Project: Zombicide - Day 4
by
, April 18th, 2015 at 11:15 (13837 Views)
Welcome to Day 4!
Today it's time to populate the board with... TOKENS!
Zombicide's appeal in part stems from all those nifty miniatures appearing on the board (My huge box of Zombicide stuff arrived this week, so I can tell from first-hand experience now ;-)). For the virtual table top that doesn't work so well.
Fortunately Zombicide provides all the graphics you need. Once again the regular card board tokens you need to set up the missions are already available in the mission generator we already cannibalized for the tiles (see what I did there?).
Which leaves us the survivors and the zombies.
With just a little bit of Photoshop work, this is quite easy - the key is clipping masks. I have set up a circular black layer with a few effects (Inner Shadow, Inner Glow) and just dump the character image (from the survivor id card) into that mask.
On a higher level I have the frame - basically a colored ring, where I choose the color according to the main color for that character.
In the end I export a transparent .png like this:
I do like exporting these at 150x150 px, but if your group has problems with bandwidth, you can make these smaller, of course.
Images for the zombies likewise are available on the website (just photographing the unpainted grey ones from the box makes it a lot harder to distinguish them).
This time I do not use a circular border, but a somewhat irregular one (this was done very quickly, it could be neater). The key here is to use different colors for the different zombies, so they can be easily identified on the board. Walkers come in abundance, so I used both the male and the female version.
Of course you can make these as varied as you'd like - adding them from screen shots for the Walking Dead TV series or any other source into your template.
Where to put them?
Once again FG helps you with that. In FG just click the Tokens button to the lower right. This opens the Tokens window. Near the bottom you'll find buttons for "GM" and "Shared" (and "Modules", but that is for using Tokens as a module, something we might do much, much later to clean things up).
Clicking on the "Shared" one brings up a standard Windows Explorer where you can put your tokens. Or you add a sub folder here called e.g. "Zombicide" and place all the tokens in there. Place them all in Shared makes sure all players can access the tokens, so you as the "GM" don't have to do everything. It's a board game after all, and there is no reason to keep these things hidden from the players.
For this screen shot I only added the Survivors and the Zombies to the Zombicide sub folder: