BGA Project #4: Dev Log #1

A bit more than a month ago I was approached by the creators of Board Game Arena, for whom I created a few games before, to do the adaptation of a 4th game for them. Being an “experienced programmer” on their platform, they went on to talk with a publisher from Montréal and they gave us the rights to develop one of their game.

You might have heard of it; the game is called Gaïa.

Gaïa is a nice little game consisting of tile placement, hand management and a little bit of take that if played with the advanced rules.

So for the past few weeks I’ve been adapting this game for the BGA platform and I have to say: it’s going really well!

As I was reading the rules and going over what needed to be done interface-wise, I faced my first problem. How the hell will I put that much information on the screen at the same time?

A player has to see: their cards, the objective cards, the nature/life/power cards available, the tiles of Gaïa’s world, the number of tiles remaining of each kind, the number of animals tokens remaining, the number of cards the other players have, the number of meeples left (for those who never played, the goal is to use all your meeples to be declare the winner), the tiles used be the players (this determines if the player is close to scoring one of the objectives)… That’s A LOT.

Also on smaller screen the world part is smaller than on a big screen. The easy solution would have been to reduce the size of the tiles, but again Gaïa’s artwork is gorgeous and it would have been a shame to reduce it to the point where details are lost. A zoom function was required.

As you can see, this is pretty much the same screen space, completely zoomed out (top) versus completely zoomed in (bottom). Thank you CSS3 Scale!

The other big problem was the amount of cards that are required on screen at the same time. Objectives are important because well… they are your objectives. Scoring an objective guarantee you a meeple since it cannot be removed whereas a meeple on a city can be removed if the city’s needs change. Nature/Life/Power cards are as important if not more since they are required to do actions, which in turn help you use your meeple and possibly win the game.

The easiest way I have found to display all those cards on screen was to create a “pages” styled display.

The rest of the components fell into place as I was adding things to the interface. It was pretty clear that I needed to display the player’s cards in evidence.

Oh, but you might say “well it’s fun and all, but it’s hard to tell the details of the cards”. Don’t worry, I thought about that too. I created a spritesheet with all the cards at the bigger resolution, so when you leave your mouse on one, a tooltip opens up displaying the full-size card.

That’s pretty much it for the interface. I started coding the rules but this will be a discussion for another time.

Are you interested in adapting a board game for Board Game Arena? Visit the studio to learn more about it!