WTactics: Open Source CCG

WTactics: Open Source CCG

Postby snowdrop » 03 Jul 2010, 14:08

Intro.
Have you ever played a trading card game or a customizable card game like Magic the Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh, Pokemon or maybe Star Wars? Do you remember the amount of both fun and costs involved, and did you ever think that you could create such a game, but do it better? Good.

Then here's your once in a lifetime chance: WTactics, a free & libre card game, is looking for new crew members that want to join our small and ambitious team. We are creating a professionally looking and playing customizable card game (e.g. like Magic: The Gathering) that will be open, innovative, free & gratis, and that's playable both with real cards as well as online.

The game is oriented towards strategy and has the CCG genres versatile and open ended nature, making it easy to modify, create new rule sets and cards for, and in that process also make it a game that is more community powered than is usually the case in the world of card games.

We take pride in only using open source licenses for all our assets - everything from docs, and original art to code, and expect the same of anyone who joins us.

Image Image Image Image

We have

  • The will and means! We have been around for over a year already and follow things through, are patient & crew is mostly made up of adults. We're serious, here to stay and see this is a long-term project and hobby.
  • Open source webbased client in the making, designed to run any CCG via browser, PvP. (AJAX, PHP, HTML5 etc)
  • Open source desktop based cross platform client/server for playing any CCG in the making (Python)
  • A working infrastructure, located at WTactics.org: blog, wiki, forums, IRC chat, also a web app that's brewing to allow us to easily create cards together within the community, surveys to gather playtesting results, code repository and some other minor stuff as well. Whatever is needed is or will be there.
  • Already a huge pile of top-quality artwork renowned in the open source community.
  • A steady flow of new original coherent looking art coming in. (We also contribute to opengameart.org. Check out our account there).
  • Some cards ready for concept testing.
  • A set of nicely developing rules.
  • Half of an interesting background story in place.
  • Ongoing translations.
  • Concept test patch for playing online using LakceyCCG, and gCCG module in the making.
  • Design documents and more, such as a printing primer.
What is planned


  • Core set with around 250-300 cards.
  • Keeping a healthy community with a real influence.
  • Releasing future expansions, frequent releases instead of an elephant sub-projects.
  • Active revisions to keep balance.
  • Only make cards official after rigorous testing.
  • Availability in all major (and minor) languages.
  • Making the game playable on any and everything, amongst others: gCCG / OCTGN2 and LackeyCCG, for online play.

Open positions

Coders: Any and all are welcome. We already use Python, PHP, AJAX, MySQL, HTML5, JQuery (among other languages) coders for our site tools but we also need coders of real languages that are interested in creating a desktop client an/or AI. All code must be open source, using the license of your liking.

Game designer: Wizard responsible for designing and working with cards and rules. Needed skills: Knowledge and experience in the field of collectible card games. Duties: Providing and judging ideas for new cards and rules, keeping things up to date across dev. team and card base, coordinating effort. Concept- and playtesting.

Game tester: Person responsible for providing reliable feedback. Needed: Background in CCG playing. Duties: Playing our game, providing formalised feedback, keeping an eye on current state of the game, also taking a somewhat active part in development.

Writer/proofreader: Individual responsible for error-busting here and there and/or developing the universe. Needed: Fluent English. Duties: Reading, writing, correcting important game documents and announcements. If will is there, also writing new stories and lore that enrich the universe.

Managers and coordinators: Delegate work and organize the project. Needed skills: Experience of community driven projects or other projects where a larger group of people have co-worked. Maturity and good English. Duties: managing game development in various aspects and coordinating other devs efforts. Checking up on people, evaluating the collective efforts, pep-talks, insuring info is spread between parties that need it.

Artists: Skilled fantasy illustrators with good portfolios that can also match our style to some degree.


Everyone: And the rest of you as well! Anyone experienced with card games will not be thwarted in our team. On the contrary.

The community is really small, but healthy. Despite our small count we are making very steady progress in various fields: Developing new cards, discussing rules, translating, pushing forward web app, and many others. We are looking for experienced, creative people that are willing to join the team and build the game.

We can handle much faster development than we're currently dealing with. Since the overall task is a pretty huge one (but also not as complex as coding a traditional computer game) we are looking for patient individuals that are prepared to stay with us for a longer period. Our project was fired up 2009, and we will be here for a long time to come.

If you are interested, please introduce yourself by mailing us a presentation of yourself, your skills and thoughts at: contact at wtactics.org

Questions and other serious stuff will be replied to in here as well.
Last edited by snowdrop on 10 Apr 2011, 21:22, edited 3 times in total.
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Re: WTactics: Open Source CCG

Postby TheAncientGoat » 04 Jul 2010, 08:49

Hey Snowdrop, welcome to the FreeGameDev forums. I've always admired your project and seen it as a prime example of how projects should work together; of the brilliant synergy that open art and open gaming can provide. Heck, it could even show a business model for open content if you choose to publish the cards, which would be an interesting experiment indeed :)

Anyhow, I wish you the best of luck with the project, and that it gets the attention it's definitely due.
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Re: WTactics: Open Source CCG

Postby Julius » 04 Jul 2010, 12:37

Yep, just saw your stuff on OpenGameArt. I think we could also make an article about this and recent improvements in the Wesnoth project etc. It is really a rather interesting project (and I used to be a big time Magic the Gathering player ;) ).

