Stage 10 prototype (Patreon)

Here's a gnome rogue/bard.

Public! Open! Prototypes for everyone!

I asked you a few days ago, and most of you were happy with the previews being opened up to more people so from now on these posts will be public.

Web service integration

Stage 10 is about connecting the website with the library. It's the minimum version possible this time: a web page with one button labelled "Gimme a bard" that gives you a bard. But it works.

I will be giving patrons a link to the dev site. That doesn't mean much for this stage, but it'll be more noticeable from stage 11.

Rogues, Bards, and advancement

The skill feats list was the hardest thing to work with this time, because the Rogue's double-length list shoves so many other things out of the way. I had to do some serious juggling of other things to get it to work.

I've trimmed the useless fields off the cover page, and in their place I've added an Advancement table showing what you get each level, with checkboxes to say "Yes, I've picked a skill feat". I'm undecided just how much this should repeat the details on the class page, but if space allows, I think a little redundancy doesn't hurt.

This fits with the idea of what each page is for:

• Page 1: use this when you're levelling up
• Page 2: use this during exploration and social
• Page 3: use this during a fight

I'm sure I'll continue to juggle the elements around each stage.

What's next

Stage 11: Generate the form

The form for building a character need to keep up to date with all the options that get added to the library. To make sure that happens, it's best to generate the form from the library's unit data. Step one of that is taking the units and producing a file with all those options, that the website can use to make the form.

Stage 12: Real data 

I've got some time off work coming up, and I'll try to dedicate that to putting in all the options.

Backgrounds present a different challenge. There are soon going to be a lot of backgrounds, each of them quite small. So rather than writing a YAML unit file for each of them, it makes more sense to take a single, much more concise data file and generate a hundred unit files from it.

After stage 12

Translations are going to be important soon. The Brazilian Portuguese translation is out already, and I'm sure some others aren't far behind. Before I can release translations, I need to make a system that can be translated. I have some good ideas how that'll work.. I think.

Along with that, I need to work on font subsetting. If you're downloading the character sheet in English, you need a different set of characters than if you download it in Polish or Russian. Careful subsetting will help keep download sizes small.