Today we are talking about our experience with Board Game Arena. We are going to discuss what board game arena is, what it was like adapting Dice Summoners and why we like it.
Transcript
hello and welcome to the deck awesome
podcast my name is brian and i’m joined
as always by the awesome kira and own
hello hi so today we are chatting about
our experience with board game arena
we’re going to talk about what it is
what it was like adapting dice summoners
for
the online world and why we like board
game arena so much
so board game arena for those of you who
haven’t come across it is a
fantastic online platform for playing
board games
there are tons and tons of free games up
there
you can play with your friends you can
play private games or you can
just log on and play with any amount of
strangers
it is fantastic you can play it on your
phone on your laptop
on whatever if you haven’t checked out
board game arena already it is
definitely worth doing
it has certainly saved us a bit of
lockdown meltdowns
throughout this whole coven experience
so why didn’t you guys tell us a bit
more about board game arena
so and board game arena is um a board
game platform that allows you to
play games where the rules have been
implemented using code so
it’s kind of a really good place to play
a game that you might not be
that familiar with or you might have
only played once before
or you haven’t played at all so you
don’t have to learn all the rules
it’s a good idea to do it but the
platform guides you as well so it’s
really good in that way
it makes it a little bit easier to get
started it’s a 2d platform for the most
part they do have
a handful of games in 3d and they’re
really
the 3d games done really well look great
but they
are few and far between because it’s
quite a hard platform to develop 3d
games on
but everything that you have in a in a
3d game
in real life can be implemented or well
most things anyway in 2d so
the platform doesn’t really um hinder
that in any way like
dice you can do a little bit of visuals
with the dice but effectively
your result is usually fine to represent
2d the only thing you’re missing out on
really is your minis but otherwise
as good as exactly does it you don’t
lose that
and then it’s free so you can play most
games on it
for free there are premium games as well
that you have to pay to play you kind of
place pay a subscription fee and then
you get access to all the premium games
so like to start out with play the free
games there’s so many of them
and it’s loads of fun and then go to
premium if you’re if there’s a game you
really really want to play and you
know that you that it’ll be worthwhile
go into it because it’s free as well
it’s a really good platform to figure
out games that you might like in the
future to buy and own
and to get an idea of a game that people
have been talking about
and you’re curious about i suppose you
say as well that the even though
the premium is a subscription service
it’s not
ridiculously expensive and if you want
to play premium games
with any of your friends or that online
you don’t all have to have premium
accounts that just
one person can get a premium account
they can host the game and invite
invite their friends to play which is a
cool
feature it encourages premium but it’s
not
it’s not going to break the bank for
everyone if you want to play it yeah i
i absolutely love board game arena
there’s so many games out there that
are implemented in board game arena and
playing them
also especially playing games you played
before you know with friends
playing on board gamer with all the
rules implemented is so fun because
i learned actually sometimes what
specific card rules are but you don’t
have to keep constantly
reading what the cards do or their
effects and stuff like that you can just
play the game
so if you’re playing something like roll
for the galaxy you know you don’t have
to worry about all the combinations and
all the different
like specifics your actions will show
you what actions are available to you
and then which ones you can kind of ship
out and all that kind of stuff is
handled for you
in the game which makes it a breeze but
you also learn more about the games you
love
so it’s just it just means less reading
of the rules more time playing and
there’s a great selection
yeah so we talked talked a bit at the
start about how we adapted
our game dice summoners for board game
arena i mean
why why would we have done this
yeah well we we heard about board game
marina a while ago i think i
can’t remember how long ago before we
started thinking about implementing dice
summoners but we just we really wanted
to
kind of give people a chance to play
dice summoners before they bought the
game and we had
we had to look around at different kind
of alternatives to board game earner
different choices out there kind of like
you can have steam games you can have
tabletop
simulator those kind of things they’re
all really good uh
board game marina we taught was as kind
of developers ourselves
it was that gave us the best platform to
kind of create the game
and it also is the best kind of
community that we wanted to be part of
so i kind of had all these pros going
for it that just meant that board game
arena was
like a really good option nice i suppose
as well as
helps that uh covert lockdown happened
and everyone was stuck at home with
