Adventure Deck System Retroactive Development Blog - The Beginning to Where We Are Now

The Beginning:

During a summer break from college I began to ponder some of my favorite things: tabletop RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons, card-based games like Magic the Gathering, and outdoor activities like camping and hiking. I’ve been a long time player, since 2nd Edition D&D, and camping and hiking since before that, being a Cub Scout then a Boy Scout, enjoying the outdoors for a long time after that before joining the Army. I remembered going camping with several friends and my son in a forest along a river, talking about D&D with my friends who had no experience with tabletop RPGs, and my son who had already begun to get into the game. One night after a long day I was dozing off in a camp chair next to the fire, listening to my son narrate an adventure off the top of his head to my friends who made characters on the fly, with my son rolling digital dice on his phone app. They were having a great time, but the gamer in me kept thinking, “What happens when his phone’s battery dies? Where can they roll dice? In the dirt and rocks and grass? What if they had character sheets? They can’t be very portable in this sort of environment.” I kept these thoughts with me the next day, on the ride home, and for quite some time until that summer college break. 

Using that experience as an outside observer to an impromptu “theater of the mind” game using digital dice, I came up with the commandments/parameters for a new game:

1. Fun

2. Portable

3. Customizable

4. Fast combat resolution

5. Doesn’t need dice to play

6. Doesn’t need a table to play

7. Can be played standing up if necessary

8. The game can generate “artifacts of play” - something that is added to your character in a physical format, without the need to write it down in a character sheet.

With these parameters in mind, I decided that a card-based combat RPG was what I wanted to create. Initially, I had no intention of releasing a game to the public or selling a game. It was just something I did to flex my creative muscles in between my Spring and Fall semesters. Because of my prior experience as an Art Director, Senior Graphic Designer, and Illustrator, I did what I always do: I started with an idea, some research, and a sketch. 

After creating a rough sketch (now lost to time), I decided that I wanted to automate the card creation process. I decided to use InDesign’s Data Merge feature, which is typically used in mailers to “personalize” junk mail, which numbers approximately 130 billion pieces processed but the U.S. Postal Service each year. Data Merge is actually quite a powerful tool, being able to place custom graphics in addition to text. However, I decided to play it safe with my first test, placing only text according to the spreadsheet that you must use with Data Merge. By setting up everything in a spreadsheet and then placing all of the text and most of the graphics elements with Data Merge, I was able to iterate versions and add new cards much faster and much more efficiently. 

I will post instructions on how to set up your first Data Merge here, including how to set up your spreadsheet in a future post. 

For now, I will share my journey of where I started, to where I am now. I will show all iterations in the future, but I thought it would be fun for my first post to show my very first version and my most recent version. Here is the very first card I created with Data Merge. As you can see, it is all text as far as the variables. This first card is before the Alpha 1 series:

This is my variable list for the card above, taken directly from the spreadsheet. I can’t find the original InDesign file, but at least I have the spreadsheet. The top row are the data field names used in Data Merge in InDesign, and the second row contains the actual data. 

Here is the latest version, Alpha 11:

This is my variable list for the card above. As you can see, it has far more elements and is much more complicated than the Alpha 1 version. The top row is of course, the field names, the second row are notes for me when populating the actual data fields, and the third row is the data field for this particular card. Because there are so many columns, I will be sharing this as a series of screenshots from my spreadsheet.

The screenshots below will not show the data because they are hard linked to files on my hard drive. In the future I will go into more detail on how to use the @image type of function in Data Merge.

Here is the screenshot from my InDesign Data Merge panel for this card:

Here is the InDesign Data Merge file with the Data Merge Preview turned off:

You can see the relevant data headers and how they relate to the Data Merge menu and the spreadsheet.

In future posts I will go through exactly how to set all of this up.