Just too bad that online CCG game platform you mention on your site seems to be windows only :(
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Re: WTactics: Open Source CCG

Postby TheAncientGoat » 04 Jul 2010, 12:51

It works fine on Wine though. Well, I couldn't really make heads or tails of it, but it runs :P
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Re: WTactics: Open Source CCG

Postby snowdrop » 04 Jul 2010, 14:35

about platform supporting platforms
Currently we lack coders, and while we do that we're not releasing AI support/digital single player modes. Luckily most times a player would want to go up against a real human. For that there is already good software around. Not heaps of it, but at least something that works and implies no costs to us or the players. That software simulates play on a real table, meaning, you'd play the game exactly as you would on the kitchen table with real paper cards.

OCTGN2, which is in my opinion the most "modern" looking and smoothest ones of the virtual table engines, is windows only as it uses .net. I haven't tried it with mono, nor have I managed to get it running under WINE. That said, I also didn't spend a month on trying to accomplish it either ;) so I', not suggesting it isn't doable - just that OCTGN2 is indeed very bound to be on Windows only. I also know that the dev doesn't target other platforms (but a nice thing is he's implementing Python for scripting inside of OCTGN2)

LackeyCCG feels like it's written i JAVA, is closed source, monetary free, and supposedly has a Linux version on the roadmap. Where and how that work is being done is a mystery that has never been clear to it's community. Personally, I wouldn't count on it happening within 2-3 years, if ever. Than again, that's just my guess. I second that Lackey works well under WINE, at least on one of my machines.

But here come the good news: gCCG is linux native and open source. It's not mentioned on our site due to (re)me discovering it just recently. It's the only one that offers centralized play, easy way for players to find each other and it even supports "trading/buying/selling cards/boosters" etc between players (for free ofc, made up money). It looks very unsexy but seems to do the job pretty well and I had no issues whatsoever getting it to run.

Plan is for WTactics to run on anything that anyone would like to support (often translates to "release a simple patch to"). As I use Linux myself and love it and it's community I will try to lure somebody ;) to release a gCCG patch of the game. The LackeyCCG-patch will be released by myself, and we'll also release an OCTGN2 patch to support the greater mass of players (my estimate is that around 90% of the CCG players will sit on a windows-machine. I also foresee that the most active within our community, if/when it ever gets established, will run other platforms.).

wesnoth & synergy
Needless to say I have always been irritated at the fact that there is no free-free CCG around that is of high quality. I know quality can be measured in a zillion ways, but with it I simply mean solid play, casual as well as competitive, and with adequate aesthetics. I'd say those are the most central aspects of a CCG as I understand the genre myself (I'm also an MtG-player for 10 years).

I'm not suggesting WT currently delivers any of those goals - it's still too early to judge what I/we/whoever will accomplish in the end, and nothing can be said until the end product is in front of us. At least it's my attempt to get the wheels going, and hopes are it will succeed with time & effort.

Battle for Wesnoth, from where WT gets art for about 120 cards, is in my opinion one of the best open source games around and is a very solid product all around that has plenty of involved people behind it and a stable playerbase in the sense that there are always people playing it. I've devoted quite some time in it's community (diff nick though) and also founded it's unofficial but successful ladder, that I also have done plenty of coding on.

Wanting to give something back to a good game/community is easy. Doing it is harder, as it actually requires people to do something, and as we know, talk is cheap ;) and action speaks louder than words.

As AncientGoat writes, it's really nice when there is some kind of synergy and different projects can - intentionally or not - find some common ground that helps some or all of them. Best is of course if the efforts and resources can be coordinated, but even if it's not so (can be many legit reasons for why it couldn't, depending on the projects) there would still be plenty to gain from keeping en eye open on other projects and creating an atmosphere where different forms of co-work is encouraged. I see this forum as a contribution to such an atmosphere.

The original art that's being created for WT maybe isn't on par with the many times excellent stuff or style of BfW mainline. Sadly, and as almost always in open source projects, It's a financial question and I pay for it all myself + only have a part time job with crappy wage :P, making it strictly a question about funds lacking. (To get art quality of i.e. MtG one would need around 100 - 150$ per card for a hired artist, and that's for the art alone since all the other work is done for free.)

Even so, I think it's good enough for it being useful for campaign makers of BfW as well as other projects in the open source community in general. I'm quite confident somebody will find creative use of WT works sooner or later.

projects getting attention & manpower
My impressions are that many, all too many, of the open source projects out there are in a situation where they have the will, plans etc but lack the manpower due to them not getting enough attention, or rather, attention where it matters.

I haven't seen some kind of numbers on this, but I'd guess that 80-90% if not more of all projects are ran by 1 to 2 persons alone. Most projects also go into the grave, not necessarily because they were "bad" per se, but because they take massive amounts of work, time and effort to get anywhere. When enough time passes and not enough has happened people simply lose the faith/will in them. That effect is strengthened by the lack of people on a project: The less you are, the heavier the work load on each person, and the longer it takes for visible progress.