nothing to do and
in the very first lockdown when the
novelty of all of this was
still going on and people weren’t stuck
in their houses staring at the window
longingly
we had a bit of time to to work on us i
know i say we
i know owned it the absolute lion’s
share of this
he couldn’t have done it without me just
being there personal
cheerleader but realistically i did
nothing so
[Laughter]
yeah there’s some of some of the best
pros about board gamer
for choosing it is i think not having to
download the game is another one that
because if you go steam
you have to download the game everyone
has to buy the game and then you have to
play it together
whereas this you know you can play on
your mobile phone and then if something
if you want to switch to your pc you can
do that because it’s all web-based
and do you know the sessions are fine
you know you can close things out you
can
reopen them again you know all that
stuff is handled in the back end
by the server so you know it’s it’s just
a really handy way of playing board
games
i think as well what pushed us to do it
was the uk games expo
at the time we the uk gamedex was going
to be our first
virtual games expo and we didn’t really
know
how to approach it we were just
brainstorming what we could and couldn’t
do
to get ourselves out there for for the
uk games expo
and having an online version of our game
came up as a really
big pro to having something to show
now we didn’t get it done in time for
the actual expo itself
but at least it was part of kind of the
ideas we were thrown out there to get
ourselves in a better position
for virtual than we were at the start to
covet that was kind of
just getting ourselves ready for what to
do in the online world yeah so
you know why why did we go with board
game arena over the lexus team you
mentioned that steam was a was a good
option for playing online board games as
well
if you’re considering developing your
game or developing a game
why board game arena over the likes of
steam or tabletop simulator and like
that
yeah i think if you if you’re focusing
it from kind of a software development
point of view or like a coder’s point of
view
and you’re looking at all these
different kind of options available to
you steam is great because you can
develop it any way you want so if you
are
a computer game developer you can use
the skills you have and then develop the
computer game
i’m not i used to be but not anymore so
i think as people there’s a lot more web
device developers out there
or web coders who understand like
javascript and php and stuff like that
and board game marina is a really strong
option for them
tabletop simulator is also great too the
problem is the restrictive
implementation of the rules means it’s
much harder to implement
exactly what the game rules are when
you’re playing the game and so people
can kind of stray off course
and do the wrong things or put cards in
the wrong places and so
it can get a bit more confusing for the
players because they have to be like a
master at the rules whereas in porque
marina
you can make sure that the person can
never go outside
that rule set yeah i think on on
tabletop simulator and tabletopia
it’s more like they’re providing a
platform and you try and implement your
game
on top of a kind of a very comprehensive
platform
so they’ve decided kind of the look and
feel of everything and you add your
pieces in
and that’s really really helpful you
just have to really worry about your
components and then people can do
whatever they need to do
to get the game going because they know
how to play your game but
our reach probably wasn’t far enough
that enough people would know
exactly how the rules are meant to be
played and would invest the time in
learning all those rules
and rather than kind of forcing anyone
who was interested in our game to have
to learn all the rules
cold and then try and play a table of
simulator we just taught
having in a board game arena means that
yeah the game guides you into having to
to when you click someone a creature
the basic creatures pop up onto the very
clever thing of
having them appear at the top of the
screen to kind of force you to go
oh this is what i now have to deal with
and
you’re guided along so even if you
only do a brief run through of the rules
you have enough there that you
are kind of guided along and and
tabletopy and tabletop simulator didn’t
do that in a way that
we taught people who wouldn’t be
familiar with our game would find it
easy to pick up for bigger games that’s
not a problem because
they’re famous enough and people have
them in real life enough that
they don’t need to worry about that but
we probably weren’t there
and then like as on said steam you need
to be like a software house to
to to build a good game on steam that’s
going to get
the money in to counteract how much time
and effort you’ve spent on it
because like steam is a is a brilliant
platform but it’s
you’re competing with computer games and
board game selection on there is really
high quality it is
a board game selection that can compete
with computer games like
really good renderings of gloomhaven and
psy and terraforming mars are all on
there and they’re really good quality
well certainly a lot to think about so
board game marina
does make it a bit easier for you know
used to set it up so players will have
