Interactive tabletop playing surface (Space Hulk Hobby Challenge)

One of the great things about Space Hulk (or pretty much any small-scale tabletop skirmish game, that requires you to create individual characters) is customising the skills and weapons that your characters use in the game.

As the end-of-November deadline looms, I’m having to cut out all the “niceties” and focus on just the practical functionality of the game.

But that doesn’t mean compromise; I’ve already spent too much time creating onscreen avatars that can be customised, with different appearance, armour and – most importantly – weapons (sure, all but a couple only fire what look like ping-pong balls at the minute, but being able to put a specific character with a specific weapon in a specific place on the board – well, that’s what the game’s all about, surely?)

So here’s a simple online editor, where we can rename our characters, assign imagery for them (to display when their miniature is being moved on the tabletop) and select the weapons they use.

Until I’ve fully tested and debugged the app, I’ve deviated slightly from the rules of Space Hulk; I’m using a simple action points system, where every action takes a set number of APs to perform – this is actually the easiest way to make sure that everything is working as it should.

Once I’ve got the movement, line-of-sight and in-game scenery in place, I can replace this arbitary system of assigning numbers to thngs with rules that more closely resemble the actual game of Space Hulk.

Not much to do, then, before Friday……