Old School Hack Annotated Screenshot #2: Hand-Drawn Map and Tokens

April 27, 2011

This is the second post in a series of annotated screenshots from an Old School Hack campaign I’m involved in.   Brennen is the GM, Bryan and Brian, are the players.    If you missed the first post in this series…um..well, that was the link, so I guess I’ll just get on with it.

Hand-Drawn Map and Tokens

Brennen drew a quick map and scanned it in.   As much as I give Brennen a hard time about hassling me for ad-hoc drawing tools, he’s right—they’re necessary, and I want them too.  I “drew” a river with blue stones in a session, which is something I don’t want to ever repeat.  Over the Easter holiday, I prototyped some drawing support….  Ah, but until then…Brennen draws maps and scans them in.  He then sets them as his background on a tabletop or a map.  (There’s really no difference except a map can have a grid, and will be able to support vision later—actually supports it now, but it’s turned off in the beta thus far, because vision opens up a whole new can of worms.)

The tokens here are an accidental variety.  We have a couple of square ones, which is the result of a couple of us setting the same image for portrait and token.  (One of us should have known better.  One of us wrote the code that creates a pog-style token from the portrait, if you don’t supply a token.)  The wolf token is an example of EpicTable creating a token automatically from a portrait.  The other small round token was a separate token image supplied by Brian for his character, and the red stones are game pieces that are in the EpicTable game piece gallery.  Brennen’s using them here for enemy minions, rather than digging up images.

EpicTable-OSH-BridgeMap

Interactive Flash version   •  Open Image

Posted by John Lammers | Filed Under EpicTable Development, Screenshots  

Old School Hack Annotated Screenshot #1 – Game Intro Tab

April 21, 2011

Recently, the online gaming group I’m part of has been playing Old School Hack.  I really like the system, but instead of going on about OSH, I’ll point you to Matt Jackson’s posts about Old School Hack. 

Brennen actually ran this game, so all I have are screenshots.  He and I will do a screencast of a walk-through in a future session and focus on using various EpicTable bits to create something like a character sheet.  In the meantime, I’ll post a series of annotated screenshots from our session.

You have a couple options for using the screenshots here.  If you have Flash, you can just load the Flash version and hover over each of the bubbles to get more info.  If you’re morally opposed to Flash, you can read the same timeless prose right here and correlate it to the bubbles the old fashioned way.

Game Intro Tab

Brennen put together this nice intro to his game to set the stage for us.  It has an overland map of the area, some adventure background material, and even a set of suggestions for setting-appropriate names.  This is a great, creative use of EpicTable tabletops. 

EpicTable Screenshot - Game Intro Tabletop

Interactive Flash version   •  Open Image

Screen Maximizing View

You can maximize your screen real estate in EpicTable in a number of ways.  You can minimize the ribbon from a right-click menu or a double-click on any of the tabs at the top (Main, Characters, etc.). 

You can set the various panels, like Chat, Dice Tray, and Portrait Bar to "Hide" or "Auto-Hide", or you can detach them and drag them to a secondary display. 

In this screenshot, I have the Dice Tray and Portrait Bar hidden, and I’ve dragged the Chat window to my second monitor.

Overland Map

Brennen drew this overland map and scanned it in for use with EpicTable.  Drawing tools aren’t integrated into EpicTable (yet).  Those of you wanting ad-hoc drawing tools in EpicTable will have Brennen’s relentless campaign for them to thank when they arrive.

The map is, I think, part of the background he used. Alternatively, he could have used an “image object”. The adventure text and name list are “rich text objects”.

Like any other surface in EpicTable, you can use game pieces or character tokens on this map.  What I’ve found helpful is using stones or map pins (from the gallery on the Tabletops tab) to mark the group’s position or important landmarks.

Adventure Background

Brennen used a rich text note (from the Tabletops tab) to provide a brief set of adventure notes to get us all on the same page (so to speak). 

He could have used a plain old notecard, but those are plain text and he’s way too into typography for that.  <g>

Sample Character Names

Brennen included a couple lists of setting-appropriate character names right here on the game intro tab.  That’s a great idea.  Not only did it help guide the naming of our own characters, but it gave us a set to draw from for NPC names.

In EpicTable, this is a "rich text note" (accessible under the Tabletops tab) placed on the tabletop.

Posted by John Lammers | Filed Under EpicTable Development, Screenshots  

Beta Update: Beta-4 Released

April 4, 2011

First off, let me apologize for my long absence from the public part of this site. I’ll try to do better. I’ve been incredibly busy with the beta. It just doesn’t show on the face of this site.

So, where are we?

The beta is still a closed beta. Right now, it’s really just a handful of folks who have been following EpicTable for a long time. Why? To keep from getting overwhelmed with questions and issues and requests. The beta testers have been great–all I could hope for–but I sure didn’t need more of them, at least at first.

Now, things are settling into a bit of a rhythm. I just released beta-4, about a week after beta-3. There’s one issue that I want to resolve prior to opening up the beta. Partly, because it’s a painful one for the beta testers, but partly because having a lot more people encounter it is going to generate a lot of noise in an area that I’m changing anyway. I may as well get a lot of feedback on the new code, rather than on a known flaw. Once that issue is fixed, I’ll start opening the beta to a wider audience.

Speaking of wider audiences…. Some of you visited the EpicTable booth at Gen Con this year. (Thanks!) If you signed up for the beta, you’ll be in the next wave of beta invitees. However, if you visited the booth, you have some loot in your possession. Look at that carefully for a way to get into the beta right now.

Also, I very quietly–I guess too quietly–updated the Features page. That has a few tutorial videos on it, and I’ll be expanding that as time goes on.

Thanks for sticking with me. Talk to you soon.
– John

Posted by John Lammers | Filed Under EpicTable Blog