lorennorman

Yay! Let's be friends and unlock the magic of game design for everyone! (Serious comment)

There's our project, Paperize: http://paperize.io (spoiler alert: we're still invite only/early access!)

It's a web app, not a code library, but we're solving similar problems. We love Squib though, keep up the good work!

Manufacturing is out of scope for this product, at current. It is firmly a prototyping tool, not a production tool. The idea is to make it trivial for designers to iterate so they will do more of it. More iterations means better games, faster, and we all win.

Yes! That's what's fun, now you can easily imagine a re-skin of all kinds of simple games, just go find some fun graphics on the web and click "print".

I want to get an interface going on mobile so you can just snap pictures with your phone to add card art on the fly.

Yeah, that's pretty easy now, I suppose. Totally not the goal, nor a behavior we'd encourage!

Thanks for the tip, Patrick! I had heard the html->pdf tools were pretty good, but you're absolutely right about the pixel precision needs. I got my Prawn setup into a reasonable state pretty early, and it's be Mostly Fine, Just Fine.

It does not... yet! I'll add it to the feature requests we're weighing.

Anything else you wish we had templates for?

What I keep imagining is managing hex and square tiles this way...

We were wondering if we were going to get any CAH requests. That's an easy thing for us to do, we just weren't sure about letting the product turn into that instead of a serious design tool.

Then again what does "serious" even mean.

Good lookin' out! Thanks for reporting this. Got that all patched up now.

So I guess our first end-user impression has already happened! I hope it was good for you.

Logging in? How did you do that?

We hope to start inviting early adopters in in March to do final tweaking and load testing. We'll probably go to beta invites as soon as we think it's stable and useful. From there, it goes where the users take us!

Right now the only way to be considered for early access is to fill out our feedback form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1pGhxa1NvBmqVvV4tPt0YTiUcDRx...

Guaranteed to happen.

Does nothing for my imposter syndrome, unfortunately!

I agree! Totally didn't expect this to get big today, but very glad it did! Once we're done gathering requirements from the hardcore game designers we're targeting, we'll revert that page to something a little sexier.

This is impressive, I keep meaning to learn to script Gimp and Inkscape, sometimes I think web apps are the only way I can think anymore...

Great point about thegamecrafter, we had the same problem. We want to try their API though, as Paperize could dump entire prototypes in there at once. Makes it a lot easier on your playtesters, too!

Thank you!

That feature is definitely on the short list, we have lots to do in terms of surfacing the data in the designs in a more "live" fashion.

Not at all and thank you so much!

Right now it is Prawn[0]. It slowly evolved from a script a year ago, where it was fine. We are considering switching to an HTML->PDF workflow, though, since I have to render all of this stuff in the web for quicker previews anyway!

Thanks for the clean design mention, we owe it mostly to Zurb Foundation[1]. Using those modal popovers to control the user's attention has really helped me narrow the UI variables.

0: http://prawnpdf.org 1: http://foundation.zurb.com

We would agree. The UI itself is still evolving rapidly, the core functionality just finally came together and got useful. Ideally, we get feedback during this process that helps us nail down the most important workflows and give it a serious UX paint job.

Sorry to disappoint! We didn't post this to HN, but I can see how the title here is misleading.

Sure!

Somewhat bittersweet to front-page Hacker News with a video about how we failed! Feel free to comment here if anyone wants to ask more questions of (or lampoon) me.