New Board and Screen Layout
I've been staying away from the digital version of the game for the last week or so, focusing mostly on artwork. But I decided to hop back in today just to see what it would take to reconfigure the board into the new vertical rectangle I'm using in the tabletop version, and to rearrange the screen around that.
A few hours later, it was done.
The rectangular board is actually easier to fit onto the screen with the other elements, and removing the draw and discard piles (because it serves no purpose to have them constantly visible in this game) opened up a lot of extra space. The character sheets now have plenty of room to breathe. Of course this is just on my enormous screen, I have no doubt that there will be issues to wrestle with on smaller devices. But I bet those problems will be much easier to solve than the old layout would have been.
It's standard coding practice to keep things configurable so they're easy to change in the future. But I was fairly sure I would end up doing this, so I was especially careful not to hardcode anything relating to the number of spaces in a row or which space was a start space or anything like that. That paid off when everything went so quickly today and ended up working on practically the very first try.
I need to draw new “tiles” for Base Camp and the Heart, but I'll probably wait a while before doing that. At this point I want to settle on what the art style for the overall game will be, and I won't be at all surprised if I end up having to redo all of the tiles I've already done. Why add more?
I did not do the thing I'm playing around with currently in tabletop where cards no longer roll against you, but get fixed bonuses based on what row you're on when you encounter them. I'm still not certain if I'm doing that at all, much less exactly what those bonuses should be. And that will involve far more substantial changes than just rearranging the layout of the screen.
Still, it's nice to see the digital version looking that much closer to the tabletop version, and closer to the vision in my head of what this game ultimately will be.