Whew! For the past few months… five months to be exact I’ve been heads down coding up a storm. So much of what I’ve been doing is just getting my head around the iPhone SDK and Objective-C. Also, setting up Provisioning Profiles is no small feat.
So now I’m starting to talk up the app and let people know what we’re up to and what we are doing. In a nut shell I’m going to continue focusing on the D&D side of things and my wife, Angela, is going to be looking into the Astrology side of things. She’s already become my personal Astrologer with suggestions around launch times and so on. If she has more thoughts around this all I’m sure you’ll be seeing them here.
So now I get to start using this blog to talk about all sorts of things, but mostly it’s going to be about D&D 4e and iPhone applications that make that world flow easier. Our very first app was born from my personal frustration with tracking all the various things that needed to be tracked in your average D&D combat session. Not just initiative, hit points and defenses but also conditions and effects. Combat in 4e is complicated and I’ve seen a lot of elegant solutions for keeping track of who’s marked and when effects end or cause damage. I started out with a spreadsheet but it quickly grew more and more complicated. Suddenly I found myself mis-marking damage or not advancing a character’s turn properly. So I decided to really put my head down and fix the problem, with an iPhone.
As the application has moved along I’ve grown to really love and appreciate the D&D combat system. I’ve learned a lot about how it flows and works and places where it bogs down. During our play test sessions while using the app I’ve sadly discovered that we made some design assumptions that turned out to just not be true. So we needed to scrap a line of development that was painful to lose, but totally worth it. The new way we are doing things makes much more sense to me and as we add features it will scale much better.
Every time I use DM’s Tracker I can’t help but smile. I get a chance to see all the characters involved in combat on the screen with a basic overview. A tiny heart icon pops up when they are bloodied and a little sad face when they are dying. It’s just adorable, oops – did I say that out loud? DM sadism aside, it’s a very fun and useful tool and I’m totally committed to expanding it out and growing it into something really amazing.
The next big project is going to be working on the PC Tracker. That’s right, the ability to track the things that are most important to you around your character. Right now there is only one app in the D&D iPhone app market that does something even close to it and it’s a great little app. If you don’t know it already, check out iplay4e.com to see what’s there. You can upload a character data set from the Character Builder and have your character right there. But for as much as I love it, I want it to do something just a little different. I need somethings more often than others and I want to UI to work with me a little better. There is plenty of room in the market for two apps like this, so I’m excited to be stepping up to the plate. We are likely to take a very different approach on this one and release early and often, once we figure out which direction we are going. We are still trying to decide if it needs to be Character Builder data driven or not. We need to figure out if it is more useful to have your entire character sheet in your iPhone or just the parts that change often. Plus, since there is only so much data we can push up there before we run into copyright issues, we have to figure out a way to work with that.
Anyway, I just wanted to take a moment to come out of my shell and say howdy and let you guys know what’s coming down the road. Some really great things lie ahead.