Dinosaur Cowboys – Tabletop Skirmish Game

Progress and Document Changes
Although I wanted to get to another playtest yesterday, I played D&D and then formatted the rules document instead. So still some progress, just not on the core rules themselves. The good news is the docs are looking a lot more professional.
First of all I put the new logo on the title page, added a table of contents and table of figures, added page number footers, and merged the Items.odt and Sheet-Posse-Roster.odt into the main rules document (including proper landscape formatting and margins). So yeah, going forward I’ll be distributing a single document called “Dinosaur-Cowboys-Rulebook”.

Fonts
In addition to all that tedious (but necessary) formatting work, I had some fun and added neater fonts for the main title and overall headers. The two fonts used are:

Future West (used for title)
Original: dafont.com
Mirror: Mediafire

West Test (used for headers)
Original: dafont.com
Mirror: Mediafire

So if you plan to view the non-PDF version of future rules, you’ll want to download those fonts, otherwise the title page and headers won’t look nearly as impressive. PDFs of course will have the proper fonts, and I’ll mainly be stressing that format for distribution going forward. I mean you really only need the ODT if you plan on making changes.

Anyways my “Document TODO” from yesterday is now down to a single item: a Quick Reference sheet. I realized there might not even be enough to put on it, since besides the Modifiers table you don’t need much else. We’ll see going forward though.

Next Up
Well this weekend is shot for Dinosaur Cowboys development, since I’m hitting the ol’ dusty trail for most of it. I hope to get another playtest in next week to tweak the Initiative rules.

I might also try a Posse Roster using the new fonts, to add that little bit of additional flavor. I care about readability over style though, so the smaller size might not work well for the fonts. We’ll see though.
Speaking of the Posse Roster I’ll probably make a version that is an editable PDF (or “PDF form”). I also had a wild, feverish idea of making a “Posse Builder” web application where you can spend IP and buy equipment and have the result be a nicely populated Posse Roster (since I could use the Java library iText to fill in my planned PDF form version.
Finalizing the rules comes first, but yeah, could be something fun to think about in the future.

Also as I hoped the battle report helped generate interest in the game, as did getting the rules posted on freewargamesrules.co.uk (thanks!). Hopefully I can use the forums to discuss different ideas, instead of having to blunder through and decide on the best way myself.