Game Box Creation - The Library

Game Box Creation edit
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The game box library is a Google drive folder that contains a set of sub-folders arranged as is described below. This library contains many of the tokens and tiles that have been used to create BOARD18 game boxes. This section discusses this library.

Of course, this library can NOT contain all possible tiles and tokens. Any missing tiles/tokens, that you need, should be added to the library when you create them for your tile/token sheets. If a tile is in an on-line tile library such as the [Blackwater Station] master tile list then you can use one of the tile adjust scripts to format the tile for BOARD18 and then add it to the tiles library. In the rare case that the tile does not exist anywhere, you may have to create it from scratch or by hand modifying an existing tile.

Please share any tiles or tokens that you create with the BOARD18 project so that they can be added to the library.

Standard Tile Colors

Some of the early game boxes that I developed contained tile images from disparate sources. This resulted in tiles of a given color that did not all have the exact same shade of that color. To correct this I decided that the tiles in the library would all comply with the same color standard.

The standard shade for each of the four tile colors is given in the following table:

Standard tile colors

COLOR	Red	Green	Blue	Hex RGB
Yellow	255	255	0	ffff00
Green	84	216	43	54d82b
Brown	170	114	42	aa722a
Grey	179	179	179	b3b3b3

These are the same shades as those used by the Blackwater Station tile encyclopedia.
The Blackwater Station tile encyclopedia is the preferred source for all tile images that are added to this library.

The Library Structure

The library has the following structure:

Library -
         |
         |-Type F Tiles -
         |               |
         |               |- Brown Tiles
         |               |
         |               |- Green Tiles
         |               |
         |               |- Grey Tiles
         |               |
         |               |- Yellow Tiles
         |
         |-Type P Tiles -
         |               |
         |               |- Brown Tiles
         |               |
         |               |- Green Tiles
         |               |
         |               |- Grey Tiles
         |               |
         |               |- Yellow Tiles
         |               |
         |               |- Special Tiles
         |
         |-Tokens -------
         |               |
         |               |- {game box name}
         |               |
         |               |- {game box name}
         |
         |-Useful Stuff -
         |               |
         |               |- Tile Patches
         |               |
         |               |- Other

The "Type F Tiles" Folder

Map boards that are in "Flat Side Up" orientation will be referred to as Type F map boards. Such map boards require tile sheets that contain type F tiles. All type F tiles in the library are stored under this directory.

The "Type P Tiles" Folder

Map boards that are in "Point Up" orientation will be referred to as Type P map boards. Such map boards require tile sheets that contain type P tiles. All type P tiles in the library are stored under this directory.

The "Tokens" Folder

All tokens are grouped by the game box in which they are used. So there will be a sub directory for each game box.

The "Useful Stuff" Folder

This folder contains images that may prove useful for creating game boxes.

File Naming Conventions

Library tiles should all be in .png format. Tile names should all begin with "tile". Please note the lower case! This should be followed by the tile number/name as shown on the tile Please pad tile numbers to a minimum of 3 digits. Finally different tiles with the same number should be differentiated by one or two lower case letters. Thus tile 14 would be named "tile014.png". If a second different tile was also called tile 14 by a different game designer then it could be called "tile014a.png" or "tile014xx.png" or some such other name.

Library tokens should all be in .png format. Tokens for a given game are stored in a directory with that name. Thus tokens for 1830 would be in a directory called 1830. Each token in that directory would be named uniquely. Tokens with two sides would be stored twice and suffixed with "f" and "b". For example, the BM token would have two image files named "BMf.png" and "BMb.png".