This is awesome. It's great to see a lot of projects coming out in this area.
I've been working on a similar project for over a year now. It's essentially this exact concept turned into an entire platform for designing/creating board games and then publishing the game so others can play it directly on the platform. Think of heroku or squarespace for board games.
I have a very rough, working prototype of the editor and game engine. There is a ton left to do (I could write pages about what I'd like to implement/improve). But, I'm at least finally getting somewhere with it.
At the risk of utterly destroying my server... for anyone who is interested, I have a demo site for the game editor prototype. A game can be test played from the editor by clicking "game play tester" in the upper-left menu. There are no docs or anything. But there are several games already implemented on the demo server.
Please be kind to the demo server. I just threw it up to show a few people -- it's not robust at all.
I would love feedback! My e-mail is dwaltrip77@gmail.com.
Note: the interface for editing the "Game UI" is going to be completely redone so that it uses the same type of visual programming code-blocks as found in the "Core Logic" editing interface. Right now the game UI code format is simply javascript that becomes a react.js render function.
Looks very interesting! I don't completely understand how to use it (and I guess not everything works yet?), but the UI looks nice, and it looks like it has some really cool features.
I once had visions of a "code-blocks" interface like you're doing, but you've certainly gotten a lot farther than me on that front. I'd love to find out more about what you're doing and if any of my code can help (will send you an email). I don't actually have time to work on this project seriously, so I'm happy to share whatever experience I've gained so that it doesn't go to waste :).
Unfortunately I have not written any docs or tutorials yet... With the demo, what you are seeing is an editor designed for creating board games of all types. It does involve some programming, although I tried to make that aspect easier with the "code-blocks" visual programming tool (if you click the </> symbol next to any code, that opens the code-blocks editor).
When I launch the full working initial version, I will have a bunch of guides, tutorials, and documentation.
As of right now, I've been focusing only on multiplayer games.
But that is an interesting idea.. it probably wouldn't be super hard to generalize the engine and game specification format to enable single-player games. That's definitely something I will keep in mind for later.
By deck building, you mean that there would be information carried between games, such as one's personal decks that they have already built?
I haven't yet built any features to allow storing player data outside of individual games, but that does seem a very useful thing that fits nicely with the goals of platform. I would have to think about what that might look like. Thanks for asking!
I think he meant Deck building is like magic the gathering. You gain cards each round and use that to your advantage. Also another popular deck building game is dominion online..
I've been working on a similar project for over a year now. It's essentially this exact concept turned into an entire platform for designing/creating board games and then publishing the game so others can play it directly on the platform. Think of heroku or squarespace for board games.
I have a very rough, working prototype of the editor and game engine. There is a ton left to do (I could write pages about what I'd like to implement/improve). But, I'm at least finally getting somewhere with it.
At the risk of utterly destroying my server... for anyone who is interested, I have a demo site for the game editor prototype. A game can be test played from the editor by clicking "game play tester" in the upper-left menu. There are no docs or anything. But there are several games already implemented on the demo server.
Please be kind to the demo server. I just threw it up to show a few people -- it's not robust at all.I would love feedback! My e-mail is dwaltrip77@gmail.com.
Note: the interface for editing the "Game UI" is going to be completely redone so that it uses the same type of visual programming code-blocks as found in the "Core Logic" editing interface. Right now the game UI code format is simply javascript that becomes a react.js render function.