ZACK LAWRENCE
Co-Designer and Pipeline Engineer
Shopping for Publishers
Summary
Love Polygon is a comedic mid-weight party game with love triangles of all shapes and sizes. The game is for 2-6 players and plays in 30-60 minutes. It’s a hand elimination game, but you're not trying to run out of cards, instead you want to relieve your sweetheart of their cards.
Sweethearts are reflected via heart tokens that players give each other at the beginning of a round. Whoever has your heart token at any given time is your sweetheart, and you are their admirer. A heart token can and will be move, meaning win conditions are fluid. You can even put in the work to love yourself and become your own sweetheart.
Once a sweetheart runs out of cards, the round ends and all of their admirers receive a memory. As for the winning sweetheart, going into the next round they'll draw a powerful special card for every admirer they had.
Relevant Work:
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Co-designed with Alex Perrotti.
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We've run over 100 playtests online and offline.
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We heavily iterated round structure, win condtion, and point distribution.
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We have 125 basic cards and 75 special cards currently in the game.
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We additionally have a scenario deck and a WIP "Fashion" Expansion.
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I made a UXP plugin for InDesign to read variables from a spreadsheet to dynamically reformat our document.
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The plugin also exports cards from a spreadsheet directly to Google Drive.
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I made a Google Apps Scripts extension for Sheets to export a .csv in UTF-16 encoding. Google's default encoding clashes with InDesign.
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I made our icons and current card designs (note: these are temporary).
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I made a font that contains our icons.
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I made the heart and memory tokens. (note: all visuals are temporary).
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I wrote numerous GREP functions to auto format text on our cards.
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Alex and I both automate our Google Sheets heavily using cell formulas.
I developed a UXP plugin for InDesign that uses a spreadsheet to auto-format then export our cards as pngs directly into a shared drive. The entire export process is shown here. It starts by downloading an auto-formatted and UTF-16 encoded .csv of the spreadsheet we want to export (functionality I made possible using Google Apps Scripts). Then it shows the export process including files populating real-time. Finally, it shows off the results of the export in our shared drive folder.
InDesign and UXP plugins are supposedly unable to read variables from a spreadsheet. That said, InDesign does let you populate textboxes with cells from a spreadsheet and UXP plugins can read the live content of those cells. In my plugin, I treat the green textboxes shown as variables, autoformatting each card based on them.
Various photos from playtests in 2024.
I developed a UXP plugin for InDesign that uses a spreadsheet to auto-format then export our cards as pngs directly into a shared drive. The entire export process is shown here. It starts by downloading an auto-formatted and UTF-16 encoded .csv of the spreadsheet we want to export (functionality I made possible using Google Apps Scripts). Then it shows the export process including files populating real-time. Finally, it shows off the results of the export in our shared drive folder.