October 10, 2022
For years now, analog tabletop games have been getting digital and physical releases. Unfortunately, the typical digital release format has been the same PDF the team used to print the book. This often means it’s not very accessible, missing alt text and mis-ordered, and nearly always means it’s non-interactive.
There’s a better format for books meant to be read on screens. One that is deeply interactive, that is responsive to the devices being used to read it, that is able to cross-reference itself and other texts, and that can be made extremely accessible. That format is, unsurprisingly, a web page. If you’re not reading a physical printout of this post on a screen, you’re reading a web page.
This project, Platen, is a toolkit that helps make the development experience for indie tabletop game developers—and anyone else who wants to make interactive digital texts—as delightful as possible. One of the largest barriers to this process has been the skills and domain expertise required for creating an accessible, beautiful, and extensively interactive site.
Platen limits the necessary work and expertise. Of course, it can’t eliminate the need for familiarity and there’s no actual magical solution to obviate all work, but it does make the process simpler, clearer, and more more manageable for folks who don’t know their way around web development.
For those that do, Platen also provides a good foundational toolkit geared directly at tabletop gaming texts that they can build on top of.
We’re excited to continually iterate on this project and smooth out the experience as much as possible. Talk to you soon!
~ Mikey