CKIXD

I had a good weekend at Protospiel Online. I met a lot of great people, and got in three playtest sessions of Villanostra, my semi-cooperative village-building game. And I was able to enjoy some downtime with my spouse and sleep in my own bed!

Here’s my playtest log (with apologies for any spelling errors):

Friday, July 17
- 12:30-2:15 My Villanostra with Rod Currie, Andrew Juell
- 3:45pm-5:45pm Lottie and Jack Hazell’s Dog Park with Lottie, Eric Jome, Rod Currie
- 8:00pm-9:45pm Nathan Bryan’s Gloop with Eric Jome, Rod Currie
- 10:00pm-12:00am Don Zimmerman’s R’lyeh Rails with Bryan Kline, Ian Winningham, Joe Hopkins
Saturday, July 18
- 9:45am-12:00pm Joshua Sprung‘s Enchanter with Matt Arnold, Miles Leska
- 1:00pm-3:30pm My Villanostra with Kyle Signs, Eric Jome, Jonathan Chaffer
- 5:00pm-6:15pm Jonathan Chaffer’s Kringle Caper with Brandon Beran, Ian Winningham
- 7:15pm-9:15pm Matt Worden‘s Magistrate with Matt, Andy Juell, Josiah Moser
- 10:00pm-10:45pm Brian H’s duck, duck, whatever with Brian, Jeremy Lounds
- 11:00pm-1:15am Bryan Kline’s Nebula with Fertessa Alysse
Sunday, July 19
- 9:15am-11:45am Zach Hoestra’s Guiding Lights with Ian Brocklebank, Eric Jome
- 2:00pm-3:45pm Clarence Simpson’s Wolf with Brian H, Caleb Vance, Eli Beaird
- 4:45pm-7:30pm My Villanostra with Carl Sommer, Bryan Kline

I consumed 16.5 player-hours. I contributed 18.5 player-hours.

I’m excited to playtest my new tabletop game project, Villanostra, at Protospiel Online this upcoming weekend. I’ve been running solo playtests in Tabletop Simulator, and I think it has some interesting interactions. Now I’m looking forward to getting feedback from other game designers.

I recently watched this excellent presentation by interaction designer Matt Leacock on finding players’ emotional responses to your game. A key source of emotional responses to Villanostra will involve the players’ relationships with the villagers. Villanostra is a worker placement game in which the workers–the villagers–place themselves. So I want to maximize the opportunities for emotional connections toward the villagers, and that requires giving them faces.

I went to https://generated.photos/ as a source of ethnically diverse faces that are free for personal use. I need about 30 faces of uniform size, and being able to generate them randomly instead of selecting them individually is very appealing.

That’s a great first step, but I don’t want photo-realistic images on my game components. The level of detail is distracting, and they set too high a bar for other images to be used elsewhere in the game. So I want to convert these faces to something that looks more like a line sketch. There are several YouTube tutorials for doing this in Photoshop, but I want a process that is quick and easy and doesn’t rely on expensive software. After considering a number of options, I selected Instant Photo Sketch. It does exactly what I want without a lot of options I don’t care about. And it’s free. Hopefully, I didn’t add any malware to my computer when I installed it.

(One odd thing I noticed: The original jpeg is 27.7KB. The generated sketch is 143KB. That’s a five-fold increase for a less detailed image. If I open the sketch in MS Paint and immediately save it, the size decreases to 76.3KB. I suppose jpeg compression might be optimized for human faces, but that’s still pretty unexpected, especially converting color to grayscale. If you have a theory, I’d be interested to hear it.)

For my next step, I uploaded the image to Component.Studio and added it to my previously-blank villager cards. These are micro cards, only 450×600 pixels. The image doesn’t need to be very detailed! At this point I’m hardcoding the entire deck to show this one face, just to test for feasibility.

From Component.Studio I generate an image cache for the entire Villager deck. Then I went into Tabletop Simulator and updated the Custom properties for the Villager deck to point at the new image cache. Here’s what the cards look like in maximum zoom on TTS, with a poker chip for scale.

Is the image too small? Maybe. Does it look better than the blank white space that was there before? Absolutely! Like any creative endeavor, game design is an iterative process: our goal is improvement, not perfection. And this easy process is good enough for the tests I want to do this weekend.