BGA Studio Cookbook

WORK IN PROGRESS

This page is collection of design and implementation recipes for BGA Studio framework. For tooling and usage recipes see Tools and tips of BGA Studio.

Visual Effects, Layout and Animation

Create all pieces statically

Ingredients: ggg_ggg.tpl, ggg.css, ggg.view.php (optional)

• Create ALL game pieces in html template (.tpl)
• ALL pieces should have unique id, and it should be meaningful, i.e. meeple_red_1d
• Do not use inline styling
• Id of player's specific pieces should use some sort of 'color' identification, since player id cannot be used in static layout, you can use english color name, hex 6 char value, or color "number" (1,2,3...)
• Pieces should have separated class for its color, type, etc, so it can be easily styled in groups. In example below you now can style all meeples, all red meeples or all red tokens, or all "first" meeples

in .tpl file:

 
  <div id="home_red" class="home red">
     <div id="meeple_red_1" class="meeple red n1"></div>
     <div id="meeple_red_2" class="meeple red n2"></div>
  </div>

in .css file:

.meeple {
	width: 32px;
	height: 39px;
	background-image: url(img/78_64_stand_meeples.png);
	background-size: 352px;
}

.meeple.red {
	background-position: 30% 0%;
}

• There should be straight forward mapping between server id and js id (or 1:1)
• You place objects in different zones of the layout, and setup css to take care of layout

.home .meeple{
   display: inline-block;
}

• If you need to have a temporary object that look like original you can use dojo.clone (and change id to some temp id)
• If there is lots of repetition or zone grid you can use template generator, but inject style declaration in css instead of inline style for flexibility

Note:

• If you use this model you cannot use premade js components such as Stock and Zone

Game Model and Database design

Database for "The euro game"

Lets say we have a game with workers, dice, tokens, board, resources, money and vp. Workers and dice can be placed in various zones on the board, and you can get resources, money, tokens and vp in your home zone. Also tokens can be flipped or not flipped.

Now lets try to map it, we have

• (meeple,zone)
• (die, zone, sideup)
• (resource cube/money token/vp token,player home zone)
• (token, player home zone, flip state)

We can notice that resource and money are uncountable, and don't need to be track individually so we can replace our mapping to

• (resource type/money,player home zone, count)

Now when we get to encode it we can see that everything can be encoded as (object,zone,state) form, where object and zone is string and state is integer. The resource mapping is slightly different semantically so you can go with two table, or counting using same table with state been used as count for resources.

So the piece mapping for non-grid based games can be in most case represented by (string: token_key, string: location, int: state), example of such database schema can be found here: dbmodel.sql and class implementing access to it here table.game.php.

Variant 1: Minimalistic

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `token` (
 `token_key` varchar(32) NOT NULL,
 `token_location` varchar(32) NOT NULL,
 `token_state` int(10),
 PRIMARY KEY (`token_key`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;

Variant 2.1: Additional resource table, using same location as token table

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `resource` (
 `resource_type` varchar(32) NOT NULL,
 `resource_location` varchar(32) NOT NULL,
 `resource_count` int(10) signed NOT NULL,
 PRIMARY KEY (`resource_type`,`resource_location`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;

Variant 2.2: Additional resource table, resource count for each player id

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `resource` (
 `player_id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL,
 `resource_key` varchar(32) NOT NULL,
 `resource_count` int(10) signed NOT NULL,
 PRIMARY KEY (`player_id`,`resource_key`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;

ALTER TABLE resource ADD CONSTRAINT fk_player_id FOREIGN KEY (player_id) REFERENCES player(player_id);

Variant 3: More normalised

This version is similar to "card" table from hearts tutorial, you can also use exact cards database schema and Deck implementation for most purposes (even you not dealing with cards).

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `token` (
 `token_id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
 `token_type` varchar(16) NOT NULL,
 `token_arg` int(11) NOT NULL,
 `token_location` varchar(32) NOT NULL,
 `token_state` int(10),
 PRIMARY KEY (`token_id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;

Assorted Stuff

tbd