Card at Work: 11 - Inserting Optional Line Breaks with DataMerge

It's a new episode of Card at Work, the video series covering the basics of designing cards for tabletop games!

This time we're building on the GREP tricks from the last episode on inline icons and using similar technique to insert optional line breaks within a single cell of a spreadsheet. Using this method, you can drop a line break into a single block of text without needing a manual line break in the InDesign template itself OR using a find-replace after merging the document.

This is my first Card at Work episode in HD resolution. I'm slowly figuring out Adobe Premiere so hopefully these episodes will be even higher quality as time goes on.

P.S. I'll be streaming today live at around noon EST. I'll be working on a new round of layout updates for Chimera Station from Tasty Minstrel Games at http://www.twitch.tv/danielsolis81.

Support more videos at my Patreon!

Elements

Download Valkyria Chronicles II Android PSP iso+cso Free Gaming Rom

Valkyria Chronicles II is a tactical role-playing game developed and published by Sega for the PlayStation Portable. Released in 2010, it is the second game in the Valkyria series of games and the sequel to Valkyria Chronicles.

Set two years after the onset of the Second Europan War, the game's story focuses on a military academy as its cadets seek to prevent an ethnic cleansing campaign by a ruthless rebel group. Upon release, Valkyria Chronicles II received mostly high scores from several notable video game publications.

ALSO SEE :- Final Fantasy Tactics The War of The Lions Android PSP iso/cso (USA) Game

GAMEPLAY

Many gameplay concepts in Valkyria Chronicles II are carried over from the original. The BLiTZ system is used during combat scenarios, splitting the action between an overhead Command Mode and third-person Action Mode. By selecting allied units during Command Mode, using Command Points in the process, said units can move and perform actions until their Action Points run out. When the player has exhausted their available Command Points, or volunteers to pass control without using all of them, the Player Phase ends and the Enemy Phase begins. This progresses back and forth until the battle's victory conditions are achieved or the player is defeated. Valkyria Chronicles II uses a system of multiple area maps connected by enemy encampments. When an enemy camp is captured by the player's forces, subsequent areas are made available, using the camp as a way-point to call in reinforcements and proceed.


Also similar to the original, the characters available for use by the player each occupy a specific class - an exception is the main character Avan who can freely move between classes.Valkyria Chronicles II features new class types and the ability of units to change their class based on a branching tree of upgrades. All five original classes from Valkyria Chronicles reappear, some with slight modification. Scouts, Shocktroopers, Engineers, and Lancers act as the base units that lead to more powerful and specialized promotions. Snipers, rather than being a starting class, are a part of the Scout's upgrade potential. The final base class is new to the series. The Armored Tech class can disarm mines and carry large shields that can deflect rifle and machine gun fire. Armored soldiers do not carry a firearm, instead wielding a hammer to strike enemies. From these five base unit classes, individual units can use experience earned from completing missions to move into more advanced forms. Advantages garnered from upgrading class range from new weapon types to increased effectiveness against tanks to special abilities. The player has access to a tank. The tank has an increased amount of customization potential, being able to increase its firepower and armor, or be stripped down into a simple armored car

ALSO SEE :- THE 3rd BIRTHDAY (ISO+CSO) PSP GAME FREE DOWNLOAD [English]

LEGACY

Three manga adaptations were released by Sega in Japan.
The first one released was Valkyria Chronicles 2 Sōkō no Aliasse  drawn by Daisuke Shido and serialised in Dengeki Maoh from June 2010 to 2011, in which the story follows the developing friendship between the Valkyrian Aliasse, and her Darcsen classmate Magari. The first volume was published in January 2011 and the second volume was published on 27 May 2011.

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Coffee & Carcassonne - "That Radical Rock"

It's the second episode of Coffee & Carcassonne! Megan and I usually play Carcassonne over Sunday brunch at home. We hope you enjoy the gameplay and dorky conversation!

Waterfall Cave

#screenshotsaturday

Transparent Card 2-Player Abstract

2-player abstracts are really hard to make commercially viable, but that's never kept me from noodling them a bit. This is one idea that I've had on the back burner for a long time while I was focused on card games, but I'm pushing it forward a bit now that Onitama and the Duke are more prominent.

The basic idea is using transparent cards like Gloom or Mystic Vale with an abstract movement UI as seen in Onitama, the Duke, and Tash-Kalar. Each player has identical set of unique pieces. Call them A, B, C, D, and E.

To set up the game, each player draws five cards from the deck. Each player simultaneously secretly picks then reveals a card to assign to each type of piece. In the above example, player 1 picked Elephant and player 2 picked Crab. For this game, A has the traits and powers of Elephant and Crab. Then you do the same for B, C, D, and E.

Then you play the remainder of the game using those movement rules. I'm imagining the game played on a 9x9 board, I can playtest on the lines and vertices of a normal chess board.

The goal of the game is to score three points. If you begin your turn with one of your pieces on your opponent's center space on their home row, you score three points and win the game immediately. Most of the rest of their home row scores 2 points. The corners of the home row scores 1 point. So you could be aggressive and aim for your opponent's heart or do a more controlled overwhelming push.

