Playgroup: MTG Life Counter 1.1.0 released

Hi folks,

Playgroup 1.1.0 is now available on all supported platforms, you can grab the latest version over at https://playgroup.gg/download 🎆

What's new:

Total overhaul of all drag and drop actions.

Our initial plan for attack declaration was very unintuitive looking back. It required an explanation video to show all the features which was probably a sign things could be better. This release features a complete redo of all gestures showing clearly labeled drop areas while also improving support for smaller devices such as mobile phones. The drop areas used to be too small to work on such devices, this should be much better in this version. Big shout-out to @DiscoAdam#4085 for giving us this idea and @jeffderek#3005 for giving value feedback while we were iterating on the implementation.

Smaller screen (mobile phone) support

The initial feedback showed there was a strong demand for support for smaller screens. The previously mentioned overhaul really helped with this but we also made various other changes to button, text and layout sizes to ensure that all features work better on mobile phones now. If you are a phone user please check us out again and let us know if things work as expected.

Support for five and six player games

Because of our changes to the drag and drop actions and our smaller screen support it was now also easier to support interfaces for up to six players. Six players on a phone is now doable, although a tablet with more screen space is still recommended.

Smaller things

• Everything is prettier
• Screen should now auto-rotate on based on device orientation
• Changed the way the player huds are displayed; removing the identification colors and using commander images for commander damage instead
• Fixed poison counters not syncing
• Resize HUD elements when virtual keyboard is open so it does not overlap on inputs
• Added a “show password” button
• Changed the way the player amount is picked
• Removed offline play; having to support two modes of play made little sense as our unique selling point is our data synchronization. We removed this feature to simplify the codebase.

What’s next?

Right now we are overhauling the logic engine for the life counter app. This will allow us to gather more data. Right now we are only syncing the ‘end state’ but don’t know who did what during which turns. With the coming update we will be able to be more specific, for instance: Johny did 10 damage to Timmy on turn 5. We can build cool timeline graphs and other visuals with this data.