Overview

Our visual editor is a lightweight environment for developing board games in a similar manner to the way IDEs such as Visual Studio allows users to create user interfaces via graphical tools. This visual editor provides a way to edit and save game graphs, the rule set, piece and vertex layouts, and various other information data structures needed for a game. Documents on our underlying framework that prototypes board games and instructions for using our visual editor will be coming soon. NOTE: This is a beta release of the visual editor. Please send any suggestions to Travis McPhail but, please note that future work on this project will not occur in the near future.

High-level Instructions

This is the high-level description of the work flow using this editor:

• Import a background board image for the game
• Overlay a graph on this board image
• Visual setup up the initial configuration of pieces
• Associate the different game, player, vertex, timer, and attribute rules needed by the game
• Compile the current rule set
• Export the game to a directory

This editor lacks an integrated debugger, so testing and debugging games created with this editor will be cumbersome. A suggested alternative is to use the editor as a graphical tool to create the game graphs and java files needed for a game. Then use an IDE such as eclipse to test and debug the game created by this editor. Please note that changes made using another IDE will not be reflected in the game document that our editor uses for input and output. We know that this is an inconvenience and we apologize for that.

Download

Here is our Visual Editor