cs db & advertising

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cs db & advertising

Post by snowdrop » Sat Apr 21, 2012 10:39

Q_x wrote:For the database my "pretty clever idea" is to put cardscape back online as soon as it's finished and rather than developing cards, take care for more people coming on board - that is advertisement.
We have nothing to playtest until we have somehow extracted the info from the old CS db: All the suggest cards (and there were a few good ones in there) are stuck in limbo. I think I will do that boring myself and just dump it in wiki.

As for next step I don't agree with us trying to get more people aboard: I believe it to be misdirected and waste of time and effort by us to try to reach more people that want to develop the game itself.

We have already been around for very long and the open source scene isn't really totally unaware of our existence. People are just not interested in developing a CCG. People are also much more likely to join if you can show them a factions completed cards + a ruleset that is "finished". Nobody wants to do the heavy lifting, while at the same time all already existing games get a million good ideas and suggestions from ther communities, which are mainly made up of players that can actually play the game. Then you get people to join.

It won't happen until then. I know I sound fatalistic but I think it's the bitter reality that we have to do the hard work ourselves, and not wait for some savior(s) to show up. There are none.

(Also, play with the idea that they do show up. Then what? We still won't be able to playtest the way you want to, we still have working tools for the cards. If anything, we need more coders to assist the ones already around.)
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Re: cs db & advertising

Post by Knitter » Sat Apr 21, 2012 11:18

This is probably a bit off topic but I've made a clone of the CS repo and placed my changes in github, also I added an installation of my current code to my testing server, you can probably get the card's info from there, at least name and rules. It could be used to get the data in an easier way.

I used the database that was offered in the forum but it contains only one single table with card data, if you can provide me with a complete dump that would probably help.

Most importantly, this is a personal/hacking project and is in no way related to the official CS project. I did it because I wanted to test some features (API for export/import) and wanted to see what I could do with CS.
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Re: cs db & advertising

Post by snowdrop » Sat Apr 21, 2012 17:02

I used the database that was offered in the forum but it contains only one single table with card data, if you can provide me with a complete dump that would probably help.

Will check out, im curious anyway sinne i havent seen caRds moving around in ss yet... Is testserver r unning latest public?
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Re: cs db & advertising

Post by Q_x » Sat Apr 21, 2012 17:56

People are also much more likely to join if you can show them a factions completed cards + a ruleset that is "finished"
If you mean 5 factions, that's 80% of work that needs to be done at all, and at that stage you will get short-term contributors only. Not that all those people won't stay for longer - basically all that will be left to do will be short term. Nothing exciting would be left after a month, and soon 90% of the people won't even bother reading anything before posting their bold ideas, and we will have to have "read this before posting rule changes proposal" to tell the people to rather start their own ruleset, than overhaul ORC.

Think of what could "early beta", or rather "really able to be tested" mean in our case. For me it's: two factions, 30 cards each, 6 quests, and our current ruleset (even if it makes not much sense from time to time), plus what we have already - lackey or gccg plugin. We can use dummy images where we won't have fitting illustration. Is such a goal really that far away, or more like a week or two of hard work soon after CS will be online?
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Re: cs db & advertising

Post by Knitter » Sat Apr 21, 2012 18:48

snowdrop wrote: As for next step I don't agree with us trying to get more people aboard: I believe it to be misdirected and waste of time and effort by us to try to reach more people that want to develop the game itself.
After the initial promotion I've just stopped spreading the work about WTactics. I have my signature with links in most forums I use and my e-mail and that's it. I also feel some resistance when people have nothing to see.
snowdrop wrote: It won't happen until then. I know I sound fatalistic but I think it's the bitter reality that we have to do the hard work ourselves, and not wait for some savior(s) to show up. There are none.
I don't think it sounds that fatalistic, it's just the way things are. People will only help with what they like and right now the project has a lot of ideas but not much in the way of a real product. I've often tried to get some sample cards to print but even that is hard as we don't have an official download with demos.
snowdrop wrote: (Also, play with the idea that they do show up. Then what? We still won't be able to playtest the way you want to, we still have working tools for the cards. If anything, we need more coders to assist the ones already around.)
Coders would be nice, very nice. I've been trading a few e-mails with foodoo and even if I help him, getting Cardscape to work properly is going to take some time. Sandscape development has suffered severely due to the many times I had to stop making restart hard and causing several bugs in the process.
snowdrop wrote: Will check out, im curious anyway sinne i havent seen caRds moving around in ss yet... Is testserver r unning latest public?
I update it every day, sometimes more than once a day. It's being used to test development and allow some friends to look at the game.

