This week I spent some time working on the visuals of the game board. I wanted to take a closer look at one of the challenges I face this week, card spacing. It sounds like a relatively minor issue, but I wanted to make sure I put some thought in it. The layout of cards in hand or on the field could have ramifications later for readability, customization, design, and/or other technical implementations. So far we haven’t finished adding in real cards yet so I used mockups as placeholders. Manual placement sounded too inflexible, requiring replacement if we decide to go with adjustments to the layout. To handle the spacing, I saw 3 main options: manual placement or a script, with or without a grid layout. I decided to go with just a script, but I had to figure out how much space to put between cards. Imagine you have the location of the first and last card, we can visualize the layouts of x cards in a space of length L as follows (with o representing the center of a card):

x = 2

o———-o

Length L between each card

x = 3

o—–o—–o

Length L/2

x = 4

o—o—o—o

Length L/3

And so on.

Where we see a clear pattern of length L/(x-1) between each card in order to keep the spacing even.

On another note, I had my first phone interview with Epic Systems on Tuesday. The call went rather informally with a software engineer at Epic. Aside from a couple questions about my project experience and technology interests, she mostly went over logistics for the position and selection process. Of note, I did appreciate her frankness discussing what working at Epic is like. For example, she noted that things can often move slowly at a medical software company. But the whole process has run surprisingly organized, with constant outreach and follow-ups. And there seems to be a lot of perks for working there. That’s all for today, thanks all for following along this far.