Our friends at Third Floor Wars had a whale of a time trying out Zhenya’s Wonder Tales, coming away pretty impressed and excited by the game’s potential. They got a chance to see our Roll20 implementation, which has been shepherded along by Jenn Martin, with amazing custom backgrounds by Sovanny Vorn.

Conversion for digital play required some modifications. The biggest, based on playtest feedback, was the removal of the lovely and elaborate floral borders, replaced by sleeker, more functional, and less obtrusive color borders. The text size was also increased, to make reading them on a screen easier. Gameplay is unchanged, and the simple card-based approach Zhenya’s takes made the digital translation very straightforward. 

Playing in Roll20 is different from a physical table, and trying to perfectly copy the analog experience doesn’t capitalize on the strengths of the platform. On a computer screen, we don’t need to conform to manufacturer specifications on card size or shape, and we can have as many cards and handouts as we need. We also knew from experience with Fiasco that cards on a computer screen look much better with a border, so we went through a few iterations of those.

When I started developing the game in Roll20, I thought about not using the card deck functionality at all, since you never shuffle cards while playing Zhenya’s Wonder Tales. I thought tokens might be simpler, but realized that they couldn’t handle the private information on the character cards—so back to custom card decks, it was! 

 

The next issue we tackled was readability. When zoomed out enough to see all the cards on the virtual table, it was very hard to read them. You can select a card in Roll20 and hit “z” to zoom in, but it makes reviewing multiple options cumbersome. We removed the floral borders and increased text size.

In Roll20, you will never accidentally mix up the different wonder tale decks, so visual cues to separate each tale weren’t needed. Because we can’t pre-deal cards on the table prior to play, it became important to make it easy to set up the table, hence the four colors. This also helps identify the move cards anyone can trigger! 

 

 Finally, I knew I wanted a background with some texture, since 2-dimensional cards can easily get lost on a flat background. I gave Sovanny some very ugly sketches, which she translated into images that I think really get you into the spirit of a cranky old witch!

 There’s lots of ways to use Roll20, and our way is only one of them. If you find a different way to do something, let us know! We are always looking for new tips and tricks! 

-- Jenn