I've also given my IP to a friend so that he can connect directly to my development machine and help me with some ideas, right now I'm in need of feedback about how the game part is working and if it's useful or needs to be changed.
Q_x wrote:Think of what could "early beta", or rather "really able to be tested" mean in our case. For me it's: two factions, 30 cards each, 6 quests, and our current ruleset (even if it makes not much sense from time to time), plus what we have already - lackey or gccg plugin. We can use dummy images where we won't have fitting illustration. Is such a goal really that far away, or more like a week or two of hard work soon after CS will be online?
Maybe a month, to be on the safe side. I don't know how the code in sourceforge is, I just really cloned it and ported it to a PHP MVC platform that I'm used to, as it stands it lacks some features that are really important. foodoo is thinking of making some disruptive changes so we can assume that it won't be available in a week or two even if we work hard on it (either my current hacking project or the official one).

The 2 factions with 30 cards each sounds a good target, if we can release that as a alpha package I think it will help both the current developers and anyone that wants to join or is interested in WTactics.
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Re: cs db & advertising

Post by Q_x » Sat Apr 21, 2012 19:16

The 2 factions with 30 cards each sounds a good target, if we can release that as a alpha package I think it will help both the current developers and anyone that wants to join or is interested in WTactics.
That's almost what we already have (few RB cards too short)...

I was thinking about 2 weeks after CS is online and operating well. I have no clues how long producing CS can take, I guess it's not trivial.

To be really precise, I think 2 weeks would be enough for:
Invent and develop needed cards,
Proofread, check for other errors in cards and rules,
Check if other important docs are up to date (how to download, how to run lackey and gccg)
Take care for typesetting the cards, provide Lackey/gccg patches
Wrap up a release consisting of: cards, rules, world/game intro, project summary (a couple of sentences each), blog post, wallpapers and so on.
Planning ahead is not taken into consideration, even though having a TODO list helps with multitasking.
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Re: cs db & advertising

Post by snowdrop » Sat Apr 21, 2012 20:06

Q_x wrote:
People are also much more likely to join if you can show them a factions completed cards + a ruleset that is "finished"
If you mean 5 factions, that's 80% of work that needs to be done at all, and at that stage you will get short-term contributors only. Not that all those people won't stay for longer
As long as the game is not in a playable state and has stable rules and a core cardpool it is unlikely it will attract contributors. Especially the type of contributors that you/we seek - the ones that will stay around, do some heavy lifting and development of the game fundamentals.

At the very least we need 1-2 playable factions + the rules. Then we might get some attention or media. And even in that case I am very skeptical we will get any developers of the sort we want. Most people are passers by and don't have time or energy or, most importantly, interest. I also lack the interest myself to give the interest to others: I think all such attempts are waste of time and that we should always only target people that are serious about what they do. Better one of those than 20 - 50 random dudes that pass by, shout, eat time and resources, and the disappear in a chaotic (mutual) disappointment.
Nothing exciting would be left after a month, and soon 90% of the people won't even bother reading anything before posting their bold ideas, and we will have to have "read this before posting rule changes proposal" to tell the people to rather start their own ruleset, than overhaul ORC.
That sounds like the profile I'm describing, of the majority. It isn't interested in doing something "big", like writing rules from scratch, or deciphering all our docus etc. 90 - 95% of all players will never care about any kind of development in any shape or form. Of those 5% that do 90% will only want to tweak existing cards and minor changes to rules, while the rest maybe seek bigger changes, in which case they came to late (and reason fro that is that they wouldn't touch the project until we were serving it all complete for them...) and they have to fork or write new ones from scratch.

