Board Game Factory

Contributors are welcome here! See the end of readme.

This is a vector-graphics framework intended for creating and scaling up production of reusable assets with vector graphics.

It is a thick wrapper around cairo for vector graphics and pango for fully featured text layout and rendering providing very user-friendly for composing assets.

I've developed it personally to satisfy my need for a solid prototyping engine for board games, but inherently, it is in no way tied to making board games, even though it contains a couple convenience classes for that (such as CardSheet for producing printable card sheets out of lists of components).

Installation

Requires conda and having conda forge in channels (see https://conda-forge.org).

Unfortunately the cairo and pango binary libraries cannot be installed directly with pip.

conda install cairo pango
pip install board-game-factory

Features

• High quality rendering - BGF is based fully in Vector Graphics, therefore allowing for renders of arbitrary resolution
• Component Tree structure - similar to making GUIs in Java, you can embed a component inside a component inside a component...
• Fully extensible components - the best way to use this framework is to create and compose your own components extending base components.
• Fully dynamic and highly flexible sizing system:
  • Component width/height possible values:
    • INFER - the component decides on its own how large it should be
    • FILL - fill all available remaining space in the parent Container
    • '12.34%' - take up 12.34% of available space
    • 123 - take up 123 pixels
• Many basic and advanced components are already implemented:
  • Container - base component with a layout manager, you add components into it.
  • Shapes
    • Rectangle
    • RoundedRectangle
    • Circle
    • Line
  • TextUniform - a fully featured text rendering component (exposing most advanced features of pango) for rendering text of a uniform style (all characters have same font, size, color, ...).
  • TextMarkup - advanced text component supporting markup for strings with multiple styles (boldface words, multiple colors, ...)
    • features smart inline laying of icons (any images) for embedding icons directly in text
  • Grid - a special component for creating table structures:
    • each cell can have unique parameters (e.g. layout manager)
    • incredibly flexible row and column definitions (INFER, FILL, %, px)
    • fully featured cell merging
  • just with those few components + LayoutManagers I've made all the samples you can see below in the link on imgur.
• LayoutManagers
  • Absolute - define pixels
  • HorizontalFlow, VerticalFlow - align automatically to row or column
  • Fully extensible, you can write your own

Usage

For examples of usage see tests.

Things I made with BGF

Samples of prototypes I've made with this framework:

https://imgur.com/a/TS779gR

Issues

Please report any issues and feel free to try and fix them on your own.

Contributors Wanted!

I would love to welcome people on board who would like to extend the project or improve it, if you're interested you can drop in a PR directly or we can first discuss, you can reach me at adam.volny at gmail dot com.

For a hobby project, I think it has a surprisingly high quality of design and code. There are is quite a good test coverage, all tests are performed directly against rendered references. This allowed for controlled development of many of the complex features in this framework (dynamic sizing & positioning is really difficult with this amount of supported features).

It could be extended to do many things (e.g. a gui board game asset builder, coupled with inputs from spreadsheets, ...), I would love to hear Your ideas!