BOARD18 Author's Guide

Introduction

Starting with release 2.2.0, BOARD18 provides to author and admin level players the ability to upload game boxes directly from the PC running the browser to the BOARD18 database. This automatic process does require that the game box in question be in a correctly formatted .zip file.

If you wish to have access to this facility then contact a site administraator for the BOARD18 site in question and request that you be made an author level player.
Note that I will grant anyone author level access to test1.board18.org for the purpose of testing new game boxes.

A Correctly Formatted .zip File

So what is a correctly formatted .zip file? In answering this question, I will use 1830-REP02 as an example game box. You will of course use your own game box name when you create your game box .zip file.

The .zip file for the 1830-REP02 game box must contain only one directory and this directory must be named board18-1830-REP02. The .zip file itself must be named board18-1830-REP02.zip. Actually the upload process will also accept a .zip file named Board18-1830-REP02.zip.

The board18-1830-REP02 directory must contain four items as follows:

 
    1830-REP02
    1830-REP02.json
    LICENSE.txt
    README.txt

The first item must be a directory containing all the image files for the game box. These image files should be in the .png format. This directory's name must be the game box name [IE: the main directory name minus the board18- prefix.]

The second item must be the .json control file for the game box. this file's name must be the game box name with a .json suffix. Do not use any other suffix. This file should have previously been passed through a JSON validator like JSON lint.

The final two items are, of course text files. They can be found in the documentation directory of the GAMEBOX source files on GitHub. These files are optional for this upload process but they are required for the final game box submission to GitHub.