Think of what could "early beta", or rather "really able to be tested" mean in our case. For me it's: two factions, 30 cards each, 6 quests, and our current ruleset (even if it makes not much sense from time to time), plus what we have already - lackey or gccg plugin. We can use dummy images where we won't have fitting illustration. Is such a goal really that far away, or more like a week or two of hard work soon after CS will be online
I almost agree (shit, it happens ; ) on this - what we need isn't that far away to do some internal concept testing. Only diff in our views is that I would want the full two factions, with all their cards in the core set. Luckily that doesn't really make the goal that much harder to achieve, it only adds +40 more cards to your 60 (so that it's about 50 cards / faction, no matter which card types are around).

Our current ruleset makes more sense than ever ;) ...and I have spent many hours revising it, accompanied by yourself and others. Yeah, it's still rough and it lacks some sections and clarifications, but I'd happily fill in the blanks if people posted threads in here with rules-stuff I need to fix.
I was thinking about 2 weeks after CS is online and operating well. I have no clues how long producing CS can take, I guess it's not trivial.
We can't wait for CS since that may take everything from a month of sudden hard work from ravenchild or a year more. We have no dates on it, even preliminary, to my knowledge, and that's no wonder since raven has a real life as well to handle, as the rest of us.
I've often tried to get some sample cards to print but even that is hard as we don't have an official download with demos.
It's doable by getting the trunk or inkscape or scribus-files from bazaar or ftp-server. I agree though that there is no streamlined docus released by us for that purpose... maybe because nobody has wanted them = P Now that you mention it I should put a couple of mock-ups in a PDF maybe... or maybe q-x qould master that better than me... I dunno.... could be cool promo though.
I update it every day, sometimes more than once a day. It's being used to test development and allow some friends to look at the game.

I've also given my IP to a friend so that he can connect directly to my development machine and help me with some ideas, right now I'm in need of feedback about how the game part is working and if it's useful or needs to be changed.
I'll do my best to assist you as much as I can by testing. Will report to you then. Where you want it? Mail or forum?
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Re: cs db & advertising

Post by Knitter » Sat Apr 21, 2012 20:23

If you place your feedback in the forum it's easier to make public and to discuss.
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Re: cs db & advertising

Post by Q_x » Sun Apr 22, 2012 05:58

What would change with 50 cards, rather than 30? I don't expect your idea of initial, narrow, focused, internal, and limited in many other ways, tests to really work differently with 40 cards more (that is if you will have 60 cards in your deck, I think we can lower card count in testing deck temporarily to 45 to 50 cards without any harm to the subject). If you think, that adding 40 cards is not much - please think again, as for what we have (40 pieces?), we've been working on for a year or more, and we haven't even finished (nor we're close).

To the point: doing limited internal tests for the fourth time (or would it be fifth or sixth?) is IMHO, against the project philosophy. As soon as things are playable - not high quality play, but "just" playable - I think it's the time to release an alpha. Bundle, wrap it nicely, place a fancy cherry on top and just push it everywhere, explaining all the doubts. If this internal testing will look like it was for all the times I know of - that is month of preparation and hour of testing, it's barely reasonable to work on it.

If people aboard are busy, demotivated, lazy, shy, or simply too few, I won't blame anyone, but we might get lucky seeking for some fresh blood ASAP. If you think the community focused around BfW and FLOSS games knows about us, why not just keep reminding, and reaching for some new audiences, huh? We still could make more in places like sourceforge or freegamedev forums, but most important are seasoned, experienced CCG gamers and creators. And I think we all know at least some places to advertise searching for those, apart from inviting our friends to join the ride.

