Can you give us any information about what the experience will be when using the app? Will a group of five people with their own iPads be able to play a shared game, or will they have to pass the iPad around? It sounds like you've got the approval of >G, so I assume it'll be all arted-up with the official art? Can you give us an idea of the features you think it'll have?
Hi all, I'm the other half of Handelabra (MigrantP has already introduced himself).
We're not getting into too many details about the experience yet as we're still very much in the early stages. Given the complexity of the game, we consider our most important job to be making sure the feel of the game is carried over into the digital world. How that will manifest itself is still an open question but we'll definitely be reaching out here for playtesters/beta testers as we move along with development.
I expect one of the challenges will be how to interpret what some of the cards do under some conditions. There are a couple of threads around here that I expect will be useful in pointing out collections of conditions that raised uncertainty in this community.
agreed arenson9. making sure every effect does exactly what it's supposed to in every situation is going to be one of the biggest challeges. we're expecting a couple to be very tricky (I'm looking at you sub-zero atmosphere completely changing the flow of the the villain turn) ;)
Subzero Atmosphere doesn’t have to be too difficult, especially if you design with dependency injection in mind. If the engine is designed in modules, you could have a main engine which simply enumerates the players and invoke their turns. Then each player (including the virtual players representing the environment and villain players) would each have their own engine responsible for playing the turn, as well as hooking turn events. This could be taken further as having a redirection engine, damage dealing engine, etc. (though the latter are out of the scope of this comment). Basically, the game initialization could set engines to default behavior. Then, if a deck like Absolute Zero is selected, it can replace the default behavior (by using either property assignment or method registration) custom behavior.
It just occured to me that, once this app is published, it will be the official rules clarification device! Any rules question will simply require the players to recreate the situation in the app and see how it resolves itself!