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designer_workshop:making_your_first_board

Before Starting Your First Board

The WarGear Board Designer is very powerful; it allows for high levels of sophistication in both a board's visual aspects as well as its game-play. As such, the Designer is necessarily complex, having features that can enable your map to do things that ..well, haven't even been thought of yet. WarGear has an extensive set of tutorials on this wiki to help you in this endeavor.

The Evolving Review Process

Once (or even before) you have started creating your board, one of the first things you will want to consider doing is //registering// your board here on the wiki site. If you are uncomfortable doing this, ask any Review Board Member to do it for you.

There is an evolving consensus in the Board Review community that the way a board goes from inception to live should be integrated with the review process such that the very last step of the process (the Review Game) feels more like a ribbon cutting ceremony than an inquisition. In order for this to work, the road to bringing a board live should involve the active participation of the members of the Review Board and Development Board, and the playing of a number of development (Dev) games. It is hoped that active discussion in Dev games alongside other activity on the board's Wiki page will facilitate this.

Bottom Line: The Review Board members are not here to intimidate; they are here to help. No matter what your level of knowledge or experience is, realize that all of us have been there at some point.

Keep It Simple

Even if you are comfortable working with images, and maybe even have created a map on another gaming site, it is highly recommended that after familiarizing yourself with the Board Designer, you avoid attempting a large, ambitious project. WarGear's Designer is constantly being updated as it becomes more and more powerful, but as a consequence, some of its newer and higher level features can be tricky to control. Even experienced designers spend a lot of time figuring out how to work around or leverage unexpected functionality.

WarGear has a very active community of designers, and there are a number of very helpful people out there to help you with your map should you choose to ask for help, but prepare for a few unexpected complications.

Bottom Line: It's fine if you want to dabble with some of these more powerful features, but avoid attempting a first map that may require hundreds of factories, dice-mods, view-only borders, etc. or combinations of these.

Choosing a Theme

WarGear has a Review Board whose primary mission is to maintain a level of quality and functionality for maps that go 'live.' However, the review criteria is subjective in nature. You can read more about it here, but generally speaking, if you are making a map that you plan to make available to the community at large, here are some things you should consider.

  • Avoid making boards that could be seen as being too close, or too redundant, to those already in the inventory of live boards available. The standards for bringing in a board which could be seen as too close to another one will be very high in order to justify its inclusion .
  • Your map should have varied facets of game-play. For a standard Risk-style map, this means a reasonable assortment of choke-points or dice mods, or some other features that give the game interest.
  • Your map size should not be too large - players don't like to have to scroll from the map to the play buttons and back all the time. Again this is a guideline, not a rule. However, if your board is larger than the average screen, be prepared to justify your reasoning behind it.
  • Your territories should not be too small - this is obvious, but it should be considered very early in the process. Think about what your map will look like even before you start working with the image.

Bottom Line: Consider the games already on the site and think of what isn't there that you would like to play, and what would make it fun to play. Be creative. Don't be afraid to think out the box, you can always stuff your brain back in there if things get out of hand.

Image Editors

You will need a good image editor that supports layers and can make images with transparency. Simple editors like MS Paint will not do the trick. Many of the designers on this site use professional or semi-professional image editors that support “Layers”, such as Photoshop or Illustrator.

Paint.net is a very popular PC based editor with a number of WarGear designers, and it's free! Another option is the open-source Graphic Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) which roughly parallels Photoshop in tools and features. Mac users should easily be able to find inexpensive but powerful editors like Acorn that will do the trick.

For more information on choosing an editor/images/fonts/etc, click here.

If you think you're about ready to take the plunge, make sure you visit this wiki page to learn how to make images for your board.

Get Started

Create the board image

You'll first need to create an image to use to form the background of the board. This can be done in a graphics program such as Adobe Photoshop or Paint.NET. If you can't afford the $$$ for Photoshop then Paint.NET is the next best thing as it's free and has all the features you need to create a board. You may want to base your board off a publicly available map or design something different completely different depending on your ideas. Board images should be in either PNG or JPG format - note that PNG transparency is fully supported if you wish to use it. The maximum board image size at present is 1.5MB. In general you should look at restricting your board size to 1024×768 pixels as anything bigger than that will mean players with smaller monitors will need to scroll around to play the game.

Circle Mode vs Fill Mode

Before you start on your board you'll need to decide whether you are going to do a 'Circle Mode' or Fill Mode' design. Circle Mode means the player's color and units are drawn inside a predefined circle placed on top of the chosen image. Circle Mode maps are generally made when a new board maker first forays into map making. It allows them to get an feel for how the designer works. However, it is very important to note that Circle Mode maps will NOT be allowed to be submitted for Review for public release. They are able to be played in Beta mode, but will never be considered to go Live.

In a Fill Mode design, the occupying player color is flood-filled into an area defined by a single continuous color on the board as shown below. The game engine will flood fill the color underneath the territory until it meets a pixel of a different color. Pulling an image off of the internet and simply placing territories on the image is NOT going to work for Fill Mode.

It's generally more work to create a Fill Mode design as you will need to carefully draw each territory boundary to ensure that it is cleanly delineated but the overall effect is often visually superior. Be careful when using dithering on the lines that make up your borders as this can lead to a messy effect when the territory is flood filled. For more information on borders and anti-aliasing, see the Fill Mode - Anti-Aliasing Help page. Also, utilize the the Fill All toggle to test that Fill Mode will function correctly and as expected once player owned.

Creating a Board

Access the board designer page by clicking on the Designer Icon at the top of the page, then select the 'Board Designer' tab.



Initially this will be an empty page so get started by typing the name of your new board into the 'Create New Board' field and click Go.

It doesn't matter what the name is set to, you can change this later on if needed.

this needs to be updated on-site too, it's referring to an old tab that no longer exists.

Board Status Types

There are 4 different board status types:

  • Live: Live boards are publicly available for any player on the site to start a game on. Once a board is in the Live state the designer is no longer able to make any changes to the board except the description, background color/border, and player colors.
  • Submitted: For a board to be made publicly available it must first be submitted for review by the site's board administrators. Setting your board status to 'Submitted' signifies that your board is ready for review. Your board design will be checked and you will be provided with constructive feedback if the board needs any amendments prior to public release. As per Live status you won't be able to make any changes to your board during this period.
  • Dev: Boards with Development (Dev) status can be changed in any way at any time by the designer. Games played while they are in Dev status (or in fact any status other than Live) don't count towards player rankings (even games played / won). In addition, the designer can start private games on the board with play testers and can terminate or restart games at any time - this is to make it easier for developers to manage updates to their boards.
  • Retired: Retired boards are those live versions of a board that have been superceded by another version - this is to ensure that only one version of a board exists in the Live state at any one time. If you create a new version of an existing Live board then the old Live board is automatically set to Retired when the new version is promoted.

Check out the Development Testers and Review Team thread in the Board Designer's Chat forum for a list of players who would be happy to help play and test your board!

Getting to Know the Board Designer Tool

Now that you've got a board ready to be created, it might be worth your time to get familiar with the tools you'll be using to make your board.

*A Quick Tour Of The Board Designer - With links to tutorials.


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designer_workshop/making_your_first_board.txt · Last modified: 2014/04/26 06:03 by M57