A Touch of Evil Android app

[JRSly]

Copied this over from by Board Game Geek thread since I imagine there's plenty of interested folks 'round these parts.

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ATOE has quickly emerged as my favorite Flying Frog game, the narrative you build anew with each game and the extremely immersive theme is just awesome. So in the last couple months since I've bought it, I've been doing all I can think of to enhance the enjoyment in any way I can think of.

The one aspect of the game that I find a bit clumsy, though a very necessary evil, are all the reference charts. The villain's abilities, the Minion Charts, the Mystery Phase Chart, the Showdown Chart...it can break up the flow and fun a little bit to so frequently have to pause and scan down a letter-sized page and find what Mystery Phase event you need to resolve, or reach over and grab the Minion Chart and look something up. I can hear some people rolling their eyes, and I can agree to a large extent..these are minor little inconveniences of time and effort. But the other quality to factor in is table space. With approximately 36 decks of cards to find spots for, all your big Character cards, the Villain's card, tons of counters...unless you're playing on a conference table, who has the room to have the Minion Chart and two rulebooks(for the Mystery Phase and Showdown Chart) also laid out within easy reach?

I was watching the great Lonesome Gamer series on ATOE, watching him spin around and grab the rulebook at every Mystery Phase and I thought...what if you could handle all of this stuff on your smartphone? You could have a ton of table space consolidated into something only slightly bigger than a card's footprint and the app could even handle the actual 'work' of rolling dice and looking up the event or Minion! I got really excited and believed it truly could help streamline gameplay just enough to make it even more fun to play. When you think about it...all those seconds spent in every single round of the game add up. And these are precious little seconds where you're not being taken out of the game and the theme to reference a chart.

So, I finally took the plunge and started learning some simple Android coding. I've wanted to for a while, and now I finally had a fun project that could keep me motivated and excited. I'm using the Android App Inventor, now being hosted by MIT after Google abandoned it, to create the app with. It seems fairly robust and capable but has a very friendly, quasi-WYSIWYG, building block interface that keeps you from having to do barebones coding. I struggled at first, but quickly got my footing enough to tackle what ultimately would be pretty basic functionality. Mostly just showing the right images when you press certain buttons.

Okay...enough of my blathering. Let's look at some screenshots! The app's not going to set the world on fire with it's stunning graphics and clever design, I didn't want to get too ambitious on my first project. But I think it looks fairly attractive and is very intuitive.

When the app is opened..simple enough options. You can choose your villain or roll on the Mystery Phase Charts, green for the Basic one and red for Advanced. I like when an app lets me do what I want, so I thought if people just want to use the app to roll on the MPCs and they like to stick with the cardboard and paper Villain materials, good for them. I wasn't going to force anyone to go through the Villain choosing process before being able to do anything else.



Here's a random Mystery Phase event. When you want to go back to the main page, you just tap the ATOE logo.



The events are chosen randomly just as if you were using dice. With the Advanced Chart, the same Bell Curve Distribution exists, where items in the middle of the chart will appear much more frequently than the events resulting from rolling a 2 or 12.

If we hit "Choose The Villain" and we have all our choices...



I have all the Villains from all expansions, including the web exclusives. Each categorized on a page based on where they came from.

We'll choose the Vampire(since he's the only Villain I have all the other pages completed for so far)...



First, the MPC buttons work exactly the same, they're easily accessible on this page as well. Now onto the Villain...we'll go a bit backwards, and start on the top right, these are the two dice to roll on the Villain's Minion Charts. Again, both Basic and Advanced so all the bases are covered.



Okay, and if we hit the logo and go back to the Vampire's main screen...

If you long-press on the Minion dice buttons, you can see the Basic and Advanced Minion charts..if you need to reference how many Fight Dice something has, or look up an Event real quick.



You either hit the phone's Back button, or long-press on the Minion charts to close this screen and go back to the Villain's main screen...

Next going left is the Villain's portrait. If you tap this button, you bring up the Villain's special abilities. If you long-press, you roll for the Showdown Chart...





Just as with the Advanced MPC, the events are distributed properly so the same rate of occurrence as if you'd rolled dice is there.

