Welcome interwebs, to a fabulous experiment.
I'm about to start work on the second version of the Stratagem prototype and I'm going to try to think out lout on the blog as I go. Admittedly this is somewhat moot as several sections of this will all be posted at the same time, but still. I'm looking to make this a bit more dynamic or something. With any luck a simple time stamp can keep the magic.
Everyone ready? I'll take that silence as a yes. Here we go:
Friday 9:30 (ish)
The first step is to plan exactly what I want to do with the two pieces of construction paper I brought home from the dollar store. I have one big black and one big white and no replacements, so this has to be right the first time. With that I shall sit and sketch. Brb.
Friday 10:00
After some sketching, with intermittent unrelated texting, and occasional drifting off, I have a short list of the things I need out of the paper I have. But the purpose of these pieces is worth a bit of explanation first. After looking at the paper prototype results, I have decided I need a way for users to assemble orders rather than conjure them out of thin air. I also need a construct that will clearly explain the turn order so that players will understand the decisions they are making in context. The plan is to create cards with slots for order cards, and their argument cards. For example: a move order for an infantry unit would consist of a move card and two direction cards indicating the path which the unit must follow.
I have an extra boost to my confidence in this idea as I had a chance to play "demon tournament" again recently. The game is major inspiration for the core mechanics of stratagem on a very small scale and seems to have a self evident UI design. That design uses single cards that represent complete orders on their own. For instance, a move left card will move your character one space left. When the player is creating their orders for a round, they are shown all the cards at once, and there is a small enough number that all cards can be clearly understood. While the basic operation of creating orders explains itself quite well, how the orders will be executed is largely unexplained. The user selects 3 cards to fill their 3 slots. They select the cards in order, which suggests their sequential execution, but it is not explicitly clear. What is completely unclear is how the enemy orders fit in. They do not show on the order creation display, leaving the user to learn at runtime that the orders alternate between them and the computer. And that the computer goes first. Always.
I want to do a more thorough post on my revisitation of demon tournament, but for now, I just wanted to touch on this issue.
My solution is to have an array of positions for the order cards to be placed face down until runtime. The array will have all 6 slots for a round and the players will place their orders in the even or odd slots respectively. The slots will be marked with the players colour before the orders are placed, so no one actually has to count. The problem with this is that I have no way to integrate it into a medieval theme right now, so I've decided not to try. Instead, the array will be made to look like a film strip with an arrow on one side indicating the direction of flow. Hopefully this will be a functional design metaphor.
Friday 11:00
I'm starting to realize just how much longer this takes when I keep stopping to write about it. Oh well.
I tracked down a tape measure and took the height and width of the papers I have. You'll have to excuse the units. My tape measure is American so everything is in inches. On the bright side, I won't be converting anything, so there's really no problem with using imperial distances.
Also it seems the paper manufacturer was also using inches as my tow sheets each measure 22x28. This gives me 616 square inches of each colour. I need 122 1x1 pieces to handle the arguments. That leaves me with 494 sq in to play with. An order needs at most 7 argument slots (in the case of a cavalry charge) and I can easily accomodate a 2x4 slot set on each card. I will need 6 of each of the 8 possible order cards and going with a square card design, I think I'll aim for the order cards to be whole 2x8 pieces. That knocks off another 384 sq in.
So now I have just 110 inches left. That should leave just enough white paper to put a backing behind each card slot on the film reel, but the white piece will not be a single piece as I was hoping. I'll have to settle for this though. It's better that what I got on my first estimate anyway.
Now actually getting the pieces out of my paper will be a bit of a knapsack problem. I think I'm going to leave that till morning. In the mean time, I'm going to start sketching the order designs. I doubt I'll have them finalized till tomorrow anyway, so I'm releasing this now. I also have to sleep at some point.
Stay tuned interwebs. I shall be back with another one of these tomorrow night.
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