The development of the multi-touch version is going very slow, hopefully that will speed up in the upcomming days. Anyway, below you can find some development pictures of the prototype. Don’t look at the art as if the prototype/concept works the whole game will be rewritten and I will have an artist look at the graphics.
On the map in the upper left corner, my first attempt, I tried a dragging procedure. Click on the building icon and a house will apear which you could drag to the desired position. The resources you could drag into the desired holes. In theory it looked nice, but it didn’t work as if everyone would drag it would become chaos.
So I needed to figure out a way I could avoid dragging and I came with the idea to give the players a small minimap (this will only show the map, not houses, roads, or other things that will be placed on the mainboard). I created a test (in the upper right corner) to see if that worked. You could click on the ‘build village’ icon, then press the space on the minimap where you want the house and the pink round circle will appear around that space, press one of these circles to choose the position for the house on that space. Although it felt you had to press a lot of buttons before you could build anything, it works suprisingly well!
Then I came to the problem that I needed four mini boards around the main board, but there was almost no space to place everything, besides the players on the left and right side of the board on a rectangle table would have less space then the players sitting on the long side. Eventually the corners turned out to be the solution for this as as seen in the lower right corner picture.
I’ve been very busy with how to present the resources as well. At first I wanted the players to drag the resources in the desired hole, but now that I am avoiding dragging it should be presented in another way. I made another radar seperated into 17 blocks, those blocks are transparant at first, but when a resource has been received, that amount of blocks will color dark. The same color so no other player could know what it is. When you want to know how many sheeps you have, you click on the sheep icon and the blocks that contain sheep will turn green and you can count how many you got. When you release the button it will all be dark again. For me this method was ideal, but my test audience had a lot of critique, they wanted to show the amount of resources all at once and they were to spoiled to count so they wanted a number to give it to them straight.
The result can also be seen in the lower corner picture, it’s a ship with all the resources on it, but you can’t see the amount yet. A big number shows how many resources you got, when you press on it, the amount of all the resources will appear.
Next, the building …
