Adding a new marker

Module Design
1

Hi all,
I’m new at the forum and sorry if the topic has been raised before, didn’t checked.
I own a module for an upcoming boardgame that I’ll release later next year.
I use the module for playtesting.
I did NOT made the module, but the guy that made it for me is no longer able to work on it, and he gave me any grant to edit it if needed.
Now I must introduce in the module a marker (a little cloud with “fired” written inside.) and I have no clue about how to do it.
Please help me, remember I’m tottally unexperienced.

Thank you in advance
Marco

2

Okay, you should try some tinkering around, but FIRST make a backup of your module so that you can go back to it in case you accidentally break something.

  1. Open your module in the Editor (select “Edit Module” rather than “Open Module” from either the file menu or when you right click on the module name in the module manager).
  2. Give yourself a tour around, and see if you can find where other markers are being defined – once place that is typical is in a “Game Piece Palette”, often called a Markers window or something like that. Other places are in “At Start Stacks” under the “Main Map” entry, but your marker sounds like one you want to be able to make multiple copies of during the game, in which case the Game Piece Palette might be the best place.
  3. Open up whichever thing (Palette or At-Start Stack) until you get to the innermost layer where you start to see “Single Piece” definitions.
  4. Right click on the “folder” that contains the Single Piece’s and select “Add Single Piece”. That makes a new entry.
  5. Now open up the properties of your new Single Piece.
  6. You can then open the properties of the “Basic Piece” trait, which lets you name the piece. You can also double click in the blank area (where it says double-click here to add new image), and you can then select an image for your piece. Browse on your hard drive for an image of the piece you want to add (you’ll want to make a PNG or JPG file or something, of the right size & shape with an art tool), and add it.

Now save your module, exit out, and try opening it and running it – hopefully you’ll be able to find your piece!

There’s obviously a lot more you can do and learn (and other ways to add images to a piece, more complicated ways to make groups of pieces, etc, etc, etc). You can check out the documentation, or just keep experimenting. And since you’re looking at a module that someone else has already done a bunch of work on, you can poke around and see the stuff they did.

Hope this gets you started! It’s not THAT hard – I clicked “edit” on my very first module back in November 2019 and now here I am giving advice :slight_smile:

Brian