As many of the visitors of becomemagi.com know, I started coding for Serpent's Tongue when the team behind the game released a full-ink playtest set that I couldn't afford to use. I created a tool that allowed me to enter the data from the cards into a spreadsheet in Google Drive, export as a CSV, and then import it into a PHP tool that essentially read the file and wrote HTML/CSS so that the cards looked... usable.
That early tool was the start... and now we're getting close to the finish, I'm actually doing the exact opposite. I've created a process that takes the data out of our DB, spits it into a CSV file, and the allows our designer, +Jere Kasanen, to bring that file into InDesign for final adjustments and PDF preparations before we send to China.
The most incredible thing about this process is that... it took about 10 minutes of trial and error for the entire thing to essentially "Click" into place. The process is SMOOTH and simple.
And that's astounding because not only have Jere and I never met, we live at almost opposite sides of the world (he's in Finland, +2 GMT, and I'm in Washington State, -8 GMT).
The file I export has 65 data fields per record; These are some COMPLEX cards, and Jere's template must look insane (I don't have InDesign, so I'm exporting data essentially blindly for him, another reason it's amazing the workflow even works).
Anyway, nothing mind blowing to write about tonight. Laptop is settling into my life nicely :)
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