This is a prototype of a party-game created by a friend during the first COVID lockdown of March 2020. It was created in order to support remote playtesting, although the game itself is probably better played in person.
- A working installation of tabletop simulator
The game was implemented as a tabletop simulator image. A curiosity of tabletop simulator is its dense integration of scripts with its “saved games,” which faintly resemble the smalltalk virtual machines I had started playing with, out of curiosity, in early 2020. In effect, a “game” implemented for tabletop simulator is actually a complete record of an initial state of a huge pile of virtual assets, entities which (for a beginner like me) have to be manually distributed across a virtual tabletop. Each asset has an ID, and it’s possible to write scripts which refer to these IDs and create additional behaviours for them, building on the basis of the very rich and enjoyable built-in tabletop simulator api.
What that means is there’s no direct way to run the code in this folder! First
you need to install the virtual machine - that is, you need to buy Tabletop
Simulator - then you need to copy the image, tts-images/TS_Save_5.json (and
perhaps also its snapshot tts-images/TS_Save_5.png) into the Saves folder of
your tabletop simulator installation - then you’ll be able to load the save
from the in-game “Load/Save” interface.
The minimum number of players is 6: 5 players and one game-master (playing black).
This was built as an in-house prototype, so although the game is playable, it’s
not fully documented! Version 1 of the rulebook can be found in the docs
folder; it describes the game as played in-person.
The game interface itself isn’t documented, but is quite discoverable. If any interest arises I’ll be happy to provide some guidance.
I’ve actually, after two years, forgotten! There are some references to LUAbundler in the code, but I think I must have been using something devoted to tabletop simulator; maybe the official Atom plugin or the unofficia VSCode plugin, or some combination of them.
Having forgotten is a good reminder to take better notes on how these things are done when they’re being done…