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):
At first it seems a bit crazy to me to spend $374 on a chair. But I spend a lot of time sitting at my desk, and expect to spend even more before this pandemic is over, while so many of us are working from home. It really is an investment.
Oh, and this video has very useful information if you assembled a used office chair you got for your birthday, and you wonder, “Should the seat on a top-rated office chair rattle around like this?” And then you found two extra parts in the shipping box, but you can’t remove the seat to attach them. Hypothetically.
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 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.
I have a vision document. I’ve been cultivating it for several years. It’s based on several things I’ve read, but mostly derived from a book called Just Enough: Tools for Creating Success in Your Work and Life. Based on their research, the authors recommend asking yourself the following question: “At my life’s end, how will I know that I have lived a good life?”
In pondering the answer to that question (and the title question of this post in its most broad, general sense), I identified three priorities for my life:
Enjoy life with my family and friends.
Create good interactive experiences.
Share what I learn.
I think I’ve done pretty well with priority #1. Three years ago I quit my job to focus on priority #2: I went to grad school to get a masters degree in human-computer interaction. But I’ve done virtually nothing with priority #3.
So here is a blog. To start with, it’s a space for me to share about the following things, in the spirit of Austin Kleon’s Show Your Work:
The interactive experiences I’m currently creating.
Things I’m learning in the process.
But you are the reader: this space is supposed to be for your benefit. Ask questions. Share your own insights. Start conversations. Let’s learn from each other.
