Ian Mahoney - Vassal Midterm Writeup
3/10/11

	In designing board games, I've often felt that it would be useful to have a convenient way of prototyping my games digitally, so that I could easily try out modifications and test out the overall structure of the game.  I considered attempting to learn Flash, but that program (aside from being proprietary) didn't seem to be quick enough to serve as an effective prototype medium.  Similarly, Blender, an open-source 3D modeling program, has a game engine, but it's much more aimed towards physics simulations than turn-based board games.  So I decided to take a look at Vassal, an open-source program for building and playing digital board and card games (http://www.vassalengine.org/about.php).
	Before I attempted to use Vassal to design any games, I used it to play a few of the board games that had already been implemented in it so as to get a feel for Vassal's scope and capacity.  It seemed to provide the functionality I would need in order to implement simple board game mechanics.  It allows you to create a board (or multiple boards), define pieces which can be modified, cards which can be hidden or placed in a player's hand, logs of what pieces moved where, random number generators, and other features.
	I began learning how to use Vassal by working through the board game tutorial on the Vassal website (http://www.vassalengine.org/wiki/Board_Game_Tutorial).  It covered the basics, like creating boards and pieces.  Unfortunately, I discovered that to documentation on Vassal's website was not a particularly illuminating way of figuring out just what the various different menus and features of Vassal do.  The tutorials, while helpful, proved to be somewhat limited in their scope.
	After having completed both the board game and card game tutorials, as well as perusing the double-blind tutorial, I set about attempting to implement my own game in Vassal.  I started by working with a simple blank hex-grid and defining some pieces, just to make sure I could.  I then attempted to find a suitable image to use as a base map for my game.  I began by using the map editor from Battle For Wesnoth, an open-source hex-based strategy game (http://www.wesnoth.org/).  Unfortunately, the editor had no way of exporting my newly created map into just an image.  I tried taking a screenshot of it, but the result proved to be of too small a resolution to be practical.
	So, I used a combination of SVG-edit, a web-based image editor (http://svg-edit.googlecode.com/svn/branches/2.5.1/editor/svg-editor.html), and the Gimp, an GNU image manipulation program (http://www.gimp.org/).  I exported a hex-grid from Vassal and drew a simple map on top of it, then imported it back into Vassal.
	Since then, I've created several images for a physical prototype of my game, and intend to use those same images in my digital prototype.  Eventually, I will create a series of identical windows with maps and irregular grids which the player's can use to track their actions, and pieces for the different heros, minions, and turrets that I create.