to follow the rules of the game
and can figure it out so no more swiping
money from the bank in monopoly now it’s
you’re following the rules or nothing
yeah
if if someone’s interested in getting
into developing on board game arena does
it cost anything
um no i think if you are a coder that
you want to get involved in board game
all you have to do is sign up and you
can get a developer account
in board game arena and there is so many
great projects of
board games that haven’t been
implemented yet but once you get the
access then you can start downloading
other people’s projects
and checking them out and seeing how
they managed you know javascript
connecting to the php
and there’s lots of different options
there and you can also start doing some
tutorials
on some kind of basic games like you
know reversi
and hertz and they’ll help you kind of
understand
the kind of games that work the best in
board game arena myself and ellen bo
looked at the tutorials to make sure
that we could figure out a way of
coming up with how we’d implement dice
summers on on the platform and
that really did give us a lot of
information the tutorials aren’t like
comprehensive of every single
feature of board game arena but they
definitely cover
the fundamentals and you can kind of get
a much better idea when looking at the
code if you are somebody
who codes even as a hobby you might get
enough information there on what you
need to do before we start
recording we had debated what the word
for hobbyist coder is
if you are someone who codes as a hobby
can you message us and let us know
because we haven’t got to the bottom of
this
that’s just i say coders coders
code hobbyists i don’t know it’s hard
there’s no there’s no defined word out
there
or a threshold
you guys did the majority of us tell us
a bit about how the developing of the
game went
yeah so it like here i said it started
off with the tutorials with the
tutorials we both kind of
try to figure out you know this
framework this board gamer framework
could do
and what kind of potential it has we
would take the tree to tutorial projects
and kind of mess around with them and
see what kind of messages we can send
and then we started working on the
basic kind of platform of dice summoners
which is just kind of
like no dice just cards and we started
from that very basic principle and see
see if we could get like javascript
sending synchronous messages
and changing the state of the back end
and then once we had that then we
started developing the new features uh
yeah so cairo was great she was
we kind of worked together architecting
and designing the game and then
bug fixing and then i wrote most of the
code yeah owen had much more
work to do on this after work every
evening was working away on actually the
bulk of the code
i just dipped in it and i was also here
there you can because you can get
everyone else’s projects as well
so you can get a cast as a burgundy and
you can see other people’s
implementations you can see
kind of what the general approach is to
developing the games which is kind of
hard to describe but there’s in the
framework there’s
obviously like there’s the back end of
the php and there’s a front end
of where you can kind of control how it
looks like the state of the game
and then you also have the javascript
which then controls the nice pretty
stuff
in the front end but it doesn’t do a
whole lot of logic and yeah if you once
you start getting your head around that
yeah because you know there’s lots of
different ways of there’s lots of
different board games out there so
there’s lots of different approaches you
can take
to developing it we went with a very
synchronous
approach where each state had someone
do something and then it goes on to the
next day there wasn’t much asynchronous
kind of
actions that could happen at any moment
and that kind of fit perfectly in with
what porgy marina wanted to do
so we stayed within that kind of
framework very easily but you can extend
it and you can add in cool things
santorini has a very cool
three-dimensional javascript front-end
i’m sure that took a long time to
develop
but yeah i’m sure in the back end it
looks almost identical to
error code of that kind of synchronous
state yeah the raw javascript i think
you were saying
really means that there’s a lot of work
to everything that you write
so you have to be prepared for there’s
going to be a lot of
a lot of code even for the simple things
to some degree yeah
architecting it was it was difficult i
think we didn’t come up with a
massive plan as to how we were going to
approach every single feature
we kind of went in with our approach of
developing the basics the fundamentals
and then just taking our time and seeing
how to fit all this stuff together
without actually digging into the code
too much and then we slowly kind of
added it together
in a piece by piece i think for
developing
in board gamer the game definitely needs
to be fully finished
and fully released because changing
things isn’t that easy
so yeah i think there’s loads of games
that are already out there that
publishers have said they want on board
game arena
but they just don’t have the developers
to work on it so if you
are if you’re a coder definitely check
out one of those cool so
if if you’re going down the road of you
know maybe it’s your own game maybe you
want to