Again, I think it's the ivory tower v. bazaar - where you want the second model, still closing yourself, the ruleset and game progress in the first. The ivory tower - name it benevolent dictatorship, snowdrop-o-centrism, or in any other way - is incorporated in our "ways" so deeply, that we haven't even developed any collaborative workflows, not to mention the bus factor. To illustrate the problem: our latest launchpad revision is from 2011-07, It's done after I refused to process our illustrations the way they were processed, the last thing I've done was uploading Scribus file with finished Gaian template.

By the way - there are 19 gaian cards in the Scribus files, 17 of those not even updated with the latest layout. And there is no single RB or other card in the making, that's because when I wanted to make those, you, snowdrop, were unsure about template colors and the last thing was accepting the new template - I'm not even sure if the size is correct or not - 65x92mm is what sits in Scribus. You were producing all the cards in Inkscape for all the time, rather than using what is expected to be used.

In an ideal case it would be three clicks or so to export a PDF from Scribus indeed. If it's only me opting for Scribus here - just ditch it and be screwed later, I won't care, I like Inkscape way more anyways.
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Re: cs db & advertising

Post by snowdrop » Sun Apr 22, 2012 12:06

What would change with 50 cards, rather than 30?
What changes would depend very much on what strength and weaknesses a faction has. What I'm worried about isn't necessarily the card count itself. I'm worried about what too limited amount of cards might result in - a faction with "holes" in it function wise, making it hard or impossible to play it in a meaningful or interesting way.

I write "might" since I don't know yet. We have 7 card types. Creating a faction is not just a matter of deciding which cardtype it primarily uses, but finding some type of balance. If we exclude Heroes and Quests we still have 5 card types. We know we will need to have a huge amount of creatures since the game is creature centric. If you would however do a 30-cards per faction you end up with less than 6 cards per card type, in each faction.

Maybe that is too little to cover the way a faction is supposed to play. Then again, now that I'm looking at it again, it seems possible to pull it off with around 30 - 40. My point would be more valid if we went more narrow, say down to 15 or 20 or so.(And another part of concept testing is also to test if the games deck building works. That isn't doable with a too small pool. This is beside the point though, as deck building can be tested separately later). If people want to it is possible to create 300 cards in just 1 week, where at least half will be usable. It's just a matter of doing, not it being an un-climbable mountain.

A suggestion would for example be to ask every developer to suggest at least one card per week or something, even that would have brought us further than we are currently.
If you think, that adding 40 cards is not much - please think again, as for what we have (40 pieces?), we've been working on for a year or more, and we haven't even finished (nor we're close).
The only time we worked for real on cards was when old CS was around, and then it was actually productive and where most of the better ideas came to mind. Reason why cards aren't worked on is that nobody works on them. And reason for that is, again, time/interest coupled with no smooth or apparent tool to do it with. (As it stands now new cards should be created in forum, discussed if needed be, and then entered into wiki. Not sexy, but works, and no real hinder...)

That said, I changed my mind somewhere in the above about 50 being necessary per faction, as it doesn't seem to be true for testing.

To the point: doing limited internal tests for the fourth time (or would it be fifth or sixth?) is IMHO, against the project philosophy. As soon as things are playable - not high quality play, but "just" playable - I think it's the time to release an alpha.
Here's the issue at hand: In my mind there has been exactly zero internal playtests. What we have done, like 3-4 times the most, is to spend 1 - 3 hours on playing around with nowhere near 30 cards per faction, with never before tried rules, no understanding of them, and a single faction. For me that isn't really serious playtesting, since we lacked both the cards to playtest and the rules, not to mention the very few times it was done to draw any meaningful conclusion about anything.

Internal playtesting for me would be, for example, something like you suggest yourself - 2 factions, a pool of around 30 - 40 cards per faction, and then actually everyone that playtests knowing what rules they playtest, and in addition to actually playtest it for real by say playing at least 20 real games or so, trying out different builds, different factions. Is that much to ask? I think not. It's hardly any testing at all, but should suffice (heck, even 10 games would) to discover major issues in the rules and also to start polishing balancing and the finer points.

