My name is Dan Goodman. Most of career has been spent developing video games. I was lead programmer on a game called Hunter: The Reckoning, based on the White Wolf RPG. I also worked on Golden Axe: Beast Rider, and a Leisure Suit Larry game (Magna Cum Laude), among many others.
I've spent the last 10 years mostly working on tools for video game development, doing contract work for 2K Games, Ubisoft, Rockstar, Riot games, and a bunch more.
I've been playing board, card, and RPG games since I was a kid. I've always been designing games on my own as a hobby. I started using NanDeck about 12 years ago for some of my card game designs, and, as a programmer, I liked it a lot. I found that the ability batch export cards from a script was a really cool idea.
I did some work for a company called Spin Master back in 2017-2018 to develop an Illustrator plugin to speed up their workflow for the new Bakugan TCG. It read the contents of an excel file, and generated a card for each row, opening a template file, and filling in all the card info from the spreadsheet.
After working on that, I started thinking about creating a better way to batch generate cards from a stand-alone visual editor. I kept thinking about it, designing it in my head for about 6 months. A year later, I released the first version of Cocktail for free to the community.
Probably less that 20 people even tried that first version of the tool, but I started to get feedback which helped me focus on areas of the software that were most important to the users.
A year and a half after that initial release, Cocktail has 400+ users. I'm still making pretty regular updates and releasing them for free. My goal was to create a tool for any game designer, whether they be a hobbyist like myself, or a professional. We have a great discord community that helps new users, and I'm sporadically releasing new tutorials and documentation.
I'm very proud of the work that I've done and I honestly think Cocktail is as good or better than anything else out there.
Anyway, that's my story up to this point. I look forward to getting more involved in the BGDF community.
Thanks,
Dan.