work on a game you physically played
what are
the stages for you know sitting down at
a keyboard
to get in the game fully release
what kind of hurdles you have to go
through yeah i think you mentioned the
first one which is
you got you got to set yourself up as a
developer and board game arena
and then you have to get rights from the
publisher to actually
develop the board game now luckily
there’s a whole bunch of board games
there already that publishers want uh
developed but if you don’t see
the board game there you can always
contact the publisher and say hey
i’m a board game arena developer this is
my first game
i would love if it was if i could you
know develop this for board game marina
uh you’d be surprised how often
publishers would say yes to that maybe
they have their own plans
for like creating a game in steam and
they don’t want one in board game really
but at least you know if you don’t send
a message you won’t know that’s true we
we asked the the publishers of die
summoners and they were very obliging
i think it was i sent a mail email to
kira i think it was
and i responded to agreed yeah very
handy a little bit of nepotism there but
still
um i do think you have to go through
board game arena before approaching
anita companies yourself
just check that board marina themselves
have contacted a lot of publishers
so they have a list of people they’ve
recently contacted to see if they could
license the game so
so don’t be afraid to approach them
anything we asked them about
they were very very helpful the team
that works on it and you might be
uh kind of hesitant to say i’m not gonna
develop an entire board game
that seems like a lot of work but i
think most of the work is done by the
framework
you’re not gonna have to worry about
sending messages back and forth you know
dealing with states
if you work inside that framework they
have enough of the functionality in
there
to allow you to do whatever you want
yeah i’ll try to
so once you’ve done that you’ve kind of
figured out you can kind of send the
messages to the publishers and not worry
too much
about what the response is you would
then start working on the tutorials
and the technical documentation like
kira said it’s not
uh perfect and it won’t cover all the
use cases
but there’s a lot of information in
there so what each kind of you know
front-end
messages do and how it relates to the
back end and once you do the tutorials
you’ll get a very firm understanding of
how to develop a game in board game
arena obviously once you start
developing
the board game then it starts facing
into issues
of how do i get specific functionality
to work
and that can be very tricky we found
that the forums were really good
tool like trolling through some of the
answers on certain functions and stuff
like that
a lot of people encounter the same
problems like if you have a dice or a
card game
people have discussed hundreds of things
that are related to dicing card game
utilization of
of the board game libraries available on
on board game arena
so like the resources on the actual site
itself
are good they’re just maybe not
everything isn’t that straightforward so
just uh
persevere and look around the whole site
to try and get the information that
you’re looking for
and if you can like one of the things i
just did
to help out was i just played a lot of
board game
arena games and then told on when i saw
features that we might want to use
and so that we could just does it a lot
of people allow their
code to be available freely available
for to you
on board arena so you can take a copy so
when we found games that had the thing
we wanted implemented we could just get
a copy of the
data and find out how they did that and
then copy it
yeah plagiarism yeah try and plagiarize
as much as possible
there’s so many people play plagiarism
plagiarism is highly illegal if you
steal from one person that is completely
wrong
if you steal from many people that’s
research perfectly
there are some really good examples of
games out there that do some really cool
things
yeah you might might look at you know if
you look at the tutorials you might get
a bit confused as to why board game
arena is so popular because
it doesn’t seem like it has that much
functionality
but it’s kind of what the community does
with that framework
is really interesting and really cool
there’s so much interesting things that
they’ve done like you know i’d say
centering is obviously the best looking
game out there i’ve seen
but we’ve seen like great
implementations of love letter and
dungeon pets
and dice forge that kind of helps us
especially with dice related games and
card games can i figure out what we want
and how we want the kind of flow to look
inside the game yeah so once you get
that kind of settled down you’re kind of
figuring out
how to do it you create the basic kind
of game you have
then you can start releasing the game
onto the on to board game arena
and as a developer you’re gonna be
pushing everything to alpha and this is
kind of
like the very basics of the game and
then at that point you can also invite
people in to play
the game at that point and see and kind
of mess around with it and see if you
can get bugs out of it i kind of develop
new features but yeah that whole process
until the game is fully kind of
completed you’re going to be in alpha
for a long time
just trying to figure stuff out so you