I don't agree that my understanding of what playtesting is or should be like is against the projects philosophy. If you for a second imagine that this would be a code-only project and we were creating software instead of a game, you would not code code code, compile it, and then release the EXE-file o the Windows-people without you as a programmer ever having tried it out before compiling it. Not even for testing purposes. You would of course try out your code to see the results. We are in a staget where we have not done that. Hence I don't want there to be some kind of official public release - why would we release a game (for playtesting) that has only been tried out in theory, but never for real?

We probably differ in the assessment of what consequences a very-untested release, of any kind, might have on the project. If we release something that not even we ourselves have tried out and just give it to the world and say "hey, playtest this for us, because we chose not to and didn't care finding out how broken it is before involving you" we risk giving the public the wrong idea about the goals when it comes to quality of the game. It will be bad PR and whoever was interested will see a broken game, and that's that - he/she will most likely never touch it again after that. That's the way players work. They won't become developers over night, nor will they be patient or understanding. What would happen is that we would not cause nice ripples. Instead they'd be bad. That is why I usually write about "internal" playtesting.

Secondly, to reconnect to project philosophy, our "internal" work is so public it is probably misleading of me to call it "internal" in the first case: What has been closed or hard for the public to gain access to this far? Whenever we did any playtesting with lackey the cards were around then, publicly and nicely packaged on site or even downloadable within Lackey by anyone that happened to have the program and know about us. Project philosophy is being open. We are. For anyone that takes the time and has the interest. There are no secrets. Heck, even our meetings are downloadable and aren't taking place in "secret" spaces. We have also never stopped anyone from showing up at them, in here, or anywhere in the dev process, let alone playtesting.
- I think it's the time to release an alpha. Bundle, wrap it nicely, place a fancy cherry on top and just push it everywhere, explaining all the doubts.
Yes, on that we agree: It is indeed what should be our closest goal. What I want to do more is to lower those doubts and the amount of "explaining" before we do the concept playtest release to the public, and with release it I mean explicitly telling the public about it and asking it to test it and get involved. As it is now we're not there since a) At least Banner lack some cards, maybe as much as 15 and b) we lack at least 1 gaian and 1 banner hero c) we lack a couple of Quests and d) we have not playtested. When all on the list happens we should indeed release a concept playtesting to the public. I think we have plenty to gain from doing that, but nothing to gain if done prematurely, as there is nothing to release right now.
If people aboard are busy, demotivated, lazy, shy, or simply too few, I won't blame anyone, but we might get lucky seeking for some fresh blood ASAP. If you think the community focused around BfW and FLOSS games knows about us, why not just keep reminding, and reaching for some new audiences, huh? We still could make more in places like sourceforge or freegamedev forums, but most important are seasoned, experienced CCG gamers and creators. And I think we all know at least some places to advertise searching for those, apart from inviting our friends to join the ride.
What needs to be done before getting to a point where new blood will flow into the veins can not be done by the new blood. It has to be done by us. You, me, whoever. When the above concept testing release has taken place, then we will, in the best of worlds, get new blood. Not before. Not by showing people fragments of untested cards, untested rules, two unfinished factions of five imagiend factions, and so on.

I am not against the idea of us reaching out, nor do I deny we need the manpower. We really do need it. I'm just questioning the timing and why you deem the project mature enough for it.

Again, I think it's the ivory tower v. bazaar - where you want the second model, still closing yourself, the ruleset and game progress in the first. The ivory tower - name it benevolent dictatorship, snowdrop-o-centrism, or in any other way - is incorporated in our "ways"
I'm not sure how or where I am closing anything, when all is public, all is open, and anyone can work on anything if they choose to do so. The issue here is not my control (of what exactly? Not to mention I have invited everyone at least on 3 diff occasions to be project leaders instead.). The issue is we haven't done enough for any serious playtesting of any kind to take place. I happily accept all the goals you lay out and agree with everything, except for the timing of when the public should be told to get involved. I also think your suggestion of the 30-card-playtesting is great. Now it is just about doing it. Hopefully forum discussions and setting goals like that will be motivating for us all instead of just a power leakage.