POD-X: Find the last escape pod!

Button Shy's been teasing the release of POD-X, coming to Kickstarter in July 5 through July 16, 2016. It's their 3-4 player adaptation of my microgame Suspense, using the original "Escape the spaceship" theme I had waaaay back at UnPub 3. I'm super excited to see how it turns out. Hope you dig it too!

In Pod-X, players are trying to escape a fallen spaceship on the last escape pod. One player knows its  location, but is keeping it secret to themselves. What a jerk! All the other players are trying to deduce and bluff their way to the secret location in this quick parlor-style card game.

Fair warning though, this is basically the Dark Souls of deduction microgames. It rewards repeated play and familiarity with the card deck. We hope you'll play again and again, developing your own mini-meta within your group. Look for POD-X next month!

Tardigrades

In our understanding of time, it is the year 20,000 BC where civilizations are about to discover galactic travel through the latest technology of their time. Earth was different back then. The deserts of south Egypt and Ethiopia are green and full of advanced technology.

Carter is a botanist at the space station Marsi-3 orbiting Jupiter. Along with his girlfriend Alex, and your guidance, they might be able to witness their civilization shifting into a higher type.

Game Info:
Resolution: 640x400 32bit
Music: Midi
Sound effects: MP3 (All self recorded and constructed)
Full Speech.

'Tardigrades' can be finished with different ways, there are two possible endings and 10s of ways to complete its puzzles. Each time the game starts is guaranteed to be a new experience due to some events and puzzles triggered randomly at any time of the gameplay. The story depends on your attitude in dialogs, tasks, choices and/or random events. So basically you'd be writing the story of the game.


The story has a plot twist and deals with slavery, secrecy, espionage and other issues that are too early to reveal at this stage of production.

Hanging Gardens of Dandelion

#screenshotsaturday

Designing the Job – Part 1: What does a game cost the designer?

Most professional tabletop game designers I've met have a day job. This is just anecdotal, but it seems a full time game designer is VERY rare. I’m more of a pro today than I’ve ever been, but most of my household contribution still comes from an aggregate of freelance projects, Patreon, DriveThruCards, and SkillShare. Only a fraction of comes from traditional game design work. And all of that totaled together is still only about a third of what my wife makes at her normal day job.

When I'm working on any game eventually I have to ask myself the scary question:


“Is this game worth designing?”

Is this game costing me too much money? Is it costing too much time? With this series of short articles, I want to share how I figure out whether a game I'm working on is worth designing and, if so, how much I can expect to earn for my time and expense designing it. First up...


How much money has this game cost already?

The most common expense is material costs. My prototypes repurpose sticker paper or bits scrounged from a scrap store, then I endlessly recycle those materials effectively making the material costs free. If I send a prototype to a publisher and it isn’t returned, I have to note that as an expense as well.

When I intend to license my games, I use stock art, public domain art, remixed vectors, or photos to save on the art budget. All of that will usually be changed by the publisher anyway, so it doesn't make sense to spend too much on it.

If I self-publish, I allow myself a small art budget to get some custom illustrations, which significantly helps sales. Lately I make sure I have rights to include this art as part of a future licensing package to another publisher as well.

If I travel to test Game A, B, and C, then I split up my entire expense of that travel between those three games. (This includes event registration, plane tickets, food, etc.)

Let’s look at a hypothetical example: I’ve spent this much designing NOODLE KNIGHT...

• Material Costs: $50

• Shipping Costs: $50

• Art Expense: $500

• Travel Expenses: $100

So any option for publishing Game A should earn me at least $700 over its lifetime of sales. This is the unusual case where I do intend to self-publish. If I didn't, then I wouldn't have spent so much on the art budget.


How much TIME has this game cost already?

This is an easy number to quantify, but harder to justify. You can easily track how many hours you spend developing, designing, and playtesting Game A, B, and C. But when you translate that to the most minimum wage income, it’s quickly apparent that being a tabletop game designer does NOT pay a competitive hourly rate compared to other careers.

This is where the passion for the job outweighs the practical considerations. Yes, you could earn more spending those same hours doing a less satisfying job, but that just shifts costs to your emotional well-being. We’re in a fortunate and privileged position that I can decide to take a hit to my wallet rather than my happiness.

Returning to the example:

• If I've spent 50 hours developing NOODLE KNIGHT, that's about ~$360 at North Carolina minimum wage. If I want to earn at least minimum wage from my game, any publishing option should also earn an additional $360 over its lifetime of sales.

You also have to consider how much additional development time you would be willing to spend if the publisher has changes they want to make to the game. Publishers vary in their development practices. Some take the whole game and test their changes in-house without much additional input from the designer, which is great since the designer has presumably already done the vast majority of design work. Some will want changes, but expect the designer to develop them on their time, which just adds to the up-front costs you'd have to negotiate in your contract.