need you need 10 people to approve the
game and
if you’re not that popular a game or you
don’t have that much of a backing
it can take a while to get 10 people
with the right credentials to
to approve review and approve the game
so
it will take a few weeks if you’re if
you don’t have enough people who know
your rules
for the most part the testers are
brilliant they’ll go on they’ll give you
lots of great feedback
they’ll say oh look we tried this out
just didn’t really work if you fix this
and get back to them and go oh look
there you go i think i’ve sorted that
out now
they play through it and everything
seems fine give you the big ol thumbs up
i understand there’s lots of
functionality that you don’t have to add
straight away into the game
kind of flashy stuff that we put in you
know like we didn’t even remember
defense tokens until much later on and
then we have like dice and then we also
had translations
so there’s lots of other things that we
don’t have to worry about too much like
if you’re waiting for artwork from the
publisher
and they don’t want to give you the
final artwork until like you are done
you have to have placeholder stuff that
can all be you know developed with
whatever you have because i know we like
once we enter beta then we started
putting in like the proper artwork
proper big content
and kind of making it look nice as
possible but yeah alpha alpha
lasts a while and then once it goes into
beta that’s
like a big release point that would that
one took a long time for us but it was
really satisfying to see it once it goes
in the beta all of your bugs
or at least the ones you found should
have been resolved and they were for
dice summoners
you might still get some feature
requests we get some feature requests
for cool things that people want to see
but we’re not fully able to implement it
at that time
then once it goes into beta then instead
of it just being a few
people play testing it like people who
are like being playtesters for a long
time
it’s now open to everybody the entire
world and you’ll
immediately see your plays go from like
two
a day to about like a thousand a day
and if there is any bugs they will be
found out pretty quickly
yeah people that is one great thing
about board game arena is people aren’t
hesitant about going oh hey
found a problem here you go so i know in
a nice way and they’re not just
slamming the game they’re going oh hey
look i noticed that this didn’t work
exactly the way i thought it would you
know is that the way it’s supposed to or
does that need to be fixed
so for the most part the the feedback
and the community there has been
fantastic with uh
with helping us out yeah they’re a lot
luck nicer than
my usual people who are giving me bugs
in my actual job
these these guys like help you go
through it and they kind of point out
what’s going on and if you want to talk
to them you can kind of ask them
questions and it’s a very friendly
atmosphere
there’s not this whole kind of you know
like offer product kind of thing because
it’s a free game
everyone’s just like happy that there’s
games there rather than
privilege yeah they want something out
of it and very nice people yeah
so wargame arena has a huge amount of
resources available there for you which
is
incredible so they’ve got the tutorials
that you guys were talking about
there’s the other games that you can
borrow code from
it’s it does sound like it really offers
you a lot of
functionality to to getting your game up
and running so
would you say all you need is the stuff
that’s available there
on board game arena and eight to ten
plus years of coding experience
i didn’t i haven’t done php in a long
time
and i obviously i’ve do javascript
development but it’s kind of newer
javascript
i don’t know be harsh on board game
arena but it’s like kind of an older
versions of stuff
but that’s only because it works with
the framework so you’ll be sending ajax
but it’s not it’s not a big deal i think
anybody who is interested in web
development you don’t have to
dig too deep into php and javascript
you just need to understand you need to
have done something similar whether it’s
php or just java or c
plus or whatever you once you have that
kind of knowledge you can create a game
pretty quickly
because you’re mostly just calling
libraries uh yes hello
so it’s a library still a box you guys
still open
close not really what i meant but yeah
that’s why i didn’t get involved
i do think that the platform has a lot
of the answers on their own website we
didn’t have to stray too far
from there are some good like tutorial
videos and stuff like that on youtube
and stuff
but actually well mostly own but me i
know found a lot of the answers that we
were looking for
on the on the site itself or just true
perseverance of like
tweaking the use of some libraries and
functions yeah i i think if you’re going
to develop yourself
you’re going to have to put in some
pretty strict development guidelines for
your own kind of work
because you know if you are developing
the game from scratch
you’re gonna have to come up with your
own backups of the data
maybe maybe put it all in github or
bitbucker or something like that
now obviously borgia marina has their
own kind of code stuff in there
but you’re better off having one created
by yourself
you can get into issues of you know
