Month: September 2020

Lots of little card tweaks this morning. Added the term “aligned”, meaning “the quality of having one or more morals in common”. This let me simplify some wording on Village Life and Building cards to use the terms “most aligned” and “least aligned”. Changed the Projects deck to a Building deck, because that’s what people think the cards are, even if they still get added to the Projects row in the Project phase.

I also changed the Ally deck to a Sympathy deck. I had already tried using the word “allied” in place of the “aligned” term I now use, and so there was a potential for terminology overload. But also it seemed weird to say “You’re allied with the Sergeant, but they don’t know it.” It seems a little weird to talk to the players about how to deal out “sympathy cards”, since that implies something else, but other than that I think it’s better.

And given how much I like the flavor text on the Village Life cards, I changed the motivation and goal text on the Councilor cards to also use first-person statements of their motivations. And changed the text to italics, because that’s what we do with flavor text. I’m afraid that also means players have been trained to ignore text in italics, which will keep the cards from creating the experience I want. *sigh*

The analysis spreadsheet for the Village Life cards is trickier than expected. I wanted to show values like “-1” when a villager loses a coin and “+1” when they gain one. But the formulas for calculating averages don’t recognize “+1” as a number, so I had to remove all the plus symbols.

I have this strange setup now where there’s all the data that actually appears on the cards, and then there are columns for analysis that are mostly derived from that data, but with some manual adjustments based on other effects. And then there’s a separate export sheet composed entirely of formulas to extract the card data from the analysis sheet, without the analysis columns and rows.

Despite all that, I managed to generate a deck and set it up in TTS. I need to tweak some of the buildings and then run another solo playtest.

I’m starting to set up Village Life cards in Component.Studio.

As I expected, CS failed to import the Google Sheet I use to do math analysis on the village life cards. So I had to copy and paste the section of that sheet to another sheet that I could publish and import. Which means that when I make a change to the original analysis page, I have to go through all those steps again. But it’s better than trying to do that analysis in CS itself.

I don’t care how these cards look, I just want them for testing. So I’m using CS _.prevy to position the text from each column right below the previous text. Looks like there’s a thing where _.prevy causes a column to not render if the previous step was empty. (Hence the line “[test]” in the screenshot above.) Something to investigate tomorrow.