Regional Focus, 'Concepts' and opening up to you

A few small updates in this blog post, however, they have a large impact on the game.

Regional Focus

As much as it pains me (being a Sega fan boy), this initial edition of the game is US only and thus, there will be no Nintendo, Sega or other Japanese products and personalities represented. They will of course be added at a later date, but I need to focus for now.

Game concepts

In an effort to make the game as accessible as possible for non-English speakers and allow for easier translation I have started adding re-usable ‘game concepts’. Thus instead of having complex and inconsistent lines of text on cards, I am attempting to create a lexicon of terms that can be used when needed in the game. I have achieved this through creating nodes for each concept (See them here) and then used the Node Embed module to allow the embedding of these concepts anywhere in text fields that allow it. Then using Drupal’s view modes I can set the way these embedded nodes are displayed. At the moment it’s just a linked title, but in the long run there will also be an icon (or perhaps only an icon).

Opening up Card Creation

In an effort to (soon) allow others to create cards in the game I started adding guidance on what each field means to the game and what sorts of values to enter. Along side this I have tried to clean the node form with Drupal’s Conditional Fields module, only showing relevant fields based on the value of other fields, instead of everything at once.

A lot of this was inspired by a talk I saw by Paul Cutsinger at Mobile World Congress covering creating community in your games. It was aimed at computer game developers, but a lot still applied and I wanted to start paying close attention to allowing ‘fans’ of the game to be involved. I will also soon start posting these production blog posts in other formats and on to other platforms.