change changing a small bit of ajax here
or
changing something there and then your
game not working and
it’s really difficult to find out why
without like because you can put in
system prints
and the debugging is quite good and
there is like lots of exception logs
inside boardgamer but it can be tricky
to hunt down exactly why
kira mentioned it before of using the
forum that’s really good but at the end
of the day it’s going to be
hard work and perseverance trying to
figure out how
some bugs occurred i remember one bug me
and carol worked on for like a day
and it was an sql bug and i can’t
remember what it was but we ended up
spending a day and you know it was a
one-line fix but it was a really
important line
so it’s not so different from coding
then
one day you can do like a thousand line
of code and the next day you’re fixing
one specific line
and you figure out why this line won’t
work yeah it can be it could be
tricky that’s just that’s the nature of
javascript and php i think yeah you
can’t locally kind of run things
you kind of have to chuck it up onto the
server on board game marina to kind of
get
understanding of it oh yeah that would
that made it quite
like difficult once you go into alpha
there’s nowhere you can like or it’s not
easy
to just create a test instance i don’t
think
that’s available to you so that can make
it a little bit frustrating it was
definitely
hard for me i’d just be looking at the
code
cold if i was trying to help out with a
bug or
just like looking through things to try
and figure out if we could do something
better
so so that definitely is a little bit
different
i guess that’s kind of like
old-fashioned style of coding
definitely when i was working on
mainframe you know it was
wasn’t an easy test environment but it’s
kind of the same sort of system so
so there’s there’s great features that
boardgame marina has
but it’s not like a full fully fleshed
out
development environment in in that sense
in the modern kind of
all the bells and whistles yeah yeah i’d
agree with that and yeah but
it’s still developing an id still like
choose visual code or or
intellij or something like that is that
even what i used i can’t even remember
what i use we use visual code
was it visual yeah this is studio code
yeah it’s busy studio i don’t know they
renamed themselves it
used to be visual studio and then now
it’s called code or something something
well visual studio yeah community is the
c c sharp
one that i use yeah but yeah it only
really does php
and kind of javascript it’s it’s hard
because you know you’re calling
libraries that
the id doesn’t kind of yes because it
there’s like table
board game arena will interpret the code
a little bit differently than
what the id expects so kind of look a
bit weird
but yeah there’s like if you you know
you once you start developing and you
start doing tutorials you’ll see
that there’s common things you’re going
to do to kind of see what the bugs are
see what the issues are
especially when compilation and you’ll
start to get the hang of it pretty
quickly
cool so if you were going at this second
time round again
or you were going to take another crack
at it would you do anything differently
yeah it’s a tough one i think we made
the right decision
on how we were going to approach the
game to be like synchronous
calls i think we would have understood
a bit more about how the kind of
communicates with the back end so what
you know one of the problems we had is
we we hard coded in a lot of things
that we didn’t realize that would be
variable or want to be configured later
on
because you know dice summer’s board
game doesn’t have them as variable
so things like having a global view of
the
defense tokens or having like randomized
deck sets starting off those things that
were very difficult to implement right
now
because of the approach we made at the
start so we have there’s
this there’s this thing in in uh board
game arena and it’s called a
materials and inside the materials
pretty much has the state and all the
like
all the starting off data that your game
needs to run
so whether that’s all the cards and all
the cards abilities and what the dice do
and structuring that in a very impo very
kind of
easy way at the stair helped us finish
the game pretty quickly but also kind of
set
us in stone as to how the game was going
to be developed in the future but yeah
i think we i think we made the right
approach i think that the end result was
really great i think that the fact that
we have a game online
especially right now is fantastic it was
it’s great to see people playing our
game even though
like it’s been hard right now to to kind
of push dice owners
and work on on developing the war game
or
selling the board game because we don’t
have events that we can go to and kind
of sell
people so i’m really glad that we have
this uh opportunity
i definitely think borg marina was the
right choice for our platform
i think that the more we’ve learned
about it versus the other platforms
available the more i think we can kind
of be happy that we made the right
decision
to to allow the most people to play our
game who wouldn’t have played it before
uh and it would have been great to have
a bit more time before the uk games expo
so that we could have showcased it there
and i guess
i would say that to everyone the play
testing and bug fixing