Finally, on the far left are the Wound and Combat numbers. This was an aspect I hadn't planned initially but then the idea hit me and I had to include it..it was more challenging than any other function, but I'm glad I got it figured out. If you long-press, you pop up this screen...



Here, you can set the number of Wounds(based on number of players in Coop and adding any as Mystery Cards dictate) and adjust the Combat as any bonuses are acquired throughout the game.



And after you've set up these figures, you simply tap on the images and the number goes down by one. So you can quickly and easily knock a few Wounds off, or take away a Combat bonus once a card has been taken out of the game. I really like this little aspect. Again, having to keep track and count a pile of cardboard circles can disrupt the fun a bit..especially when you're talking about in the intensity of the final Showdown. Now, I can just glance at the phone and know exactly how much more it's going to take to defeat the bad guy.

Oh, and you just long-press on the logo and this takes you to the main page and clears the Villain so you can start over. Now, I can pretty much leave the MPCs, the Villain card, and its Minion Chart in the box and free up quite a bit of space on the table.

And that's that! I'd love to hear what people think, toss out suggestions or things you think I might have gone about in weird ways. I've made all this in a bubble, thinking only of my own uses...so I'm be very curious to see what it looks like to everyone else. I wouldn't be surprised if I might've overlooked something.

I've got the hard part figured out, all the functionality and logic is pretty much in place. Now it's just the much easier, if a bit time-consuming, process of making all the graphics and plopping them into the code.

I'd really like to share this and upload it to the Android Market so everyone can try it out and enjoy it. I'm just not sure if Flying Frog would like the idea. I feel like that wouldn't be crossing any lines, the app has a lot of info from the game in there, but no one is going to be able to play the game with just the app. But I've used official graphics and components from the game without permission, so they'd be perfectly in their right to say no. So I think I'll wait to hear from them before I upload it.

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Update post a few days later

Sorry for not popping back in...been busy working on the app!

Thanks for all the replies, I'm glad some other folks see the potential and don't think this was a silly waste of time to put together.

I've finished everything for the base game Villains, putting together all the graphics for every Villain is gonna take a few days, especially now that we're back to Monday and another work week. And I'm also considering reformatting the layouts and functionality just a bit..so that may mean redoing the graphics I've already made. cry But I'll think about it.

My main concern is readability on the small screen, so I'm thinking I might make all the result pop-ups full screen, rather than keeping them in their own 'side-frame' with the logo still visible. Using up as much screen real estate as possible for the sake of clarity. On that note, I did drop all the headings, such as "Minions of the Vampire"...firstly because I've always thought it was sorta awkward calling events Minions, just the weird, anal side of me. And second, so no screen space and kilobytes are wasted on ultimately useless info like "Minions of the Vampire" or "Vampire's Special Abilities".

Other small change, I dropped the "Done" button on the screen where you set the Combat and Wounds. It was silly to have a different button, when the ATOE logo is used to go back in every other instance.

Next thing I'm working on, I think I'll do this while I contemplate the graphic situation and if I want to redo a lot of stuff, is making a "Random Villain" function. I'm thinking of how to go about this...the easiest would be to make one big pool of all the Villains that the app would look at and randomly pluck from. The problem would be if a player didn't have the Hero Pack or hadn't downloaded the Web Villains, and they'd get a Random Villain that was unusable. So they'd have to back out and randomize again...and if you had some bad app luck, you might get three or four unusable choices and that might be annoying.

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Overhauled the graphics a bit, I thought a cool, spooky background might be more interesting than solid black everywhere. Unfortunately, this meant I had to go back(and am still in the process of) saving all my graphics out again with a transparent background. Luckily, I've saved (almost) everything in Photoshop, so it's quick just to drop the background, I don't have to remake much from scratch. But still a bit tedious.





Also, does anyone have better suggestions for a name? AToE Assistant is about the most straightforward name I came up with, but it's also the blandest. I've thought of maybe something like Shadowbrook Traveler's Guide, ATOE Hunter's Guide..something a bit more interesting and evocative.