ZunTzu

I am a member of an internet discussion forum for amateur game designers (www.bgdf.com), and we have been discussing for years how great it would be to have an application that would allow us to playtest games over the internet. ZunTzu is exactly what we have been looking for. I am very, very impressed with what you have put together here! Very well done! I very much appreciate what a useful tool this will be both for solo playtesting and for playtesting games over the internet.

Speaking specifically as a game designer, there is one suggestion I would make that could perhaps be incorporated into a future version if practical. It is not at all uncommon for playtesting to reveal that changes are needed to a prototype's componentry -- maybe you put 25 Victory Point tokens in the game but it turns out you really need 35, or maybe you find you want to add an additional deck of cards. It's easy enough to modify the files in your Zun Tzu gamebox to add new components in this way, however, when I have tried to do this, scenarios or saved games created with the "old" version of a game no longer work. It would be nice if Zun Tzu could handle these modifications more gracefully -- if a scenario would still start up even if a game box had been changed (as long as none of the components the scenario was looking for had been removed, for example).

There may be a few other additions that could be useful, but I don't want to overwhelm you with a wish list. But to make the program more useful for playtesting, this one change would be tremendously useful.

Again, thanks so much for your hard work in developing Zun Tzu. It's much appreciated.

Best,

-Jeff

Expanding on my previous thought, it appears that any change to the game box makes existing saved games unusable. To test this, I changed the .ztb gamebox file back to a .zip, placed a new Icon file into the .zip archive (the Icon was identical to the one that was being overwritten), then changed the extension back to a .ztb. When I opened Zun Tzu and attempted to open a saved game, I got the message: "Unable to open game. Game box '[game box title]' was not found in the library".

However, if I change the .ztg file to a .zts file, (changing only the extension, without modifying the file at all), and drop that into the gamebox, it can be played.

So, there seems to be something a bit odd whereby saved games don't like changes to the game box but scenarios are indifferent. Is this a bug or am I doing something wrong?

At any rate, as I mentioned, changes to the game box for a prototype game are somewhat inevitable, but it would be good if there was an easy way to still be able to use a saved game even after you've modified the game box. (Even if the solution required modifying the saved game file, that would be acceptable).

Thanks,

-Jeff

jwarrend wrote:I am very, very impressed with what you have put together here! Very well done! I very much appreciate what a useful tool this will be both for solo playtesting and for playtesting games over the internet.

Thanks!

jwarrend wrote:It would be nice if Zun Tzu could handle these modifications more gracefully -- if a scenario would still start up even if a game box had been changed (as long as none of the components the scenario was looking for had been removed, for example).

Point taken.

A saved file is linked to a specific version of a game box. It's the easiest way to make sure that a saved game is compatible with a game box.

After small changes (to an image file for instance) you can hack the file by opening it in Notepad and by changing the value of the "hash" field. It is the unique "signature" of your game box.
If you have added (or removed) counters, the file can still be hacked but it's more difficult: you'll have to add an offset to (or substract an offset from) every counter id. That's because the first counter of the first counter section has id "0", the next one has id "1", ...

jwarrend wrote:Expanding on my previous thought, it appears that any change to the game box makes existing saved games unusable.

That's correct.

jwarrend wrote:However, if I change the .ztg file to a .zts file, (changing only the extension, without modifying the file at all), and drop that into the gamebox, it can be played.

The constraint is relaxed for embedded scenarios, because we know for sure that they are designed to be played with the game box into which they are packed.

Jerome wrote: After small changes (to an image file for instance) you can hack the file by opening it in Notepad and by changing the value of the "hash" field. It is the unique "signature" of your game box.
If you have added (or removed) counters, the file can still be hacked but it's more difficult: you'll have to add an offset to (or substract an offset from) every counter id. That's because the first counter of the first counter section has id "0", the next one has id "1", ...

Thanks Jerome, knowing these details is very helpful. Modifying the .ztg file is easy enough so I'm glad to know how to do that. It does sound like manually modifying the file after adding components could be more tedious by hand, but if it's at least possible to straightforwardly use a gamebox that has only undergone minor changes, that's good enough for me for now. Thanks again!

-Jeff