is going to take up a little more than
you expect the platform has
rules on how to implement things and and
then it has those things that don’t work
that well
and things that do work a lot better and
though there’s no particular
things like turn based there were a few
things we did
that meant that turn base took a lot
longer and i think that they were some
of the
feature requests that came in like
straight after mark
like defense token strategies and stuff
like that
that sort of thing where we play at real
time
at a table in real life and then you
move to a platform
and this is these are the things that
people want to do so that they can play
with their friends
who maybe can’t get online at the same
time as them and
i guess we weren’t expecting that to be
so popular we actually didn’t use board
game
in to play long games over a long period
of time with people
so because that wasn’t our usage profile
we hadn’t really taught that it was so
popular and
then once we had gone to alpha we had
realized that there’s a few people who
do
who play like that and alpha testing
took a lot of like pushing to get people
to to play even though we got good
reviews
it just took time to to get people
who are willing to to submit reviews and
and get it
help us get it over the line even though
the community was so great and everyone
was really really helpful but
but it it’s still a long process and
we talk because we’re the publisher and
the developers
it might be a little bit easier and i
think that it was for some of the steps
but for other steps it’s still just it
still is a matter of time
you make a good point about when we
released into beta that we had
turn-based combat and there’s issues
with it that was probably our problem of
when we tested it we always tested it in
real time and then there were some
fundamental issues with the turn-based
game
but you know the community created bugs
about it and then we’ve resolved those
books pretty quickly but
i think that also shows one of the
powers of board game marina which is
if you kind of develop it inside the
framework
and you make sure to follow their kind
of guidelines once you release that game
you get a whole bunch of features that
you don’t get in our games
that just come for free so obviously
there’s the chat that people can
to talk about you also have this
turn-based game that can last you know
days so each each day person plays a
move uh kind of like chess that’s kind
of cool that just comes for free
and then you also have translations
which i love so you can have
you know people play in japanese and
they’re having a great time and
obviously the cards are the artwork
isn’t converted into japanese but
the tooltips are they kind of hover over
it and that’s
perfect for people to kind of understand
the game and play the game
in a different language once you follow
all those guidelines all that
is done and you might be confused like
well i didn’t translate my game with the
japanese
you there’s also people there’s
community in bourgeois marina who will
translate your game for you for free
they obviously get something they get
like you know four game arena tokens
that they can
you know use uh but that means that then
you have this whole bunch of people from
all over the world translating
your game and then making it available
to everybody which is increasing awesome
to see i
remember we didn’t even know it was
happening and then we check our stuff
and we have like in spanish and greek
and
it’s all over the place so that’s
awesome to see so once you follow those
guidelines it just becomes part of it
now obviously we had bugs for all these
things because
we didn’t really pay attention to
translations until beta
because we didn’t really understand how
it works but once the book started
coming up then we figured it out
but that really was amazing to see like
because on board game geek people
started reviewing are
reviewing the game that they had played
on board game arena so
like we were seeing reviews coming in
from you know south america
antarctica russia they were coming in
from literally everywhere and we looked
where people getting this
oh yeah the online one oh yeah but it
was incredible it was
very humbling that was a bit of a two
two-sided sword though because
obviously the vorge marina one doesn’t
have the full fleshed-out
design that our actual game has so
you’re kind of being judged on a fairly
a limited version of your game but but
it was still great to see people
tell like so many people playing from
all over the world yeah i wasn’t
expecting that i i didn’t expect people
playing the board game arena game
only to you know review it in board game
geek but people do
very strange yes they haven’t played the
actual game so i feel that’s a
word yeah so i suppose the the real test
of
you know would you recommend board game
arena or not
is would you do this again our future
games
all the next and upcoming dag games
which you guys should definitely
subscribe to
uh so you hear about them first will we
launch those games on board game arena i
think so
i think there are games where we can’t
because they’re
one playthrough games but there are
definitely games like bomber bots
that we will be pushing to board game
whether we make it free or premium
it’s tough to know we love the idea of
free just because it means that people
can play the game and then buy it but if
