Pirate's Cove Online

IDEA: The board game "Pirate's Cove" is an old classic in my family. We used to play it every day and this year it has become more popular again. With my goal of moving to Stockholm and my family not always being together I want to create a way for us to easily play a round of one of our favorite games. Especially with my brother in law being really good at this game it is important to have a way to beat him, even when I am not home.

02/02/2023 - a new beginning

I have researched this idea before but today is the day I actually am doing something. First struggles when installing Apache appears. (My) Research shows that Phaser is a pretty common way of achieving what I want so I'm gonna give that a try. They have a good step-by-step tutorial and I can work with WebStorm apparently. Okay so following all the instructions on the tutorial page kind of leads to a more complicated state than I need so I am now following this workshop. As always however when I encounter new things, everything is a mess and I am redoing everything multiple times but it gets clearer every time. I now successfully set up a client-server-connection. At first I wasn't getting it because I was connecting to the wrong port. I am beginning to feel comfortable with this way of working and now am trying to set the basics for the game on the client side. Having troubles with changing HTML views. I figured out the problem, which lies in the EvenListener.

04/02/2023 - data

Sitting down to start on the data for the pirate cards. There are two of each pirate card and a total of 60. Taverncards are now all in one excel such that visually we can compose them like in the real game. However, we still need to figure out the advantages and how we sum up the functions. Now I'm going to try to create the cards digitally. They are 67x44mm with a rounded corner of 5mm radius. Using AI images to create the Tavern. With a little bit of gimp magic, overcoming my OCD when it comes to drawing things and patience, the pirate cards are now done and look really nice.

05/02/2023 - creating cards

After finishing the pirate cards yesterday, today I went on to create the tavern Cards. First the victory point tavern cards. Next the combat tavern cards. I discovered a typo in the preserveAspectRatio attribute. Contemplating if i should just save the cards as images for later, so loading won't take too long. Combat done we move on to the upgrade cards. Finding the metal thing took a while but I searched for military metal and found a piece that I edited for the final result. I now distinguish between normal upgrade and special upgrade cards. If I eventually end up saving the cards as images I won't need to clean up the code, but if not there is plenty of code to clean up. Doing the special upgrades it is hard to find a sail so I moved on to the crew and didn't find anything either. I ended up using the Deep Dream Generator and got a perfect result on the first try. Removing the background with this online tool, it is the perfect image. I also ended up fixing some stuff for the linebreak code that I added earlier to make the content text look nice and pretty.

07/02/2023 - more images

Let's continue finding images for our ship areas. This turns out harder than I thought. I am learning a lot about different sails. Finally found at least a cannon on this website and removed the watermark with this website. I figured out a way to do the sails - by deleting everything from a ship that isn't sail - but I'm not 100% happy with it. I will leave it for now but in case I find something better I will change it. However it might look good on the cards. I found a storage thing that would look good on the ship board but it doesn't work on the cards, so I'm gonna have to change it. The rest looks good. Maybe I will remove the pole from the sail but let's see. For today that shall be enough. While cleaning my github this morning I also pushed this project, so I'll update that too. The positioning of the images on the cards need to be adjusted too.

08/02/2023 - the shipboard

I tried to find a better storage image but couldn't find one. Later: Moving on to creating the shipboard. I found a new storage image on the search for a shipboard. Creating the shipboard was difficult but with iStock, watermark removal, removing unwanted pieces and upscaling i got something acceptable.

03/05/2023 - the shipboard (cont'd)

I felt some motivation to continue this project. I continued working on the shipboard, appending some rectangles to the circles I already had, in order to visualize the steps of every area. The rotation part proves to be very annoying but I am slowly getting to what I want. 

16/03/2024 - switching to unity

So, after pausing this project for almost a year and having started my job in the video game industry I realized I approached this in the wrong way. Therefor I switched to implementing this in Unity. Today I started off in an easy way, by just setting up some basics in unity and creating a very minimalistic game menu, from which you can start the game as well as the board, that you switch to when starting. I used DALL-E 2 to create an image for the main menu and it looks quite cool. I had some troubles with some of the fonts I downloaded that looked a little "pirate-y", so I had to find some different fonts and settled on one that is actually super close to the original game. I quickly sketched the boardgame and focused on not spending too much time on it, because eventually it'll be done much nicer (by either me or someone else haha), once the actual mechanics are implemented.

17/03/2024 - inventory

After creating the main menu and the boardgame yesterday, today I continued with the inventory or rather the shipboard (like I called it before). Getting the right layers for the UI elements proved to be the hardest thing about this. It took me quite a while to have the circles of the shipboard be displayed correctly, but eventually I figured it out. With the help of a quick YT Tutorial on how to drag and drop things I got started quite quickly on the functionality of the shipboard and managed to get a nice prototype going where you can drag and drop a marker in a specific ship area. I also got the upgrade prices and values of the different states set up in a way that I can easily work with later and a structure where I can easily increase or decrease the values of the different ship areas. I also pushed the project to a new repository from which I'll be working from :)

20/03/2024 - cards

Today there wasn't much coding going on, but I created the pirate cards and almost all of the taverncards, with three special types missing. I'm not super sure on the structure of it all yet, but it's a start and we'll see what exact structure I'll need later on.