IMI OW is an online trading card game and a long-term project hoping to bring my stories to an exiting new environment. This is an ongoing series of quick touch points to share the ideas and inspiration behind the game as it transitions from a conce...
[Utility Belt parts will focus on apps to help with game dev and maintenance, not for players]
I once worked on a rescue project for a kick-ass application. How did a system need saving if it was so good? There were likely a few reasons for this (such is the nature of business and the nature of humans working in said business), but one lower-level design problem was that the app relied on several hundred unstructured and widely dispersed configuration items that had to work together to make the system function.
It's always better when you're in the position to learn from other people's mistakes and, for this game, I know that if we don't nail the underlying card configuration and maintenance, it will be difficult to extend the prototype past early stages without a heap of re-work (the type of re-work that would potentially euthanize a project like this). Introducing IMGR, the OW Image Manager (a simple app to help upload and work with game media).
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The role of this app will be to load images in to the datastore (currently an Azure Storage account); add some searchable metadata (tags); and then to assign one or more images to the card's display configuration. (note: the tags will only for sorting images not to be the source of truth for card properties such as rarity, etc.)
Right now, this flutter app runs only in debug mode on Chrome, but in its simple form I can see it growing with the project to provide an essential back-end system.
Next job is to design the card configuration, witch will be a series of aspect properties including the display. The idea will be to start simple for the prototype with some solid card elements and then build on that over time.