---

Now I have a ballpark goal of about $1060 to earn from my game. The more time or money I spend on the game, the more I'd need to earn to just break even. Beyond a certain threshold, I can't expect a retail license or POD sales to reach that number. That's why I need to keep my material costs low and development time efficient, to make any game I'm working on actually worth working on.

Any professionals out there break down their games like this? Is it too fiddly? Do you have another method of accounting? I'd love to hear it!

Constructing a garden

Replaced background

The main oxygen gardens of the section that Carter works at Marsi-3 was one of the parts where I was always trying to skip while testing puzzles. I never liked the background from the beginning of the project's development. I had to make a workaround by tinting the room mimicking that the camera is now positioned outside a window in the ship. It was a little convincing at the time.

But no. Something inside me refused the whole background. I was postponing the change because the room has a lot of functions, regions, doors, and a GUI for botany related tasks that allow you to grow different plants...  

The room alone is about 2KLOC but there are extra global functions that adds 500LOC to the sum. A lot had to be changed, coordinates, positions, walkable areas, regions... So I spent the last 3 days working on that. I really hope the new background is considered an improvement.

An Investigative Reporting Push-Your-Luck Game

I've been noodling a push-your-luck game themed around investigative journalism for a while now. At first I was exploring a reverse-auction mechanic, but the push-your-luck aspect of Circus Flohcati, Incan Gold, Dead Man's Draw, and Abyss seemed to make more sense. The idea of "digging" into the deck as a mechaphor of investigation sounded really compelling. I also really love games where the only prep you have to do is shuffling one deck of cards.

Here are the basic ideas I have right now, which haven't entirely gelled yet into a real game, but are close enough to get to the table by next week.

Cards have ranks and suits, noted by the number and large symbol along the top corner. Each suit represents different subjects your reporter is following.

Below the suit is a little arrow pointing at another suit. Lower ranks have more arrows than higher ranks. 1s are "?" and have an arrow pointing to "?"


Setup


Shuffle the deck. Deal one card to each player's hand. Discard ten cards to the discard pile face-up.

Each player begins with 0 points, 10 Credibility, and 5 Money.


How to Play

On your turn, you'll dig: Reveal a card from the deck and place it in the center of the play area. Then you must decide whether you'll stop or keep digging.

• Keep digging: Reveal another card and place it beside the last revealed card. Then decide again whether to keep digging or stop. If you ever reveal two of the same suit, you're caught and must do the penalty action noted by the matched suit.
• Stop: Take one card from the play area into your hand and do the action noted by that suit. Actions are more powerful the more cards there are in the play area.

At the end of your turn, you may file a report. Lay down a set of cards from your hand in front of you. Reports are either open or closed.

• Open: Your report connects suits to each other in a linearly. For example, Media connects to Military connects to Government. When you file an open report, score the lowest rank in the report as points.
• Closed: Your report connects suits in a closed loop. For example, Media connects to Military connects to Governments, which also connects back to Media. When you file a closed report, score the highest rank in the report as points.

When you file, you may discard 1 Money to fill in any missing connections. The next time you do this costs 2 Money. The next time after that costs 3 Money, and so on.

"?" may be used to fill any missing connections for free.

Keep your filed reports separate from one another, face-up so everyone else can see them.

This ends your turn. The next player begins their turn as noted above. Each player must dig at least once on their turn before deciding to stop.



Suits

This is just a quick list of possible suits, their actions, and their penalties. Nothing final, just something to test at the table ASAP. In all cases, the "__" in actions is the number of cards in the play area.

Entertainment: Take __ cards from the top of the discard pile. Penalty: Discard __/2 cards from your hand.

Sci-Tech: Look at __x2 cards from the top of the deck and take __ into your hand. Penalty: Discard __/2 cards from your hand.

War: Swap __/2 cards from any opponent's reports for cards your hand. The swapped cards must be the same suit. Penalty: Discard __/2 cards from any of your filed reports.

Business: Gain __x2 Money. Penalty: Discard __ Money.

Politics: Spend __ Money to gain __/2 Credibility. Penalty: Discard __/2 Credibility.

International: Discard up to __/2 cards from your hand to gain that much Credibility. Penalty: Discard __ Money.

Local: Discard up to __/2 cards from your hand, then take that many cards from the top of the deck into your hand. Penalty: Discard __ Money.

Rumor: Add __ cards from your hand to any of your filed reports. Penalty: Discard __/2 Credibility.

I'm sure there are other subjects that would fit in this list and these subjects could have more thematic effects. That's it for now though.


End of Game

When the deck runs out, the game is over.

At the end of the game, you get bonus points for doggedly reporting on the same subjects over and over again. For each suit appearing on more than one of your reports, score the highest rank in that series. In the example above, you reported on War three times, the highest rank of which is 8, so you score 8 points.

Money doesn't affect final scores.

Whoever has the most Credibility doubles their point total.

The player with the most points at the end of the game is the winner.

I like the idea of two competing strategies being equally valid: File fewer reports while relying on your Credibility to carry you through - OR - Spend a bunch of money filing shoddy reports aiming for an insurmountably high score, regardless of your Credibility.