Interactive tabletop playing surface (Space Hulk Hobby Challenge)

“Isn’t Sam a little… short to be a stormtrooper?” asked some wag on a recent blog post. I’m not sure. I’ve never met him. Maybe that’s why he always sits at the far side of the table during videos? Like the famous Father Ted caravan scene, he can simply claim “I’m not small, I’m just further away”….

Anyway, I think I fixed it.

And then I thought “I don’t want to fix problems with imagery every time someone pipes up it should be different”. So I extracted the artwork from the app and made it an external resource. To those who don’t bother much about such things, the end experience is no different.

But to those who want to, they can now find the external .png (on their phone/smart device) and edit it, to include their own favourite characters.

Suddenly it made sense!

I’ve painted my Space Marines as Ultramarines. No, not because I haven’t the imagination not to. And no, not because I had loads of blue left over from buying three copies of Warhammer:Conquest magazine a few weeks back for the freebie miniatures (actually, probably a bit of that). I just liked the blue marines.

But Space Hulk is usually played with Terminators (it’s a good few years since I actually played Space Hulk and I’m not sure where in the loft my old miniatures are any more). If I’m playing a two-player game over the intertubes, it’s quite possible that my opponent is using Blood Angel Terminators for their Space Marines and 2nd edition genestealers, while on my board, hundreds of miles away, I’ve got regular Smurfs and Tyranid proxies for my playing pieces.

By allowing both players to edit their own artwork, each can have the graphics in their app match the miniatures on their own tabletop!

Maybe in future there could even be some kind of online image editor for each character too. But that’ll have to wait. I’ve got (yet more) coding to finish off.

As my wife said, “I you think I’m going to sit here drybrushing your terrain because you’ve run out of time, messing about adding stuff that isn’t really important to your bloody game instead of just getting your head down and getting it finished, you’ve another think coming”.

She’s quite supportive like that.