BS Games is an independent team of tabletop developers headed by former Games Workshop Employees Scott Kelly and Bill Murphy. They are responsible for the games Mathemagician's Duel, and the recently released Sinoda. I was taken onto the team as an intern to help Bill and Scott see if we could port their board game onto the popular site Board Game Arena. I would be researching how to port the game and hopefully, porting the game over to the site.
I spent the first few weeks of my two month co-op just learning five different frameworks for web development. Javascript would be used to run the game logic, CSS and HTML to style the website and add the elements. PHP and SQL were used to retrieve data from within the BGA framework.
I was able to get a rudimentary understanding of all of the basics for each of the languages and frameworks that I was using, as I learned I continued to make several prototypes for this web version of Sinoda to see if any of these iterations would be good starters for the website.
This Sinoda prototype would run through the game as a text based game. The logic of the game was all made in Javascript. This simulation kept track of player turns, total points gained, and what player is the victor of the game.
The Rulebook prototype was me trying to get my hands on some web development. I just wanted to see if I could have one page switch to another, so that I could make a separate page or popup for the rulebook.
After my endeavours in BGA, due to licensing issues we were forced to look in another direction. I chose Unity to continue prototyping. This meant I would be programming my first board game in unity, and my very first iteration couldn't even click in the right spot. I promise this changes.
This Prototype allowed players to click on the piece, and rotate it to follow the game rules of Sinoda. This would rotate the cube to the correct "point value" and you could move the piece by clicking and dragging.
I made a little level that is based off the Sinoda poster. I wanted to create a little atmosphere. I learned how to change skyboxes and learned how to scale textures properly.
Before my work term ended and my contract expired. This was my final iteration. I added some store assets to the area, you could pick up, move, and rotate the piece, and if two differently colored pieces touched, one would disappear based on whose turn it was. You could even look around to see the rest of the large pyramids.
I never got to finish this project, but if I did, I would want to include some sitting character figures that two players could play as. I would also have wanted to make each pillar interact-able; and when it was interacted with, it would either play a voice message about the history of the game, or tell you the game tutorial.