Nay Saga Devlog 5: Additional Cards & Tabletop Simulator

I took about 1-2 months break from working on this project while my personal life was busy. But now I’m getting back into it!

When I got back to it, I started by adding 64 new character cards in the sheet so I could try and balance things a little more and have more variety, especially for playing with a bigger group. I found some placeholder art and threw them into images within a few hours. There are a few characters I definitely need to draw new ones of or at least clean up old drawings that I found before I’m comfortable using them in the final version though.

I decided that I wanted to try them out in Tabletop Simulator to even more quickly prototype and test without having to print them. So I made a quick card back so I could at least import it in for this step. This is super rough and very placeholder right now, so I’m not intending to use it at all in the final version. I still need to brainstorm and sketch some ideas for what it’ll look like.

Then I exported all of my cards as a large png to be used in Tabletop Simulator! I discovered though, when I was importing it in, that you can’t actually have a deck of more than 69 cards in Tabletop Simulator. I did some tests with a smaller deck of like 10 cards for work previously, but I didn’t realize this limitation until now. So I realized I need to cut down and make multiple decks to even test this aspect.

After looking in the documentation for nanDECK, I figured out I could just type more lines in the DISPLAY command to specify how many cards are in each row/column and then specify the start and end cards. So I just had to run 2 different commands to save out 2 image files to use for the decks.

Then I imported my two decks into Tabletop Simulator! It was pretty easy once I had the correct sizing figured out. So I started to draw the cards and lay them out for testing.

Then I decided to prototype and playtest a game in there. It was a little more manual than using physical cards, but was a pretty quick way to test it out, especially with adding new cards and not needing to print them out. I used some default marbles for tracking the order cards were played in and then checkers pieces to track the points. I think I prefer the methods I was using when playtesting physically by using colored tiles with numbers on them and the numbered tokens for points (temporarily borrowing from other games), but it was good to test with these to figure out what I prefer most.

Then I printed the new cards out so I could use them for testing! The printer was out of ink though, so it took a couple of weeks before I could do this. But I now have a lot of cards and a lot more variety (with 108 total)!

Now that I’m back into working on my projects more, I hope to have more updates and test with real people at some point soon. I have some other game types floating around in my head that I might try out too, but I also have been thinking more about the digital version of the game. So there’s still a lot that I want to look at when I get fully back into this, but the great news is that adding new characters is fairly easy to do with all of the systems set up!