Print On-Demand APIs and Rule-Based Images

Hello all,

As always, we're plugging away on the website.  No huge news, though I am purchasing all of the cutting dies and print equipment next week.  The nice thing about not being operational is that I can focus on development.  I'd like to have most of the heavy lifting done before we open for beta, and from there just add features over time.

Coding the entire site to run on APIs is going very well.  Right now I'm working on the ability for a remote system to give us their files (either via FTP or HTTP POST), register the files, and associate the registered files with a game.  This is certainly the most complicated area of the system, but once we get it right it should allow for some new concepts in the game industry to emerge.   That's the part I'm most excited about.  A game designer teamed up with a programmer could create 100% personalized board and card game experiences.  The only trick is, how to make this easy for designers to leverage.  But we have that covered!

What we plan to do is create a rule engine that game designers can leverage.  Questions can be collected from the customer and submitted along with the order.  Those questions would then be used by the rule processor to generate different composite images.  For example, let's say we have a Fantasy CCG that allows the player to customize their main hero.  We could ask the customer the following questions:

1.  Upload your hero's photo
2.  What should the name of your hero be?
3.  Choose a magical element: (Fire, Water, Earth or Air)

When those questions are submitted along with the order, the system would execute all rules associated with the game.  Some conceptual sample rules are below:

=== Hero Card Creation Rules  ===
Rule 1.  Create a new 2.5" x 3.5" canvas

Rule 2.  If Question #3 is set to "Fire", add "fire_template.png" to the canvas

Rule 3.  If Question #3 is set to "Water", add "water_template.png" to the canvas
...
Rule 6.  Add Question #2 image to the canvas at coordinates (10,30) and constrain to (200,200)
Rule 7.  Write the text from Question #1 centered in the coordinates (10,10,200,30)
Rule 8.  Render the canvas over Card ID "Hero Card"

The rules above could be built using an MS Outlook style rule-builder, where each rule has one or more conditions, exceptions, and actions.  Sample conditions and exceptions could be:

"If Question #2 has value [comparison] ..."
"If Question #3 is not set or not valid ..."

Once the conditions have been met and none of the exceptions are triggered, the rule's actions would execute.  These could be:

"Create [Width, Height] Canvas"
"Add [file] as Layer [Layer Name]"
"Write Text From Question #2 using [center|left|right] alignment between ([X,Y, Width, Height]) as Layer [Layer Name]"

Once the rules are set up, the designer will be able to collect input from the user, have our system render customized content, and have us print/ship it on-demand.

I'm excited to know what crazy ideas people could think of if customer-specific print on-demand was available to them.  If anything comes to mind, I'd love to hear from you at anthony@goblinworkshopgames.com.  The more feedback I get, the more I can ensure the engine that we're building will cover what you have in mind!

I'll close this post with a little bit of eye candy - the My Accounts page, in development.

Happy designing,
- Anthony