Miniature gaming is a fascinating hobby. In fact, it is at least three hobbies bundled into one. I?ve been painting miniatures since my early teens. I started with Warhammer 40.000 Rogue Trader (1st edition). After a break I recently got back into tabletop gaming in form of Warhammer 40.000 Kill Team.
The world has changed a lot since the early days. Everything is now digital. While in the past we built our army lists with pen, paper and calculators, nowadays things work much nicer with apps on your smartphone.
BattleScribe seems to be the app of choice for most gamers.
BattleScribe: Build your army list. Fast. – Apps on Google Play
A fast and powerful army list creator for tabletop wargamers. Create, view and share army lists for a wide range of?
play.google.com
BattleScribe is great! However, it is focused on building the lists, not so much on using the lists during a game. The best way is to printout a paper but that is something that could be improved.
My gaming group is all software developers. So naturally we started a discussion on what could be done digitally to improve on the printout.
Markus, Michael and I put our heads together and decided to build a prototype. Introducing ?Companion for Kill Team?:
Design principles
Couple of guiding principles we wanted to follow when we started the project:
Do not replicate BattleScribe functionality
BattleScribe works. It has a lot of users. There?s no need to create a competing product for it. Instead, we hooked into the format of BattleScribe roster export. It allows us to build on the great work Jon Taylor has done. People can simply use BattleScribe and share a completed roster to the Companion for Kill Team.
Focus on Kill Team
If you try to cater for every use case you can?t focus on anything properly. We are playing Kill Team so we decided to solve our use case. As the name of the app indicates it is laser focused on Kill Team.
Better than a printout
What we?re building must be better, easier and faster to use than a printout. Otherwise, what?s the point. We have built in features to make it very easy and fast to find the information you need and allow the focus to stay on the tabletop. People staring at their phones is something I want to avoid. Tabletop gaming is table top gaming.
Depending on the selected turn phase the app shows different model stats right in the overview.
Miniatures centric
Miniature gaming is all about miniatures. Not about the rules. We want to build the companion app to reflect that. At the initial state we have added a simple miniatures collection management where user can upload pictures of their miniatures and then associate these pictures to the team they?re bringing to the tabletop.
Pictures of your miniatures are in central role in the app
Getting ready to launch
The app is now in Open Beta! We?re looking for people who are willing to experiment with not-quite-ready product and give us feedback.
If you?re interested, head to Google Play to opt in to the Beta test from this link:
Sign in – Google Accounts
Edit description
play.google.com
And once done, download the app for free from the Play Store:
Companion for Kill Team – Apps on Google Play
Everyone 10+ Use this app during a game of Kill Team to show your team roster in more convenient way. Import a roster?
play.google.com
Please join our subreddit r/CompanionForKillTeam for feedback and discussion.
Follow this Medium publication or follow our shared miniatures twitter account, @NextOnTabletop for updates in social media.
Yep, this is us.. playing Kill Team before creation of our app.
