Online play via Lackey, perfect for playtesting

Lackey is a program that lets you play card games online via a virtual table. This is an easy way to playtest. Conveniently one of my friends who's programmed other games for Lackey has volunteered to do the programming for Phylo.

He needs the card data spit out in a spreadsheet of some sort. (or tab deliminated text file will work too) I realize we have no actually generated cards as of yet, but if the database that runs the website and generates images can be set up to dump the text to this type of file, it will let him work on making an actual playable online interface.

There should be a way to set up the background architecture to spit out the correct data in the right format if its set up to do it that way now.

Thanks! I'll see what I can do. In the meantime, I can definitely make an excel file of the data as cards are being produced.

i.e. fields would be:

Name:

Latin name:

Scale (1-9)

Food Chain Rank (1-9)

Diet: yellow - photosynthetic, black - simple carbon source, red - carnivore, green - herbivore, brown - omnivore

Biome: up to 3 of the seven (grassland, ocean, forest, fresh water, tundra, urban, desert)

Climate: up to 4 of the 4 (cold, cool, warm, hot)

Classification: Kingdom, Phylum/Division, Class

Special Stuff: (will include movement among other things)

Is this what you want? But to pull down from the data set entered into the website. If so, I'll see what I can do.

One way to do this is to test play is to make generic cards of a variety of attributes to how t plays (i.e. not neccessarily play with identifies organisms). Just call it organism with these stats.

Let me know what you think and we'll go from there.

Whoa... that Lackey program looked pretty cool (and also complicated).

That looks about right. Just so long as the various attributes are in different columns, it should work fine.

Aiden tells me the actual programming on the background isn't that complicated on the background, so long as you don't need lots of specific actions.

The current rules set for Phylo should be REALLY easy to program since it only needs about four commands:
Draw card
Play card
Discard card
Create token X


Cards can just be dragged and dropped on the play area once they're in play.

Great. I'm in marking zone (and also trying to put finishing touches to the website so that we can release proper), but I'll hope to have an excel file of 80 or so cards. Can you take a peek at the map-building rules (as they are right now), and see if the additions I've included look reasonable.

(http://phylogame.msl.ubc.ca/2010/04/06/phylomon-as-a-map-building-game-notes/)

cheers
dave

So has this plugin ever been finished? If nobody's working on it, I wouldn't mind helping

The answer is 'no, but I'm getting there'.

Behind the scenes, I have already created a plugin for Magic Set Editor, an alternative way to create playtest cards on the fly. My principal reason was because I wanted actual images to print out, but it also has a proven track record of exporting to Lackey.

From that point of view, I don't actually need any help - I was a good way through creating duplicates of all the cards already released, and only myself and a couple of the main MSE programmers knows more about the Lackey export. While I may need help, it will be the I call on .

There was a hiccup when my computer died - I just copied MSE onto this computer last night.

Dave/Fenris: I've done a small upgrade of the MSE plugin since the one I showed you. I was holding off releasing it until I could release the card file too.

I meant help Phylo in general, I've only had a bit of Lackey plugin writing experience, but I wasn't sure if it was still being worked on.

My lab's IT folks have been looking for a wordpress plugin that can generate these tabbed text files. No luck in finding one yet, but they've been pretty busy overall (our building is getting new A/V hardware throughout). If you know of one off hand, let me know, and I can install it to see how it works.

Ah, well how many cards are there currently?

There are currently 123 (by my count). I'm actually going to put up a pdf where you can print all at once before the week is up.

This sounds great!