I'm posting this up from the main discussion in the Defiance Kickstarter as its probably going to get lost in the comment sea. I'd like the mission generator to be an app where people can use the tiles and game resources to write and share their own missions. Theres quite a few talented app developers in the Infinity community so I've o doubt someone will eventually produce something for Defiance. Could you make the game resources available such as images of the tiles, enemy tokens, hacking board etc so that a basic graphical system could be used to make missions? It doesn't need to be complex, just a way of linking images of the tiles together to make a map and a way to position enemy markers and objectives on said tiles. If you were to make these basic resources available to players they would fill the need for additional mission content by writing their own and potentially sharing them with the community.
I think CB’s response is essentially “Corvus Belli can’t afford to get into app development.” And, to be frank, looking at the state of the mobile version of Army, they probably can’t. Crazed fans running off and writing their own apps without any consideration for compensation is one thing. Looking at the PDFs that CB has for the version of the materials on the Kickstarter page, there are probably some things that they could do to make it easier for an app to be developed. Things like making the images on the cards available without all of the boxes and hexagons on top of them (because you can get better results (more readable and searchable) drawing the text over a compressed image). A certain other game company produced an app for a card-based Wargames where they supplied all of their cards as PDF images. They ran into problems because the text limited how much they could compress the images and that limited how many cards they could include in the app. If they had supplied background images for the cards (like Privateer Press’s War Room app does) the app developer could have had the app generate better cards dynamically. And, as a bonus, people would get to see full frontal shots of the Gwalior and Sheskiin. :)
@solkan I'm not thinking of an app to emulate the experience of playing Defiance, that would almost certainly be a huge amount of work for anyone to do. I'm specifically thinking of an app or program that would allow for players to make their own missions to play using the physical game. Imagine an editor where the available tiles are presented to the user and can be linked together to form a "dungeon" layout. Then markers representing the available enemies can be put in specific locations on the tiles as well as an objectives. Things like the hacking console from Defiance can appear with the means to add the symbols needed to active their associated objectives. A basic text pannel to add details of the mission and any specifics related to objectives would be needed as well. The created mission could then be shared in the form of a pdf or image for players to use. A more advanced option might be to generate a hex code for each mission that would allow it to be shared to other users of the app for editing and refinement. If the player base comes up with good missions then CB could highlight them on the Infinity website similarly to how high quality battle reports in the online campaigns were published. If there are worries about the app resources being used to bypass the need for the physical game, for example by printing out tiles and tokens, then the size and resolution of the app images can be kept limited. After all the app is just for generating tile layouts and populating the mission resources. If something bare bones was initially developed then additional features such as "random dungeon" generation could be added or the means to add custom content such as additional tiles which could come with the mission PDF as extra content.
You could do all of that with just a graphics program. Step 1: Copy or extract the images out of the PDF Step 2: Use graphics program to arrange the elements. I mean, that’s basically what CB will be doing, except they’ll have the images separated out as they make them, probably. Layout text and graphics and done. If you had the money to pay someone, it’d be a nice paying gig for a developer. (Or a nice student portfolio project, but would still be better for money...) But I think you’re trying to make things more complicated than they have to be. Disclaimer: I stand by the statement that the barrier to something like this getting written is going through and extracting all of the images and prepping them for the app. That’s the “this is slow, time consuming and not what I went to school to learn to do” (a.k.a the “Not Fun”) part if you try to talk someone into writing a map editor.