The ivory tower - name it benevolent dictatorship, snowdrop-o-centrism, or in any other way - is incorporated in our "ways" so deeply, that we haven't even developed any collaborative workflows, not to mention the bus factor. To illustrate the problem: our latest launchpad revision is from 2011-07, It's done after I refused to process our illustrations the way they were processed, the last thing I've done was uploading Scribus file with finished Gaian template.
The reason for why there are no collaborative workflows is that nobody has mapped them out(?), not that I have forbidden it or hindered anyone from doing so. On the contrary, if people find it easier to work using some kind of other structures, I would kindly ask you all to create them and present them so we can adopt them yesterday. This has been "discussed" in a newsletter sent out a year ago or so where we tried to identify the bottle-necks in the project. Problem then was there was no real discussion that lead anywhere.

I'm not sure I understand your example with Launchpad: It hasn't been actively maintained as you yourself asked for another solution and I in response opened up the ftp-server instead, saying we'll try it out and see what comes out of it. Reason for looking for other storage solutions was that everything took hours to do in bazaar, even a simple 1kb update, that somehow became a 1 GB one instead. Personally I see no reason for why we should have both the ftp and bzr around when one would suffice. I'd also be happy to settle with something else.
By the way - there are 19 gaian cards in the Scribus files, 17 of those not even updated with the latest layout. And there is no single RB or other card in the making, that's because when I wanted to make those, you, snowdrop, were unsure about template colors and the last thing was accepting the new template - I'm not even sure if the size is correct or not - 65x92mm is what sits in Scribus. You were producing all the cards in Inkscape for all the time, rather than using what is expected to be used.
65x92 mm is the correct (new) size and the only one we'll use in officially maintained releases unless we get very good reasons to go smaller in the future. As it is now with that size it fits all standard sleeves perfectly well, and also leaves some space in them.

The Banner Template doesn't exist, not because I'm unsure of it, but because nobody has created it. You did a kick-ass job producing an totally different alternative to what we had template wise. I am against using templates that differ that much stylistically in one and the same game (+ have diff layout and means of representing info) and we would either only use yours or the one we already had.

What I did instead by fluke chance is to almost finish creating the Shadowguild template (minus the kidney logo which probably needs to be replaced). That doesn't of course help us with the RB template not being around yet. In total though, there have only been 3 attempts made: 1 disasterous by myself, 1 by somebody else, and 1 total make-over by you, where yours was the only one that looked decent.

RB Template is still on the to-do list. And what we're talking about is really "just" a re-colouring, as I did with Shadowguild, of the "original" Gaian templates. Again, all files have always been around for anyone to take a bite off it. And yes, I have directly hindered progress by not accepting the few attempts that were made to re-colour it, because they didn't live up to what I believe is adequate quality, and yours wasn't a re-colour but an alternative.

I could try to put in some time on it next week, but in such a case maybe somebody else could help Knitter with the sandscape icons?

You were producing all the cards in Inkscape for all the time, rather than using what is expected to be used.
Yes, because Scribus wouldn't install properly on my system at the time, and because it in the end doesn't matter what I use to produce mock-ups. You are right though that we should create all the playtesting cards in Scribus instead of Ink, and that will be done. As your recall I also asked you about the latest Scribus file some week ago.

I haven't had a chance to start doing that yet though due to everything else. For example this week I have put in 8,7 h in the forum. It can also not be done in any meaningful way before I/we extract the data from the old CS database (maybe eased by the info Knitter gave in another thread).
If it's only me opting for Scribus here - just ditch it and be screwed later, I won't care, I like Inkscape way more anyways.
We've had that discussion many times already: We're not ditching Scribus since it was your choice for printing, and you know printing. As simple as that. Only thing that would change that is if it is impossible or near-impossible to do what we want in it when laying out text/images, and I wouldn't know about that since I have been cheating by usin inkscape :oops:
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