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.
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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.