Cosmic Encounter Generator 1

Oh! This entry is more than 2 years old.

I've decided to let some of my old work stay on this site as a reference point to my progress!

Cosmic Encounter Generator

17 juli, 2019 – Webdesign

Cosmic Encounter

Cosmic Encounter is me and my best friends favorite board game. Each player gets one or multiple aliens species, which all each has a special power that will change the rules of the game, to try to capture all planets in the universe.

The aliens are given out at random, no one can just pick an alien out of the pile. There is also several special events that will be fired once in a while, requiring a player to get a new alien mid-game.

For experienced players (like my friends and I), we are given 4 aliens at random and then we get to choose 2. This means we don't reveal what aliens we "are" until everyone is ready and has selected.

The problem

This game can has multiple expansions and therefore it has 165+ different alien powers you can play. The alien cards are very big, think almost an A5 piece of paper, so it's hard to shuffle them together.

In addition, since the expansions are in separate boxes, sorting through the pile of flare-cards and alien cards that were all shuffled together is not fun.

The main problem was that since we kept each expansion pile separated, it was hard to make the drawing of powers completely random.

Landing page. Illustration on the left is made by me.

The old version

I decided to create a generator, where a user can set settings like, number of players, number of aliens and flares, what expansions should be included and then it will select aliens for each player.

This was an idea I had in 2013, and I made a very simple Javascript generator that did the job. However, since each player has to see what aliens they get and as when my friends and I play together we select 2 out of 4 aliens, we had to take turns to click on the website to see which power they had gotten. This would take time, therefore I decided it was time to make something more fancy.

The new version

I decided to use Ruby on Rails for this project to create my own custom back-end. I also setup websockets so that now a registered user can setup a gamesession. Now someone can start a session that will create a unique id, so every player can go onto the website on their phone use the id to put in the same session. When in the game they get their own screen with their alien selection.

On the main screen where the game master was, shows which players have chosen and who is still selecting. When everyone has pressed ready, the mainscreen will transform to an overview of all the players and their selected aliens. That I usually airplay on the TV, so we all have an overview while we play.

Cosmic Generator 6
The alien illustration in this picture is borrowed from the game "Cosmic Encounter" made by Fantasy Flight Games. I have no affiliation with Fantasy Flight Games.

Statistics

The best part about having a back-end in the new version, is that we now can collect statistics. Now we can check player winrate, alien winrate, popular duos, how many shared wins each player have etc. We no longer have to fight about it ;)

Coming soon

Even though I'm done with most of the functionality/programming, the design is not complete yet, but this post will be updated soon with a link to the project and screenshot

Alien index, for an overview. Clicking on a alien will bring up handy statistics like winrate, how often it's picked, best combos, illegal combos etc.

More images