And we're back to the attention-part: Reaching out to potential contributors, no matter who they are, is über-vital for most projects. At the same time, getting people interested is much much easier the further along we have have come in a project. This creates a paradoxical situation that can almost be summarized with "The longer away we are from the finish line, the more help we need, and the less likely we are to get it."

This brings me to the perhaps constructive part of my post and also off topic:
Project Showcase & Collaboration
Introduce projects, get feedback, advertise to contributors


What about creating a page for open source game job offerings? If a project needs a coder/artist/x they can put an add on it, with a detailed description of what type of person it seeks/what job needs to be done, a brief description of the project, a link back to it. The person announcing the job would have to "renew" it once a month by writing a re-captcha in order for the ad to be visible to potential contributors. That would insure that only fresh, relevant and still living projects are around and makes life easier for future contributors to find what they seek.

If I am an artist/coder/x and want to find a project I would want to work on that seek my services I should be offered a simple but yet advanced search: I can select if I want to work on an FPS game and/or RTS etc, I can also select if I look only for paid jobs and/or unpaid ones, or if I look to solve bounties, and I can select to search only for projects that need my skills as, for example, 3d-artist. Furthermore, I can also select to search for projects that are still "in planning" or "half way there" or "near completion" etc.

I think such a page would make life easier and do part of the job of matching needs and human resources better, and work as a great addition to the forum that is perfect for structured communication, but less so for finding each other.
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Re: WTactics: Open Source CCG

Postby Q_x » 08 Feb 2011, 13:50

Its strange thing to me to find a thread like this not updated for a longer while.

What has changed since last spring? Plenty!
Project is moving forward with decent speed.
Stuff that we have: working set of rules, around 20 good looking playtesting cards ready for online testing, web app for cards development in "testing alpha" state, around 6 active devs, two faction stories, plenty of our own pro-grade illustrations, also infrastructure is in place(Forum, wiki, web page, IRC channel), Scribus card template.

What are we doing currently? Introducing cardscape to production use, making sandscape (web online client), making cards, playtesting, translating.

What is so different in this project? It is easy, not bloated, not complicated. It is fun to develop it. While developing it you will not spoil your further fun (like when making adventure game).

Project is currently looking for any card game enthusiasts/gurus to speed up things. PHP coding is done on our two subprojects (sandscape and cardscape), residing on sourceforge and github.
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Re: WTactics: Open Source CCG

Postby Gallaecio » 08 Feb 2011, 15:29

Website down?
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Re: WTactics: Open Source CCG

Postby Gallaecio » 08 Feb 2011, 15:31

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Re: WTactics: Open Source CCG

Postby Q_x » 09 Feb 2011, 13:48

I asked as you pointed it. Thanks for the idea.
Website works fine, but due to using strange iframe mechanism it fails on some browsers. For me some links has to be opened outside of the iframe (in new tab) instead of "just like that".
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Re: WTactics: Open Source CCG

Postby farcodev » 11 Feb 2011, 16:33

I'm happy to see your project going well, even w/ some assets problems as snowdrop talked about it in july.

Keep up the good work and dedication ! :D
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Re: WTactics: Open Source CCG

Postby snowdrop » 10 Apr 2011, 21:21

Updated #1 post with latest info and working images.
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Re: WTactics: Open Source CCG

Postby Knitter » 09 Apr 2012, 10:58

I can't update the initial post so I'll just provide some info here.

After many problems with SPAM and malware infestations in the blog snowdrop spent several ours and dollars to have everything corrected, updated and reinvigorated. We have a new theme, one I think is much nicer and cheerful than the one we previously had, new hosting features for art and card development has restarted. Also the satellite projects that were born in WTactics are moving forward even if the are, mostly, one man shows.

I've asked in the Sandscape's topic but I'll ask again here since it makes more sense, can WTactics be featured in a blog post? I believe it would help the project get to more users and show that were are not dead and have been working and overcoming the many obstacles that arise. It would be interesting to have a blog post about WTactics that would also mention Sandscape, Cardscape (don't know if there is anything to show about this one) and ViCE. I think snowdrop will be able to provide more info.
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Re: WTactics: Open Source CCG

Postby Julius » 09 Apr 2012, 22:12

Hey... nice to see some progress on this.

About the blogpost... how about you write an nice article yourselves and we publish it as a guest-post?
I have taken some flac lately for not getting the facts strait ;) And thus I am sure you can do a much better job at mentioning all the important things. Besides this... we are all quite busy right now :p
Just email ( freegamerblog@gmail.com ) us the text and links/videos you would like to have posted, and one of us will get it on the blog ASAP.
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Re: WTactics: Open Source CCG

Postby snowdrop » 09 Apr 2012, 22:22

Thanks Julius.

We'll send something for review to you guys soon (TM). Would somebody mind adding us back to PlanetDev as well? Our RSS is >> http://wtactics.org/?feed=rss2 or http://wtactics.org/feed
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