people are struggling to buy the game
then it can be you know it’s
struggling to put it down it’s for free
i think that one of the things you have
to consider when you’re
deciding on uh whether your game i guess
should should go on board game marine or
not
um as well as whether you should put
your next game in borge marina
is what sort of game it is like worker
placement games and
turn based games are really really
suited to morgan marina but
i think we’re gonna be releasing a
escape room style game i’m not sure that
will fit into the structure
of organ marina and won’t really help i
think that it’ll kind of it won’t
look as good or feel as good as it as a
game on there
so i definitely say if you’re a
publisher of like social deduction games
really think if that’s the right
platform for
that’s gonna that’s gonna sell that game
to everyone playing
how like and rpgs and stuff like that
would probably keep on rpg
preferred sites for definitely for uh
the main bulk of our like games board
game
board real board game board games i
think it’s a good platform
yeah because i assume like when i play
board game run and playing a social
production game
i will play over zoom and then i’ll have
board game marina as
like on the side where people can play
it so i’m using different ways of
communicating with people outside of
board game arena because
their chat is pretty much just text
based so you have to kind of be wary of
that of
you know if you if you require a lot of
player interaction and player
discussions and player conversations it
can be done
in board game arena but you’re going to
either have to automate it in a way
where people are given options and
choices or
you have to implement some sort of voice
thing so any final tips for someone
who’s considering uh
getting into getting into developing a
game or having someone develop their
game on board game arena
yeah i i would say download a load of
steam
board games play a whole bunch of board
game running board games
and check out tabletop simulator and
tabletopia
and just play as many of these games you
can you don’t have to like
complete any number or anything just
just mess around see what kind of
features there see what kind of
functionality is there
and if it interests you and you if
especially if you if you see a game that
you love
that isn’t there definitely just see
just see if you could maybe develop it
yourself
and feel free to check out owen’s code
that he wrote for dice summers on github
to check out how hard or easy it is to
uh
to develop a game there’s a lot of code
but you also see where the framework and
libraries come into it so
so it’s definitely worth checking out
yeah send us a comment or
or message us and uh and get in contact
to see
if you have any questions on the code or
uh there’s stuff you don’t understand or
for some specific you want to kind of
dig deep into
and then we can have a chat nice so we
have all of our code our code is all
up on github as you’re listening to this
it should be up there
unless someone has stolen it from us i
don’t know how github works i assume
it’s just still gonna be up there
but for you i’m assured that you
developer folk out there
understand how github works it’s also on
board game arena i assume because our
game is up there if you can see the code
we used so
if you’re developing a game that has
similar functionality to device
summoners you can see how we did it and
how it works that way as we said before
full of tutorials and videos and a very
helpful community
and forums and that up there so anyone
who’s interested in getting into
the developing side of things there are
there’s so many resources
and as i said all of our all of our code
is available there for anyone who
wants to take a a nosy at it so it’s
worth pointing out as well
around the time that we’re recording
this the company asthma day have just
purchased board game arena it’s hard to
know what kind of changes this will mean
for the website i mean
all going well it’s just going to be
asthma day sitting down at a computer
and just coding all of their massive
library of games
onto board game arena which would be
fantastic for the platform we’d see a
huge increase in the number of games
that are available up there so stay
tuned it’ll be it’ll be interesting to
see what changes that means in the
future yeah i’m i’m hoping for
like a more functionality for the
framework for developers
and adding in new features that people
want that they end up implementing
themselves
but yeah i i can’t wait to see what
would happen with that borg and marina
now as my day is in charge
so asthma day with their seemingly
enormous fund of
resources behind them and owning almost
every game
that comes out now it’s fantastic we’re
very keen to see what happens positive
or negative because if it’s negative you
know we can just go on the internet and
complain about it until they fix us
as is the way of today’s society
that pretty much wraps up our whole
experience with board game arena and if
you’ve
enjoyed this please share us tell
everyone follow us on any social media
you can search for decking awesome games
and if you want to try out dice
summoners yourself and play a game
online
just go to board game arena and search
for dice summoners we have been decking
awesome games thank you for listening
and we’ll
see you soon see ya bye
