Templates versus games

Templates are a cool way of making your game creation process easier. There are some public templates that you can use and modify to create your games, but did you know that you can create your templates? I will outline some ways why and when you might want to use templates.

The most obvious case for a template is if you have a game concept that you want to use several times. For example, you have created an outdoor team game concept that you are running for different corporate groups at different locations. So each time you want to do some adaptations (for example locations), but want to keep the main part of the game the same.

Sure you can also clone your last game, but templates are a more structured and versatile way of handling your game creation process. The main differences between games and templates are following:

• templates can not be played, games can.
• templates do not need to be complete, games must. That means that you can remove locations or other features that you know will be modified from the template and add those “missing pieces” when creating an actual game based on the template
• templates can not be created from scratch, games can
• templates can be shared to other accounts should you wish to do that in the future
• templates can hold additional information about the template so you remember what the template is about
• templates are presented when new game is created

Creating templates

You can not actually create a template from scratch. You need to create a game first. Test it out and then make a template of it. The idea here is that as templates can not be played, then you should first develop a working game prototype that you can also fully test and once that is ready turn it into the template. In this moment the template will start its own life and you can make modifications to the template if you wish.

Templates will hold some additional information as well that will make it easier for the users to remember what the templates are about. So you might want to fill this in. After that just save your template and you are done. This will appear under the Templates section and also be presented to you when creating new games.

Creating games

Creating a game based on the template is quite easy. Just click the template and create a game. New game will be created. If the template is complete (like some free games in our template library) you might not need to modify anything. If you have a need to modify the game then you can freely do that for your own templates.

Important points to remember

There are three things to remember about templates.
1. If you change a template then games created in the past will not be affected. Only games you will create in the future will receive the changes. If you want to modify a game that is already created you need to go and modify the game itself.
2. If you modify an individual task that is in the game and template it will affect all the games and templates that the task is in. It will be changed in all the games. So if you need to modify a task just for one game it is better to modify it and then “save it as a copy” so that your other games and templates are not affected.
3. If you are using public templates and the tasks involved are not yours, then you can not modify them, but you can save them as a copy to your account should you want to make modifications.

Try it out and let us know how it feels!