I've spent the last 25 years working mostly on video games as a programmer. I'd started dabbling a bit with my own tabletop game designs while at Secret Level, a Sega development studio. With the help of a couple of friends there, I designed a card game prototype called Monkey Business, using nanDECK.
After Leaving Secret Level, I started doing contract work with various game companies, including Ubisoft, 2K, Rockstar, and many others. Eventually, I had an office and a few other programmers working for me. Our focus was on tools - creating editors, exporters and other utilities that were useful to game development.
In early 2018, we started working with Spin Master on an Illustrator plugin for generating cards for their upcoming trading card game, Bakugan. A lot of good ideas came out of developing that tool, like batch generating the cards from a spreadsheet, linking text and image properties to the data, and using markup to insert icons into text. But, In the end, I felt that using Illustrator to generate the cards was a really clunky solution that could be streamlined by making a stand-alone tool.
Soon after finishing up the initial contract with Spin Master, I met Justin Gary of Stone Blade Entertainment. He had also worked with the Bakugan team, and was looking for a tool to help Stone Blade quickly make prototypes for playtesting. We went back and forth about the project for a while, but in the end, we couldn't come to an agreement. Still, the idea simmered in the back on my mind for a while afterwards.
Later that year, I pulled out my old Monkey Business nanDeck file because I was interested in making some updates to the layout and adding some new card ideas I had. I don't know if anyone else has tried looking at old nanDeck script files after years of being away from them, but even as a programmer, I was completely lost, and gave up after a couple of hours. I was convinced that creating a visual tool that was easy to use and didn't rely on scripting was a good idea.
I started working on Cocktail shortly thereafter. I spent about 4 months working on it full time before releasing the very first free version of Cocktail to the public in November of 2019.
A lot has happened since then. I've had nearly two and a half years to improve the tool with the help of a great discord community of game designers. I've seen one of our early users, Ecrya Games, successfully Kickstart their board game, made using my software. I've worked with the Stone Blade team to create a custom Cocktail exporter for their upcoming SolForge game. And right now, I'm on the verge of launching my own first ever Kickstarter for Cocktail.
It's been a blast working on something of my own that I'm passionate about, getting feedback, and helping people bring their ideas to life.
If you want to check out Cocktail, you can still download it for free here:
https://cocktail.software/download/
Also, check out the Kickstarter here:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cocktail/cocktail-card-design-softw...
