The Nexus Life Counter Web App

Feyd_Ruin and Cryogen1591196400

We are pleased to introduce The Nexus Life Counter Web App!

The Nexus Life Counter is a full-features life tracker web tool which is designed to scale to your needs, with no installation or download necessary. You can easily load it on your phone to keep track of just your own life total, or split the screen for your two, three, or even four player games. Have a big screen and a big game? It can handle that too, scaling to your demand. The Life Tracker can even handle 80+ players for the most awesome free-for-all table imaginable, although the latter would require quite a large screen or even projector for everyone to see. Don't worry, it can handle reasonably sized tables too, of course.

The Nexus Life Tracker also comes equipped with network play, which allow players to join a private game room to keep track of their life totals individually, with a shared-screen interface that lets each player see everything. This allows a playgroup to share their life totals easily when playing on video based platforms such as Discord or Zoom, or for everyone to keep track of their own life on that giant monstrosity of a free-for-all mentioned above. Additionally, it supplies a stream view so that you can overlay these life totals on your live stream for Twitch, Periscope, or any other service.

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View in-game for each player.
(Click to Enlarge)

Basic Features and Quick Setup

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Two Player Flipped view on mobile.
Click to Enlarge

Basic, in-person games are easily handled with "One-Screen Tracking". One-Screen Tracking offers both quick one-click setups as well as customized setups, with either being controlled from your single device. Anyone can use One-Screen Tracking, no account required.

The app comes preloaded with default settings if you want to quickly load it for a game: one player, two player, and four player setups — each in normal (20 life), or Commander (40 life) mode. You can also choose to have the layout all facing the same way or flipped so each side of the table can see their own stats. Selecting any of these will give each player a tracker for their life total, infect, energy, and experience counters. In the Commander setup it will also track commander damage from each player separately as well as the number of times you've cast your general.

If you wish to customize the game, you can add each player individually, give them proper names and deck titles, as well as choose their background theme. You can adjust what kind of counters appear in the game, adjust starting life totals, or anything else that you need for your game. After you get your game set the way you need, you can also save the setup to quickly reload it later. You can also adjust any player's information and style inside the game.

Inside the Game

Once your screen is setup, the interface is fairly straight-forward: click or tap a value and you'll get a popup to adjust that value as you need. You can easily gain or lose life, add counters, and keep up with per-player commander damage. You can also, optionally, keep track of each player's turn by using the turn indicator at the top left of each player's life board.

At the top are the control buttons: Full Screen mode, Settings, Light/Dark mode, and a Stream View. The first button toggles Full Screen view, as well as enabling a No-Sleep function to prevent your phone or tablet from turning its screen off. The Settings button offers a host of in-game controls. If you decide you need to keep track of a counter mid-game that you didn't add at the beginning, just click the settings button up top and add it under Game Settings. You can also reset your life total (or all players in One-Screen tracking) to quickly start a new game, and control stream view colors and room-owner tools (more on that later). Light/Dark mode offers a minor adjustment to the brightness of the screen, and is especially useful for large games over projectors. The final button, Stream View, gives you a compact view of each player in a basic layout for people who stream their games and want a graphic overlay.

Network Game Rooms

The network lobby is divided into three sections: "Your Name & Style", "Create Game Room", and "Join a Game Room". The first section is where you can edit your basic info — display name, the name of the deck you're playing, and the custom background you want displayed on your area of the app layout. Creating a game room is straightforward — a room name that is automatically generated, a field to add a required password, a drop-down to choose Normal or Commander modes, a field to set the default life total, and boxes to turn off poison, energy, and experience counters. Lastly, you can join an active game or simply spectate an existing game by clicking the room and supplying the password. There is no need to close a room when you are done, they automatically close after a couple hours of inactivity.

While "One-Screen-Tracking" mode allows anyone to play regardless of having an account or not, Network Game Rooms require an account, as this attaches to each player, providing multiple layers of security as well as game portability. If you get disconnected or close out the browser, you can jump back in and all of your stats are right where you left them. You can even switch devices if you need.

Network Controls and Stream Overlays

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The standard styling offers a crisp, clean look for streams,
but is also fully customizable for your needs.

The Nexus Life Tracker offers extra controls to the room creator. The room owner (who first created the network game room) has access to extra settings, under the setting's Room Controls tab, to better control the game. The room creator can rearrange players so that they appear in turn or stream order, thus matching the flow of the game. They can also kick players, which is useful when someone disappears or players change between games. Remember that players won't initially disappear just because they disconnect — their information and display remains so that they can easily reconnect without messing up the game. And lastly, the room owner can give ownership to another player.

The Nexus Life Tracker also offers customization of the stream view. Under settings is the option to adjust the look and color scheme of the Stream View, down to the level of fonts used and shadows given to fonts. Although the initial setup has been designed to offer crisp, clean view most can easily use, streamers are given absolute control to adjust the look to best fit their stream. Once you adjust how you desire, you can easily save this setup so that you you won't need to reconfigure it again.

For most setups, you'll want to join the room in spectator mode in a separate browser window that your streaming software captures. This will let you control your own life total from one browser without needing to switch back and forth in views. Note that if you use a in-app browser (such as in OBS) and want to use a custom stream theme, you'll want to log into MTGNexus inside of the browser view to easily save/load the setup.

Wrapping Up

Whether you just like having a life app to use on your phone for casual games, or use it to give your stream viewers more in-game information, we truly hope you find this web app useful and convenient. We encourage and welcome feedback, as we are always striving to improve and meet the needs of the community. Feel free to ask us any questions, and we'd love for you to give any feedback or bug reports in our feedback and bug reports forum.

Want to see it in action? We'll be using it for our Commander stream tonight on twitch.tv/mtgnexus, so come check us out, and feel free to give it a whirl of your own.

Life Counter

Web App

There's no need to install an app to keep track of your life total.

This feature rich web app offers unlimited players, stream overlays, and much more.