A game with hundreds of creatures needs a lot of design –> debugging –> play testing –> play balancing.
So I just spent a relaxing afternoon cobbling together a simple PDF layout system using PDF-lib that takes what the lexid creature database knows so far and formats each one into a series of playing cards, one poker-sized card per version of our placeholder art.
The ability text of each lexid is placeholder as well. It tells the design idea of what each lexid should do in the game thematically, without getting stuck on specific mechanical wording along the way. There’ll always be more waves of revision for mechanical text, right?
The important thing right now is to have some playable prototypes to print out and try every which way.
Here are some iterations of the PDF print sheets so far:
They’re ugly, incomplete, and rough drafts in every way–and so is the code that collated and generated them–but they will help a lot with paper prototyping!
Since these are laid out using JavaScript instead of HTML/CSS, they don’t look exactly like their playable digital prototype counterparts:
We keep on keeping on, working to avoid ludological languishing. 🙂