I am attempting to create a Vassal Module for my new card game about the old west. The photo shows how far I have gotten.
I have a couple of design questions. The photo shows how the game would be laid out on a table.
Each player starts with 4 outlaws in their “hand” they place them on the table with one outlaw, the Leader, in front of the other 3 members of the current gang. All these cards are visible to all players.
My question is should I attempt to keep this format, or have each Players “Hand” in a separate window with the Outlaw cards lined up?
The 1st on the left would be the “Leader”, the next three would be visible to all and any subsequent cards would be in a pile face down so only the owning player could see them.
A 2nd question would be how to get the “Outlaw” cards to be facedown when placed in the jail space. Right now they remain face up.
As a bit of background…
I am currently watching, on YouTube, both John Dinger’s design series as well as Joel Toppen’s series.
But both are geared toward games with tokens and proper maps. Neither are really card games.
If all the information should be visible to all players all the time, there isn’t much benefit in shunting the hands off to separate windows.
One question is whether the orientation or relative position of these hands matters. If not, orienting them all to face the viewer and make better use of space might be an option.
Easiest way to get cards to flip facedown is to make the jail a deck, and have it set so cards in it are always face down.
But even if you do that, you might need to auto-rotate the cards going in back to their default facing.
Both actions can be achieved by a map-level key command to any pieces ending a move on the map (check map properties) and triggers on the cards. Your trigger should check where the card moved to, and if its a zone called the jail, and the card is face up, “flip” the card (check mask properties). Similar thing for changing facing.
You can see there’s a central “market”, and an outer ring where players can play their cards. This example is of a 5-player game. Little more complex than your example, because of the variable player count and the need to have a continuous circle for players to play cards to. In this case, relative positions do matter, so I went for the upside-down and sideways orientations. Player hands are also on separate windows, because they are not public information.
But if you dig into it, you’ll see the automatic card rotation and flipping going on, maybe that could be of help.
Might be OK, but a variable player count is one case where separate windows for players might be better. A 2-player game would have so much dead space.
I have to wrap my mind around Vassal Play vs “Round The Table” play.
Possibly the 6 card piles would be on one board.
And the active player board under it, with the other players up on the top bar, but visible if the active player clicks on it.
Next to work on the “Dice” icons, I think 6 sets of different colors, because 2 players are rolling dice at once, so color coding them to the player colors makes sense to me.
I need to figure out how to attach “events” to the cards.
I also need to figure out how to resolve the results of the combat die rolls.
Slowly getting there.
As I said, this is my 1st attempt at module creation. Any advice would be appreciated.
Sorry to be away so long, real life got in the way.
I am back at this. Still lost though. I will be going back and reading the Design Section here as well as reviewing 2 YouTube series on Vassal Game Design.
Any suggestions on a good place to learn how to design in VASSAL?
